How can I buy a work by Christina Shmigel?

Bruno David Gallery handles the sale of available works by Christina Shmigel. For prices and availability, email info@brunodavidgallery.com or call +1 314 696 2377.

Where can I see work by Christina Shmigel in person?

At Bruno David Gallery, 7513 Forsyth Boulevard, Saint Louis, Missouri 63105, during public hours or by appointment.

What does Christina Shmigel make?

Installations and sculpture in steel, wood, cardboard, paint, plumbing parts and found furniture, such as the steel water towers of In Our Town (2020), the laser-cut cardboard city of This frightened, blasted, beautiful tender world, just as it is (2022) and Shanghai Archive, an apothecary cabinet of found and fabricated artifacts.

Where is Christina Shmigel based?

Christina Shmigel lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri.

Has Christina Shmigel had an exhibition at Bruno David Gallery?

Yes. Nianci Li & Christina Shmigel: Little Pink (7 February to 30 March 2024); In Our Town (29 February to 18 April 2020) are among her exhibitions at the gallery. Catalogues can be read in the gallery’s Publications library at brunodavidgallery.com/publications.

Christina Shmigel

Christina Shmigel (born 1958) is a St. Louis-based sculptor who makes installations, sculpture and drawings about how a place’s character shows in its material culture. Born in New York City to Ukrainian immigrant parents, she grew up between cultures and languages and became an observer of cultural cues. Her subjects include pipes and plumbing, Chinese gardens, the improvised buildings and recyclers of Shanghai, and rural American water towers.

Shmigel combines hand-made objects with unaltered found components and uses shifts of scale and viewpoint so that her installations unfold slowly; she has likened them to a theater in which viewers become players. She works in steel, wood, cardboard, paint, plumbing parts and found furniture. From 2004 to 2017 she lived and worked in Shanghai, which became her main subject. She now keeps studios in St. Louis and Bakersville, North Carolina.

Shmigel earned a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (1980), an MFA in sculpture from Brooklyn College (1987) and an MFA in metals from Southern Illinois University Carbondale (1993).

Shmigel taught at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (1987–90) and was associate professor of sculpture at Webster University in St. Louis (1995–2005). A resident artist at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina from 1993 to 1995, she has taught there often and is a former trustee.

She has had solo shows at the Saint Louis Art Museum (2002), Laumeier Sculpture Park (2005), the Duolun Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai (2006), Hillyer Art Space in Washington, D.C. (2016), Penland Gallery (2017) and Webster University’s Cecille R. Hunt Gallery (2025), and she took part in CIM at The Ukrainian Museum in New York (2016–17). Bruno David Gallery represents Shmigel. Her exhibitions there include This City, Daily Rising (2011), three installations about Shanghai centered on an antique Chinese medicine cabinet; In Our Town (2020), steel water towers in the Window on Forsyth that marked her return to St. Louis; and Little Pink (2024), a two-person show with Nianci Li, whose short film records Shmigel’s performance with a bicycle loaded with laser-cut cardboard. The gallery published catalogues for This City, Daily Rising and In Our Town.

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