YVONNE OSEI

The Mess Is Us

April 4 - June 21, 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.