Black and white portrait of a smiling woman with styled hair in space buns, wearing a striped necklace, earrings, and a top with contrasting sections, standing in front of a brick wall.

YVONNE OSEI

The Mess Is Us

April 4 - July 12, 2025

Bruno David Gallery presents The Mess Is Us, an exhibition of new works by Yvonne Osei. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Yvonne Osei’s creative practice explores beauty, systemic racism, colonialism, clothing politics, and the erasure and distortion of history. In The Mess Is Us, she employs photo-based textile works to confront cultural amnesia and spotlight narratives of racial violence in the United States, grounding her inquiry in St. Louis, where she lives and works.

The exhibition builds upon a textile collection Osei designed in 2020, also titled The Mess Is Us, which investigates systemic violence against Black bodies and communities. She transforms her own photographs and historic images of St. Louis neighborhoods, landmarks, residents, and beyond into intricate textile patterns. Osei applies these dynamic patterns onto construction materials like metal, ceramics, wood, and plexiglass. These works juxtapose imagery of destruction—such as the 1972 demolition of Pruitt-Igoe and the burning of the QuikTrip gas station during the 2014 Ferguson Uprising following Michael Brown’s death—with raw building materials, creating a striking visual paradox of loss and reconstruction.

This exhibition reveals racial injustice as part of the nation’s framework—built into its foundation, reinforced in its structure, and present in every layer of its design. It challenges viewers to recognize their role in a system that both creates and erases histories, complicit in the cycle of violence and forgetting. Osei’s The Mess Is Us asks: Who owns the mess? What does it mean to live within the mess? Who should clean it up? Who gets to walk away from it? Who is forced to live in it? And what does rebuilding look like when the foundation itself is fractured?

Time is a vital thread in Osei’s work, linking past and present racial atrocities—from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter—through textiles that serve as both witness and archive. Rooted in her vibrant Ghanaian heritage and St. Louis’s complex socio-political landscape, The Mess Is Us invites reflection on collective remembrance, atonement, and the urgent need to rebuild—not only structures, but systems, histories, and futures

Yvonne Osei’s work has been included in “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century” at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Other museums include the St. Louis Art Museum, Knoxville Museum of Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, McMullen Museum, 21c Hotel-Museum, and others. Osei received a M.F.A. from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, a B.F.A. from Webster University, and an MS in Fashion Design and Business at Lindenwood University. Osei was a Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Osei has attended residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. In conjunction with the exhibition, Bruno David Gallery will publish a catalogue of the artist’s work with an in-depth exhibition history and bibliography. "The Mess is Us" is made possible with generous support from the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis.


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CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Broken glass window with a cityscape mirror reflection covered in snow, some broken glass pieces, and a few pink patches.

The Weight of What We Built 2025 Ceramic tiles on wood 36 x 48.5 inches

A woman with dark skin wearing earrings, blue lipstick, and a colorful dress, holding a collection of water guns in front of a chain-link fence.

In the Time it Takes to Breathe 2025 One-channel video with sound 7 minutes 27 seconds Edition of 6 + 1 AP

Mixed-media collage art featuring children walking past a historic red brick building with large, expressive tree roots and hanging figures, creating a surreal, layered scene.

Still Playing: Isle 1 2025 Digital print on aluminum 30 x 54 inches Edition of 6 + 1 AP

Mixed-media artwork featuring urban scenes, trees, and people in a mirrored design with symmetrical structures and reflective elements.

Still Playing: Isle 3 2025 Digital print on aluminum 36 x 54 inches Edition of 6 + 1 AP

Collage of outdoor scene with children and adults, some in shadow or as silhouettes, around steps and a brick building, with some figures wearing signs reading "I AM KAM".

Still Playing: Isle 4 2025 Digital print on aluminum 32.5 x 45 inches Edition of 6 + 1 AP

A woman with red curly hair sitting on a small stool on a road, wearing a long dress with a newspaper print pattern, in front of a billboard that supports Mark McCloskey for U.S. Senate, with an urban background of partially constructed buildings.

Who Gunner Back Down 2025 Photograph printed on OSB board 8 x 12 feet (triptych) Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Still Playing: Isle 2 2025 Digital print on aluminum 25 x 45 inches Edition of 6 + 1 AP

Abstract collage with layered floral cut-outs on a blue background.

Pruitt I Go Into Clouds 2025 Photo-based textiles printed Over clear plexiglass and On vinyl wallpaper 2 Elements 132 x 168 inches (size variable)

Collage of people walking, skating, and skateboarding around red brick buildings and trees on a city sidewalk, with a cut-out shape of the state of Missouri in the background.

INSTALLATION VIEWS

A woman with long curly red hair and dark skin sitting on a chair on a road. She is wearing a long dress with a newspaper print pattern. Behind her, there is a billboard with a political campaign ad for Mark McCloskey, a U.S. Senate candidate.
Interior view of an art gallery with white walls and gray floor, featuring various modern paintings and mixed media art installations, including abstract and photographic works.
Contemporary art installation featuring five mirrored, three-dimensional wall sculptures resembling small architectural structures, with miniature human figures and trees, in a gallery setting.
Art exhibit with a large suspended sculpture of a cloud with mountain and cityscape images, a small digital screen below it, and two wooden sculptures resembling playground structures with miniature figures on a white gallery wall.
An art gallery featuring two large artworks on white walls. One is a mixed-media piece with a photo of a person kneeling on a street, surrounded by metal fragments, and bordered by a frame of metal debris. The other is a bright blue mural with stylized black, white, and green floral patterns and a white silhouette of a planetary figure.
Mixed media art installation resembling a cityscape with layered cutouts of buildings, people, and trees, creating a three-dimensional effect.
Art gallery with mixed media artwork, including a large photo of a person kneeling on a street with a tree-shaped cutout over their head, smaller sculptural pieces resembling stepped platforms with miniature figures, and a mural-style collage background.
An art gallery with multiple contemporary artworks. On the left, a large mixed-media piece features a woman in patterned clothing sitting on a road with an billboard and industrial structures in the background. On the right, a mural depicts abstracted trees with black outlines, green foliage, and a blue background.
Mixed media art installation on a white gallery wall featuring two cutouts with layered images of people, buildings, and trees, arranged symmetrically and asymmetrically.
An art exhibition featuring a flat-screen TV on the left displaying an image of a person holding a tool and an art piece on the right depicting a miniature wooden scene of a building with miniature people.
A woman with red braided hair wearing a dress made of newspaper print, sitting on a folding chair on an empty street with a billboard in the background, and a framing border of newspaper collage.
Art gallery with three large mixed media artworks on white walls, featuring sculptures and collage-style images.