The University of Illinois Springfield Visual Arts Gallery is pleased to present A More Perfect Union, an exhibition by St. Louis-based artist John Early. A More Perfect Union will open on Monday, October 21 and run through Thursday, November 14.

Coinciding with the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, A More Perfect Union is a sculptural installation made for a nation teetering on the precipice. Its focal point consists of a massive, fragile panel of compressed earth held up by a wooden frame and cinderblocks. Pierced with fifty holes, the dirt sign sits in front of a bay of windows, thus allowing natural light to shine through an otherwise impenetrable plane. The sculpture evokes old roadside billboards and DIY signage found throughout the Midwest countryside, yet it makes no pronouncements. Rather, it offers an invitation. To reflect, to connect, and, perhaps, even to hope amidst the precarity of the present moment.

John Early (b. 1978, Richmond, VA) is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose site-based work explores the textures, layers, and histories of place. Much of his recent work addresses power structures of inequity found in the recreational landscape of St. Louis’s public parks. Since 2021, Early has collaborated with sports studies scholar Noah Cohan on Whereas Hoops, an interdisciplinary project combining public scholarship, archival research, spatial interventions, and activism to address the absence of basketball courts in St. Louis’s Forest Park. In April 2022, Early’s essay about a basketball court in North St. Louis was included in the edited volume, The Material World of Modern Segregation: St. Louis in the Long Era of Ferguson. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and is a Faculty Affiliate at the University’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity.