Image credit: Gavin Kroeber, *Four Days in the Illinois Country*, 2026. Digital collage with component images by Guillame Delisle, Alex DeRoin, and Gavin Kroeber.

FOUR DAYS IN THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY; OR “L’ESPRIT DE L’ESCALIER”

Thursday–Sunday, October 8–11, 2026
St. Louis, Missouri

Tulsa Artist Fellowship is excited to partner with Counterpublic to present Four Days in the Illinois Country; or “L’Esprit de L’Escalier,” an event series exploring land-based approaches to art and artistic approaches to territory, running October 8-11 in St. Louis, MO.

Four Days in the Illinois Country brings together a diverse group of visiting artists, including sound practitioners, land stewards and seed keepers, experimental geographers, and Missouria, Osage, and Peoria descendants visiting their ancestral homelands. Over four days, this group will drift between several sites in the St. Louis region, staging public programs at Laumeier Sculpture Park, Wildfruit Projects, Counterpublic exhibition site the National Building Arts Center, and even on the Mississippi River. These events will also be “wrapped” by private exchanges, site visits, and artistic fieldwork, bringing visiting and local artists together to build relationships with one another and with the land.

The series’ title conjoins two historic French phrases. “The Illinois Country” (or “Pays des Illinois”) names a place: the upper Mississippi watershed, with St. Louis at its heart. It also invokes a time: the 17th and 18th centuries, when the Illini Confederacy lived on the great river and its tributaries, along with the Missouria, Osage, and other Native nations. This remarkably complex period of colonial encounter was defined as much by sovereign Indigenous power and emergent Métis multiculturalism as by conflict and encroaching European empire. In the contemporary settler imaginary, “The Illinois Country” presents a compelling, ambiguous image of a historical hinge-point, with the capacity to arouse un-settling ideological disorientation just as easily as it can invite Romantic “settler moves to innocence.” “L’Esprit de L’Escalier” (or “The Spirit of the Staircase”) was coined by Denis Diderot in the 1770s—that is, during “The Illinois Country” (but not geographically in it). It describes the regrettable feeling of thinking of a perfect response too late, of coming up with a searing comeback at the bottom of the stairs, after you’ve already left the party. Four Days in the Illinois Country; or “L’Esprit de L’Escalier” brings artists together to navigate the physical, temporal, and ideological territory of “The Illinois Country”—and to collectively devise a kind of clapback, 300 years late.

Four Days in the Illinois Country is organized by Tulsa Artist Fellowship Awardee Gavin Kroeber in collaboration with Juan William Chávez, Alex DeRoin (Osage/Otoe/Pawnee/Blackfeet/Ioway), Kole Galbraith (Sinixt/Peoria), Josh Levi (Cherokee), Veronica Pipestem (Otoe-Missouria/Osage/Potawatomi), and Tulsa Artist Fellowship Awardee Warren Realrider (Pawnee/Crow).

Admission is free to all events except the Canoe Tour. Visitors are welcome to attend as many (or as few) programs as desired.

Part 1: Campfire Chat: Wak’a Garden Sound Pollination

Presented by Counterpublic and Tulsa Artist Fellowship in partnership with Laumeier Sculpture Park.

Thursday, October 8th
6:30–8 p.m.
Laumeier Sculpture Park
Outdoor Galleries: South Lawn
12580 Rott Road, Saint Louis, Missouri 63127
Free | No Registration Required

Join us for a “sonic conversation” around the fire in Juan William Chávez and Kiersten Torrez’s monumental installation Wak’a Garden. Visiting sound artists Kole Galbraith and Warren Realrider will join Chávez, St. Louis musician Josh Levi and other local artists to collectively improvise an ambient sound composition in response to Wak’a Garden and the wider landscape.

Part 2: To Erode the Territory by Passing Through It

Presented by Counterpublic and Tulsa Artist Fellowship in partnership with the National Building Arts Center.

Friday, October 9, 1-4 PM
at the National Building Arts Center
2300 Falling Springs Rd, Sauget, IL 62206
Free | No Registration Required

Please join us for an ambient afternoon of art research, punctuated by sound tests, roving conversations, and fieldwork at sites around the NBAC campus, featuring Juan William Chávez, Alex DeRoin, Kole Galbraith, Gavin Kroeber, Josh Levi, Veronica Pipestem, Warren Realrider, and Counterpublic exhibiting artists Chris Carl and Lynne Smith.

Part 3: Lan𐓈𐒰͘𐓈𐒰 Docupoetics: Queering Cahokia

Presented by Counterpublic and Tulsa Artist Fellowship in partnership with Wildfruit Projects.

Friday, October 9, 6:30-8:30 PM
at Wildfruit Projects
4704 Virginia Ave, St. Louis, MO 63118
Free | No Registration Required

This pop-up exhibition will feature artwork by artists Alex DeRoin and Veronica Pipestem, drawn from their ongoing projects engaging “landcestry”—the ways contemporary Native people’s connections to their ancestral biomes persist across time and distance—and “Lan𐓈𐒰͘𐓈𐒰”—which combines Landback and Dadaist principles to challenge colonialism, capitalism, and oppression. The evening will feature a reading by DeRoin and an optional workshop for audience members to spontaneously create Lan𐓈𐒰͘𐓈𐒰 texts.

Artist statement: Queering Cahokia is about documenting important shifts through the medium of Dadaist Poetics,in order to challenge the Western, heteropatriarchal, and male-dominated assumptions that have been used to interpret the ancient Mississippian city of Cahokia. Applying Queer Ecologies to the botany of the Mississippian World turns these assumptions on their head, because indigenous epistemologies look directly to the natural world to decipher the “Natural Order” of life. The surrounding environment of Cahokia is a living text that reorients the conversation to accept the fact that Nature is inherently queer.

Part 4: Canoe Tour: Mississippi River with Juan William Chávez, Alex DeRoin, Kole Galbraith, Gavin Kroeber, Veronica Pipestem, and Warren Realrider

Presented by Counterpublic and Tulsa Artist Fellowship in partnership with Big Muddy Adventures.

Sunday, October 11, 3 PM
Limited public tickets will be released for sale soon

Join Big Muddy Adventures + Counterpublic for a unique St. Louis experience combining paddling, art, and exploration on the Mississippi. Get out on the water, experience the city from a new perspective, and connect with contemporary art along the way. Come paddle, explore, and discover something new with us!

Artists Juan William Chávez, Alex DeRoin, Kole Galbraith, Gavin Kroeber, Veronica Pipestem, and Warren Realrider will share about their collective art research in “The Illinois Country” and the ways their work connects to the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers.

As part of advance fieldwork for the series, there will also be an October 5 “prelude” event in Chicago, IL:

Territorial Practices: A Conversation About Art, Sound, Land, and Water

Monday, October 5, 5 PM
at Watershed Art & Ecology
1821 S. Racine Ave, Chicago, IL 60608
Free | More information at watershed-art.org

Roundtable discussion featuring Gavin Kroeber, Kole Galbraith, Ryan Griffis, Brian Holmes, Claire Pentecost, Warren Realrider, and others. Presented in partnership with Watershed Art & Ecology.

Gavin Kroeber creates gatherings, excursions, and collaborative projects that explore the relationships between art, landscape, and cultural power. Working across visual art, curatorial practice, and performance, he brings interdisciplinary communities together to examine place through decolonial, ecological, and speculative frameworks. A 2025–2027 Tulsa Artist Fellowship Awardee, Kroeber is also a Creative Capital Awardee and an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellow.

Warren Realrider (Pawnee & Crow) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the intersections of sound, materials, and site. Through performance, installation, and collaboration, he creates immersive works that draw from Pawnee cosmology, contemporary Plains experience, and experimental sound. A 2024–2026 Tulsa Artist Fellowship Awardee and Summer 2026 Bemis Sound Artist-in-Residence, Realrider has presented work throughout the United States.

