In this bonus episode, co-producers Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Michelle Dezember, and Misa Jeffereis look back at Radio Resistance with Lara Hamdan, Producer of St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. The four trace connections between episodes, share behind the scenes insights, and celebrate the power of radio.

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As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.

What is the power of writing to carry a voice, or many voices, particularly defiant ones? In this final episode, we return to the impetus for this series, the exhibition Stories of Resistance, as an invitation to consider the medium of words and storytelling. Artist Banu Cennetoğlu and poet Treasure Shields Redmond discuss their work attending to the writings of American Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and Kurdish freedom fighter Gurbetelli Ersöz, respectively. They acknowledge the responsibility of caring for the words of activists, especially those who gave their lives to struggle for what’s right.

Banu Cennetoğlu is a cross-disciplinary artist whose practice incorporates methods of collecting and archiving and enquires into the politics of the production, classification, and distribution of knowledge. Her work Gurbet’s Diary (27.07.1995–08.10.1997) inscribed words from Gurbetelli Ersöz’s diary—which Ersöz kept while she was a Kurdish freedom fighter before she was killed—onto 145 press-ready lithographic limestone slabs. Cennetoğlu lives and works in Istanbul, where she founded BAS, an artist-run space dedicated to artists’ books and printed matter.

Dr. Treasure Shields Redmond is a St. Louis metro-based poet, performer, and educator. She has been featured at the Nuyorican Poets Café, and published poetry in such notable anthologies as Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Breaking Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cane Canem’s First Decade, and in journals that include Obsidian and The African American Review. A Cave Canem fellow, Treasure has received an MFA from the University of Memphis, and a PhD from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

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As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.


Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.

How can we move beyond the dominant narrative, to hear stories that have been erased? Artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn and curator and public historian Gwen Moore find similarities in growing up in communities that were violently transformed or completely erased. Building on earlier discussions of trauma in this program, the two talk about how their practices of storytelling and public memory are a response to damage leveled on Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and Mill Creek Valley in St. Louis. Their mutual interests point to listening to the voices of ancestors, the testimonial power of objects, and our collective responsibility to understand history.

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s artistic practice explores strategies of political resistance enacted through counter-memory and post-memory. Extracting and re-working narratives via history and supernaturalisms is an essential part of Nguyen’s video works and sculptures where fact and fiction are both held accountable.

Gwen Moore is the Curator of Urban Landscape and Community Identity at the Missouri Historical Society focusing on race, ethnicity, race relations, and social justice issues in St. Louis. An important part of her work has been documenting the Ferguson protest movement, which includes a collection of physical materials along with an oral history project. Gwen was also the curator for the Missouri History Museum exhibition, #1 in Civil Rights: The African American Freedom Struggle in St. Louis. 

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As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.


Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.

This episode explores historic and contemporary failures of infrastructure, racial capitalism, and climate change and how these current dysfunctions are intertwined. Our guests discuss ideas of spatial justice, St. Louis’s ongoing engagement with confronting its past, and how to work across disciplines to envision possible futures.

Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Dyson’s abstract works are visual and material systems used to construct fusions of surface tension, movement, scale, real and finite space. With an emphasis on the ways Black and brown bodies perceive and negotiate space as information, Dyson looks to spatial liberation strategies from historical and contemporary perspectives, seeking to uncover new understandings of the potential for more livable geographies.

Geoff Ward is Professor of African and African-American Studies and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2) at Washington University in St. Louis. His scholarship examines histories of racist violence, their legacies, and implications for repair.

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As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.


Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.

What would it mean to live out a fair and better future, right now? Join artist Jen Liu and scholar Candace Borders as they explore the complex role that women have played in labor rights and activism in both the US and China. This episode digs into the history of St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project and the African American women who lived there, organized, and performed everyday acts of resistance. Our guests unpack the radical idea of building community and the immense possibilities that open up when we think together beyond our current circumstances.

Jen Liu is a visual artist based in New York and Vermont, working in video/animation, genetically engineered biomaterial, choreography, and painting to explore national identities, gendered economies, neoliberal industrial labor, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts.  She is a 2019 recipient of the Creative Capital Award, 2018 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant, and 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video.  She has presented work at The Whitney Museum, MoMA, and The New Museum, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; Royal Academy and ICA, London; Kunsthaus Zurich; Kunsthalle Wien; Aspen Museum of Art; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; MUSAC, León; UCCA and A07 @ 798, Beijing; Times Museum Guangzhou, and the 2014 Shanghai Biennale and 2019 Singapore Biennale.

