Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection

September 12, 2025–January 5, 2026
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
St. Louis, MO

This fall, the Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis presents Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection. Spanning nearly eight decades and featuring nearly 70 artists, the survey places leading contemporary practitioners in dialogue with an earlier generation of artists whose work anticipated current discussions of figuration and abstraction as well as identity and power.

Curated by Cecilia Alemani, Donald R. Mullen Jr. Director and Chief Curator of High Line Art, and Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator at the Kemper Art Museum, the exhibition is the first public presentation of this important collection, premiering in New York in 2023.

Making Their Mark juxtaposes contemporary practices with pathbreaking historical works to illuminate transgenerational affinities, influences, and methodologies among artists from the postwar era to the present. Featuring a wide spectrum of artworks spanning almost eight decades, the exhibition emphasizes dialogues between artists who circumvent and break through conventions in art-making, embracing craft techniques, uncommon supports, and alternative materials. Accompanied by a major publication produced in advance of the exhibition, Making Their Mark assembles significant examples by artists whose works go beyond prescribed definitions of art-making established within a historically patriarchal field.