Juanita McNeely comes home as St. Louis opens first hometown solo show
St. Louis is finally giving Juanita McNeely a solo show at home. The Ferguson-born painter spent more than five decades putting the human body on canvas, on paper and in clay, and this career-spanning survey is the first devoted to her alone in her home town. It opened after her death.
It is a two-venue presentation by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in Missouri and the Saint Louis Art Museum in Missouri, co-curated with Counterpublic, the St. Louis-based art organisation behind a city-wide programme Saint Louis Art Museum. The Contemporary Art Museum show is called 'CAM x Counterpublic: Juanita McNeely' and is organised as part of Counterpublic 2026: Coyote Time Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
Counterpublic 2026 runs from 12 September to 12 December across St. Louis. The McNeely works at the Contemporary Art Museum stay on view longer, through 7 February. Art in America marked the opening on 18 September with a review titled "Juanita McNeely Painted Abortion's Messy Truth" Art in America.
McNeely lived from 1936 to 2023. Counterpublic describes her as a prominent American feminist artist, meaning work rooted in women's lives and rights, whose painting and drawing conveyed the extreme physicality and movement of the human figure Counterpublic.
What makes this stand out is the homecoming. She is not there to see it. Neighbours get to stand in front of work they missed the first time round.
Counterpublic lists the museum show as one of its Counterpublic Projects. The organisation also notes it works on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Osage, Missouri and Illini people, and says it spent four years helping steward a process with the Osage Nation to rematriate, or return, the entirety of Sugarloaf Mound. It describes the mound as the last remaining intact mound and oldest man-made structure in the City of St. Louis, with the return carried out under the Osage Nation's preservation plan Counterpublic.
