ArtReach: Zines as Activism
by Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Exhibition Dates: June – December 2026
Location: Post-Security, E Concourse
The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) is pleased to present its annual student showcase from ArtReach, the Museum’s suite of programs for K–12 schools aimed at providing support in classrooms where art is needed most. Through a collaboration with St. Louis Public Schools started in 2017, the ArtReach Partnership ensures a consistent art curriculum is available for students year-round at Vashon and Sumner High Schools. CAM hires and trains a cohort of Resident Teaching Artists (RTAs) to lead art classes twice a week.
During the 2024–25 school year, RTAs and students explored media and concepts related to the theme of confluence, inspired by St. Louis’s proximity to the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Drawing on their own studio practices, Resident Teaching Artists Adrienne Outlaw and Dee Levang each interpreted the theme differently with their students. This iteration of ArtReach: Confluence presents a sample of artwork showing how students worked in a “flow” state with various water-based media and learned about ways to repurpose post-consumer plastic pollution culled from the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.
About the Organization: Students from Sumner High School
Since 2017, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) has run the ArtReach Partnership program in collaboration with St. Louis Public Schools. Each year, CAM hires and trains a cohort of Resident Teaching Artists (RTAs) to lead art classes twice a week at Vashon and Sumner High Schools to ensure a consistent art curriculum is available for students year-round. The works on view here are selections from the annual student showcase, ArtReach: Near Futures, on view at CAM from September 10, 2026 through February 7, 2027. This year’s program at Sumner High School was presented in partnership with Counterpublic, a triennial exhibition reimagining the possibilities of art in public life. Students learned from CAM RTAs, Counterpublic artists, and Great Rivers Greenway staff to offer students a glimpse into the many community contexts that their work can exist within – now including an airport.
Working at Sumner High School last spring, RTA Cleonique Hilsaca drew upon her experiences and perspectives as an immigrant Latinx artist and zinester to give students the tools to share their voice and stories through DIY publishing. Students were challenged to create zines exploring their social critiques and aspirations for a better future—for themselves, their communities, and the city of St. Louis. Through Hilsaca’s guidance, students engaged in research, drawing, painting, writing, screen-printing, risograph printing, and self-publishing.
The class also hosted local artists Phoebe Santalla and Dan Zettwoch, who shared insights about their zine practice; participated in workshops on printing techniques with People’s Art and Recreation Center as well as Swan Meadow; and visited the Counterpublic offices and the Zine & Minicomic Collection at the St. Louis Public Library, where they learned the history of zines with Librarian Wes Harbison. While viewers will have to visit the Museum to see the original zines in their entirety一as well as other work on view in the ArtReach exhibition一this selection of large-scale print reproductions of the original publications gives a taste of the students’ work.
More Art
-
Infinity, Try Angles, and Reflections of Law
by David Parks
LOCATION
Terminal 1 Light Boxes
-
Field Notes: An Artist’s Perspective
by Laura Lebeda
LOCATION
Post-Security, E Concourse
-
Onward Forward
by Mee Jey
LOCATION
Pre-security, Lower Level A Baggage Claim Windows
-
