Elevate at 21c: Jen Everett

Elevate at 21c showcases the work of artists in St. Louis and the central Mississippi River region, highlighting the range and depth of visual culture in this dynamic, ever-changing area. 

Sage Dawson and Jen Everett each create artworks based on nostalgia and remembrance of the past. The artists hold firm to the units that make up a life – a building, a quilt, a song, a photograph – these are documentation of memories and lives lived. Objects, whether physical or intangible, become the legacy connecting past with present and the subjects of these artworks. Through materials and sources left from the past, the artists celebrate the experiences of the underrepresented and the structures of shared culture and community, neighborhoods and creativity, and the homes that allowed them to thrive. By remaking the references in different forms, the artists sustain the memory while reimagining the legacy into the present.

Through Everett’s use of vintage ephemera, especially objects that celebrate the technology and memory of the photo album, the viewer can imagine the sounds of gathering with loved ones. These unheard sounds come through in images of family members and strangers collected by the artist. She crops, considers, and stacks images and objects with textures worn. The vintage sonic equipment featured in these works is sourced from thrift stores and family friends and interspersed with literary and sonic references from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. They are quietly queer totems, speaking to the importance of the family unit and the key role music played in developing queer identities. Everett tells unspoken stories which glimpse into the interior lives of Black Americans, showing moments of the everyday, while also building myths and stacking totems to the power of family, music, and memory. As Alexander Nemerov writes of Everett’s artwork, these objects provide “proof against omnipresent loss.” The artist invites the viewer to look closely and connect with moments and objects from a fragile but formative past.

Dawson creates artworks based on historical regional textiles, including needlepoint, weaving, and quilt patterns. Through extensive research, the artist unearths handiwork skills and textile designs created primarily by women in previous generations. Inspired by these near-forgotten designs, Dawson labors through process-based techniques of printmaking and layering or building in paper pulp, instead of fabric or thread. The artist opens a window to the past – celebrating the handmade family quilt, a legacy that was once central to the comfort of our most intimate spaces. In BRICK MYTH and the DEMO Project, Dawson references the structures and buildings of the past. During the 19th and 20th centuries, St. Louis was an epicenter for the manufacturing of building materials, especially ornamental brick. Dawson references the ornamental patterns from bricks now housed at the National Building Arts center in Sauget, Illinois in collagraphic prints to build the tent-like walls of a Persian-inspired pleasure-pavilion. The walls of the BRICK MYTH installation are presented here sharing an aspect of the American city that is about both structure and collapse. Similarly, in the DEMO Project, Dawson creates works on paper to imagine the moments leading up to, during, and just after a house is torn down. By reinventing elements from the past, the artist connects the viewer to that which makes up a life, whether structurally, systemically, or personally.

Jen Everett
Through assemblages made from physical photographs and found objects related to the photo album, Everett honors the subjects shown in this series – strangers and family members alike. She plays with cropping and assemblage to further explore both the care for image’s past and the slippery boundaries between perceiving and being perceived. The artist’s intentionality with every image offers a loving view of Black interiority, compelling closer readings and amplifying the beauty of the everyday – care in the face of immense structural limitations. In the Unheard Sounds, Come Through series, Everett collages found objects into sculptures. The artist brings vintage technologies which call to mind memories of music in living rooms or basements into the museum. Everett’s images are silent, but immediate, prompts to the past through the unheard sounds implied in collective memory. Everett centers the close connections of Black communities with music and shared culture, inviting the viewer to listen in through her nostalgia. Usually exhibited as sculptural objects, for Elevate at 21c, Everett instead presents her art as photographs of two sculptures, moving the objects further from practical use to the museum wall.

The winner of the 2025 21c St. Louis Artadia Award, Jen Everett is an artist and educator based in Saint Louis, Missouri. Her practice moves between lens and time based media, installation and writing. Jen received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis where she was a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. She earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Tuskegee University. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally at The Saint Louis Art Museum, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Krannert Art Museum, SCAD Museum of Art, and Kunsthall Stavanger, among many others.