Candace Borders is a PhD student at Yale University in the departments of American Studies and African American Studies. She also works as a Wurtele Gallery Teacher at the Yale University Art Gallery. Currently, her dissertation focuses on the experiences of African American women who grew up in St. Louis, Missouri’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project. Through the use of oral history and Black feminist methods, the work accesses Black women’s everyday experiences at the nexus of race, gender, class, and public assistance in the mid-20th century. More broadly, Candace is interested in Black Feminist theory, the politics of knowledge production, public humanities, and the intersections between race and architecture. Prior to starting her graduate studies, Candace was the PNC Arts Alive Fellow at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

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As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.


Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.

What it would mean to reset our understanding of health and well-being as an entire community, especially now? In this episode, artist Guadalupe Maravilla and trauma surgeon Dr. LJ Punch speak to the effects of untreated, unhealed trauma in the body. They explore deep connections between the body and the mind, between physical and spiritual realities, and the power of ancient and traditional medicinal practices from across the world. Ultimately, they advocate for the importance of bringing healthcare to the community and offering people better access to alternative ways of healing.

Guadalupe Maravilla is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer. At the age of eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. In 2016, Maravilla became a US citizen and adopted the name Guadalupe Maravilla in solidarity with his undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as his last name. As an acknowledgement of his own migratory past, Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts of immigrant culture, particularly those belonging to Latinx communities.

Dr. LJ Punch is an American critical care surgeon, an associate professor of surgery, and a scholar within the Institute for Public Health at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. Punch is also an activist in the fight against gun violence and directs StopTheBleedSTL, located at "The T" anti-violence center, which runs programs to educate the community on how to reduce the impact of trauma, injury, and violence in St. Louis. As a physician, educator, and activist, Punch aims to propagate the idea of “Radical Generosity” as means to better his community and the lives of those around him.

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As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.

Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.

In this episode, artist Hank Willis Thomas holds space for Congresswoman Cori Bush to share vulnerability around the intense battles that have shaped her public career: the Ferguson uprising, personal traumas, the road to Congress, and the violent insurrection she confronted in her first weeks in office. Thomas shapes an empathetic conversation, taking a moment to recognize Bush and show an appreciation of Black women throughout history. Their conversation asks us to consider how we can care for front-line activists, bring joy to the center, and insist on our humanity.


Congresswoman Cori Bush is a registered nurse, community activist, organizer, single mother, and ordained pastor for the people of St. Louis. Congresswoman Bush is serving her first term as the representative of Missouri’s 1st Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives. She is the first Black woman and first nurse to represent Missouri; the first woman to represent Missouri’s 1st Congressional District; and the first activist from the movement fighting for Black lives elected to the United States Congress.


Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), Writing on the Wall, and the artist-run initiative for art and civic engagement For Freedoms. Thomas is a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2018), Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2018), Art for Justice Grant (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a former member of the New York City Public Design Commission.


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As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.


Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.

How do public spaces reflect public consciousness? Join Shannon Levin and Marina Peng of PSA:, a public art project that features text installations by St. Louis-based artists, writers, and poets, and Cleo Barnett of Amplifier, a non-profit design lab that builds media experiments to amplify social movements. These creatives share with us how and why they use their platforms to reclaim public space in order to uplift the voices of others, and how public art has the ability to shift our perspectives and make room for real change.


Cleo Barnett is a curator, creative director, post disciplinary artist and emergent strategist working in the arts & civic engagement. Barnett is currently the Executive Director of Amplifier, a non-profit design lab that builds media experiments to amplify social movements. Since 2009, Barnett has directed and produced more than 300 public space interventions across five continents. Collaborating with artists, government agencies, non-profit and community based organizations, foundations, educators and global brands, her work shifts culture through public art and mass media experiments that amplify the voices of environmental & social justice movements.


Shannon Levin is co-founder of PSA: and an illustrator, designer, and educator living, working, and playing in St. Louis, MO. She earned a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis where she currently teaches an undergraduate illustration course. Driven by color and expression, her work extends to clients in the arts, music, and community-focused spaces.


Marina Peng is co-founder of PSA: and a visual artist based in St. Louis, MO. She holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis. In her practice, she examines her position as a second-generation American in the Midwest. Her work visualizes experiences of isolation, sacrifice, and hyper self-analysis.

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As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.

Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.