The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis acts to enhance lives and inspire creativity, curiosity, and learning through experiences with modern art. Our goal is to offer meaningful engagement with the most innovative and relative art being created today. Free to all, we’re a welcome space.
We display work being made today for today’s audiences. Art that showcases the world around us and helps unites us to the most salient topics of our time. Not having a permanent collection lets us be responsive, nimble, and adaptive – both to our local community and the global art world.
CAM is a beginning place for artists, several go on to critical acclaim. It is also a venue for St. Louis natives to see figures of international recognition. A place for discovery, CAM is a meeting place to enjoy and see the modern visual culture.
Impact and Mission
Encouraged by the work on view, we engage millions of people outside and inside the museum’s walls through a vast host of activities for folks of all ages, such as stroller tours, artist talks, hands-on ArtReach workshops in neighborhoods and schools, a monthly neighborhood art crawl, and city-wide Open Studios STL. We have over 75 public programs per year and most of them are free. We keep a serious relationship with St. Louis public schools.
CAM cultivates the creative thinking of our city’s young people with in-depth, free art education. In New Art in the Neighborhood, our famous studio art program for teens, and LEAP Middle School Initiative, students partner with artists to become engrossed in contemporary art practices and issues. In Teen Museum Studies, an inventive career-based training program, members experience the inner workings of the museum as they coordinate an exhibition from beginning to end. These programs have a long-term impact, forming better citizens, better artists, better students and art spectators for the future.