Juan William Chávez, a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and beekeeper of Indigenous Latinx and Irish descent. Working across social practice, public art, installation, and ecology, he creates long-term, community-based projects that connect land stewardship, food sovereignty, and decolonial practice. Drawing on Andean philosophy, Chávez explores ecology as a living system shaped by creativity, ritual, labor, and reciprocal relationships with the land. He was the lead artist for Art Pollination, Bloomberg Philanthropies’ 2024–26 Public Art Challenge, and founded the art-and-ecology nonprofit Northside Workshop. Chávez is currently the Wallace Herndon Smith Distinguished Visiting Artist at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and the 2026 Visting Artist in Residence at Laumeier Sculpture Park.

Alex DeRoin (They/Them) is a Two Spirit Neo-Dadaist artist, poet, best-selling author, and awarded water protector. Alex comes from the Osage, Otoe, Pawnee, Blackfeet, and Ioway tribes. They are an active member of the 𐓒𐓂͘𐓒𐓂𐒿𐒻 district and headright holder for the Osage Minerals Estate. Their work explores intersections of marginalized communities, notably through their work with Tulsa Two Spirit, Kinship Model, and Words of the People. They are the pioneer of LAN𐓈𐒰͘𐓈𐒰ISM (Landadaism), an art movement that utilizes a unique cross-pollination of indigiqueer ecology and the art of Dadaists’ collage principles as metaphor. To become a “visual rebellion” that questions, recontextualizes, or operates outside of heteronormative and conventional standards. To merge their art-making with their interpersonal resistance and reclamation of two-spirit joy in all their affairs.

Kole Galbraith (Sinixt/Peoria) is a multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on sound, audio-visual, and found object installation. Based in Seattle, Washington, Kole Galbraith has been active in the underground experimental music community for the past decade performing throughout the West Coast of the United States and Europe. Sonically his sonic studio compositions are informed by musique-concrète, metal, jazz and contemporary composition. Thematically, the compositions are influenced by interior Salish folklore, and contemporary indigenous experience. Galbraith mixes using materials found in nature with electronic techniques to uncover both hidden sonic capabilities and their latent histories. Galbraith has worked with musicians including Lori Goldston, Greg Kelley, Jessika Kenney, Steve Moore, Raven Chacon, alyené vinokurova, Warren Realrider, Nathan Young, Catherine Guesde, Sean Waple, Jason Lazer, Patrick Wurzwallner, Maja Osojnik, morher and Noel Kennon.

Josh Levi is a graphic designer, photographer, writer, musician, and community builder based in St. Louis, Missouri. For more than 20 years, Josh has pursued his love for experimental music and curation through a series of DIY booking outfits, including his current project, Flood Yr Face. He was the co-founder of Select DC, a collective dedicated to bringing noise, techno, and avant-garde electronic music to Washington, DC, from 2013 to 2017. In 2023, his book Subterranean By Design was published by Snap Collective. The book compiles over 20 years’ worth of his photos, flyers, and snapshots of the American DIY Underground. He is currently the public programs manager at Counterpublic.

Veronica Pipestem is an Otoe-Missouria/Osage/Potawatomi multidisciplinary artist who primarily works in beads, metal, and hide. Pipestem’s work explores the intersections between land, seed, and traditional knowledge stewardship. Pipestem owns ItsimiVee, a firm that specializes in contract grant writing and in developing practical solutions for cultural and natural resources organizations. Pipestem is also a co-founder of INDIGICHIC, an experiential fashion arts boutique that offers exclusive collections of Native artists’ work. In addition to being an artist and entrepreneur, Pipestem strives to be a good Landcestor by growing, rematriating, and maintaining relationships with ancestral seed relatives.

Warren Realrider is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on sound, site, and material to convey the intersecting time and ecological cycles moving through contemporary plains existence and Pâriru’. He is a Pawnee descendant and is a member of the Crow Nation of Montana. Warren received a bachelor’s degree in painting from the University of Oklahoma in 2000. He is currently in the 2024-2026 cohort of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art’s Summer 2026 Sound Art + Experimental Music Artist-in-Residence.

Special Thanks: Lydia Cheshewalla, Micaela Tobin

VISITOR EXPERIENCE

Tulsa Artist Fellowship is committed to creating a welcoming, inclusive, and accessible experience for every visitor. All exhibitions and programs are free, open to the public, and thoughtfully documented and archived for continued community access.

For accessibility questions or accommodation requests, please email info@tulsaartistfellowship.org or call (539) 302-4855.