Saint Louis Art Museum Announces Major New Acquisitions

The Saint Louis Art Museum has acquired a group of works that significantly strengthen the museum’s holdings in modern and contemporary art, decorative arts and design, and Native American art.

The acquisitions include “Soft Folding Chair” (1987), a major late sculpture by Claes Oldenburg; a monumental Art Nouveau fireplace designed by Hector Guimard for a private residence in Lille, France; “Phrasing to the Floor, Softly, as in an Evening Sunset (for Nina)” (2025), a major new work by Jennie C. Jones; a large-scale ceramic floor piece by Kahlil Robert Irving; andirons and a fire screen designed by Charles Eames for a St. Louis residence in the late 1930s; and a group of seven baskets by Native American artists from the Sierra Nevada mountain range and northern Alaska.

“These acquisitions reflect the depth and range of what this collection can do,” said Min Jung Kim, the Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum. “From Oldenburg’s challenge of sculpture’s most basic function, to Guimard’s integration of architecture and design, to the work of Jennie C. Jones and Kahlil Robert Irving—two of the most compelling artists working today—these works open new conversations across time periods and collecting areas. We are also pleased to enrich our holdings of Native American art, which has long been a part of this museum’s history.”

The Irving, Jones and Oldenburg works will be on view at SLAM beginning in November, in the new installation “Art After 1945.” An expansive reinstallation of the museum’s postwar and contemporary collections, the show will include works by Alexander Calder, Chuck Close, Leonardo Drew, Richard Long, Julie Mehretu, Isamu Noguchi, Gerhard Richter, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Kehinde Wiley, among others, in newly conceived thematic groupings.

Claes Oldenburg’s “Soft Folding Chair” is a late example of the soft sculpture series the artist began in 1957—and which became one of the most recognizable bodies of work in postwar American art. Using canvas, polyurethane foam, and latex paint, Oldenburg rendered a commonplace folding chair without any structural integrity, leaving it to hang and slump rather than stand. The effect is both comic and philosophically pointed: a chair that cannot be sat on, an everyday object stripped of its purpose and transformed into something closer to a body than furniture. The work joins SLAM’s existing collection of 10 works by Oldenburg and is the only example in the collection dating from the 1980s.

Fireplace (c.1900-01), Hector Guimard (1867-1942)

This monumental fireplace was designed by Hector Guimard for the Maison Coilliot, built between 1898 and 1901 for tile manufacturer Louis Coilliot in Lille, France. One of two made for the residence, the fireplace work exemplifies Guimard’s characteristic “Style Guimard”: organic, thrusting forms and sweeping curves, here realized in lave émaillée, an innovative high-fired ceramic material he employed across both the Coilliot house and, most famously, the Paris Métro station enclosures of 1900. This fireplace left the Maison Coilliot during renovations around 1990 and has since been in private collections. It expands SLAM’s holdings of the designer’s work, which includes cast iron, a crystalline-glazed stoneware vase, and furniture, like a tea table once owned by the architect himself.

“Phrasing to the Floor, Softly, as in an Evening Sunset (for Nina)” (2025), Jennie C. Jones (born 1968)

Jennie C. Jones’s “Phrasing to the Floor, Softly, as in an Evening Sunset (for Nina)” (2025) is a two-part work—two yellow-tinged, painted canvases resting at an angle on brass blocks, joined at their edges by gray architectural felt and a strip of bright red paint that produces what Jones calls a “hum” of color. The felt, by contrast, suggests sonic reduction. Jones’s practice operates at the intersection of visual art and sound: She draws from Minimalism’s formal vocabulary while redirecting it toward the history of experimental music and Black sonic traditions. The title nods to “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise” (1928), recorded by John Coltrane, Miles Davis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Abbey Lincoln, among others. The work also carries a personal dimension: the “for Nina” is a dedication to Jones’s dog, named after Nina Simone, who died in 2024. “Phrasing to the Floor” was first shown at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis in the exhibition “Jennie C. Jones: A Line When Broken Begins Again,” before being acquired by SLAM—the first work by Jones in the museum’s collection.

Group of seven 20th-century baskets by Native American artists

These seven coiled baskets by Indigenous artists come from two geographically specific practices: the Sierra Nevada mountain range and the far north of Alaska. Four baskets are by artists from Californian or Nevadan groups including Neola Pete Esqueda (Washoe), Elizabeth Graham (Chukchansi Yokuts), Maggie Howard (Mono Lake Paiute / Kootzaduka’a), and an unattributed Mono artist. Each adds an important style and form to the collection. The three Alaskan baskets were woven in baleen, a material drawn from the plates in the mouths of bowhead whales, in a technique that originated in Barrow during World War I. Two lidded bowls are by Marvin Saġvan Peter (Iñupiaq, 1911-1962) and George Omnik (Iñupiaq, 1905-1978), and the third is by an unattributed Iñupiaq artist. While California baskets have been part of the museum’s story since 1904—and the first modern Native artworks acquired for the permanent collection, in 1920, were California baskets—these are the first baleen baskets to enter SLAM’s collection.

Andirons and Firescreen (1936-38), Charles Eames (1907-78)

These andirons and fire screen were designed by Charles Eames for the John Philip Meyer House in Huntleigh, Missouri—Eames’s largest and most significant architectural commission in St. Louis before he departed for Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he would begin the collaborations and experiments that launched his international career. The works are unique: custom-designed for a specific room, in the restrained classical modern style characteristic of the prewar St. Louis design milieu. In addition to strengthening the St. Louis-Cranbrook connections already represented in SLAM’s collection, the pieces complement furniture from the same commission already in the collection, including a bridge table and chairs and a sideboard table.

Kahlil Robert Irving’s “[ STREET & Stars | (Memories < > Matter) fair and FREEDOM ] Black ICE ]” (2019) is a large-scale floor installation composed of 80 hand-pressed ceramic tiles—speckled, textured, and resembling asphalt—measuring nearly 15 feet across. Ceramic objects and found-object-like decals are embedded in the tile field, layering references to the history of ceramics, to racial violence, and to the aesthetics of city surfaces. The gift deepens SLAM’s collection of African diasporic and African American contemporary art while also making a significant addition of a work by a St. Louis artist, continuing the museum’s commitment to showing and collecting living artists with deep connections to the St. Louis region.