The spirit of St. Louis
Shabez Jamal

October 3 - November 15, 2025
Opening Reception October 3, 5-8pm

The Spirit of St. Louis is a three-channel video installation that visualizes Blackness in relation to modernity, capitalistic industry, and the subsequent erasure of Black spaces. In this work, artist Shabez Jamal utilizes a queer visual aesthetic to explore Blackness as a lived condition deeply rooted in care and preservation, especially in the face of global capitalist interests reshaping geographic spaces.

About the Artist

Donny Bradfield, also known as Shabez Jamal, is an interdisciplinary artist and the Harnish Visiting Lecturer in Photography at Smith College. Born in 1992, in St. Louis, Jamal earned their BA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and their MFA from Tulane University of Louisiana. Their visual practice explores the relationship between the memorialized and the imagined. Through their work, which includes photography, non-linear video, installation, and performance, they engage with the vacant space as inherently Black. Through this framework, they understand physical, political, and socio-economic spaces through the possibilities that arise when engaging with the inherited backward and forward motions that are inherent to spaces rendered as “empty.”

Jamal has received numerous fellowships and awards, including Harvard University’s In the City Fellowship, the Mellon Community Engaged Fellowship at Tulane University, and Washington University’s The Divided City Research Grant. Their work has been exhibited extensively in both national and international spaces, including the St. Louis Art Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Their work is part of the St. Louis Community College, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Newcomb Museum of Art at Tulane University, and several private collections.

https://www.shabezjamal.com/
@shabez.j

This exhibition is made possible with public support from the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency.

Events & exhibitions at the Foundry Art Centre are free and open to the public. For more information, please email Jessica Mannisi, Director of Exhibitions, at jmannisi@foundryartcentre.org