October 3 – November 15, 2025

The Foundry Art Centre is proud to present two powerful new exhibitions opening October 3rd, featuring the work of Alex Rosborough Davis and Shabez Jamal.

In Out of the Closets and to the Front! Alex Rosborough Davis creates powerful, nomadic works called Queer Revolutionary Objects (QROs) from materials that are abandoned, broken, and discarded – a personal definition of queerness that extends beyond identity. Drawing on a wide range of craft and trade skills, the artist challenges traditional gendered binaries while transforming these salvaged materials.

Davis is a Genderqueer artist and activist from St. Louis, Missouri, and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with an MFA in Visual Art in 2023. Davis earned a BA in Anthropology-Sociology and Environmental Studies from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, in 2018, where they managed a student-run bicycle shop and were heavily involved in student activism. Davis currently resides in Brookings, South Dakota, where they serve South Dakota State University in a role of Architecture Lab manager.

Shabez Jamal’s The Spirit of St. Louis a three-channel video installation that visualizes Blackness in relation to modernity, capitalistic industry, and the subsequent erasure of Black spaces. In this work, Jamal utilizes a queer visual aesthetic to explore Blackness as a lived condition deeply rooted in care and preservation, especially in the face of global capitalist interests reshaping geographic spaces.

Donny Bradfield, also known as Shabez Jamal, is an interdisciplinary artist and the Harnish Visiting Lecturer in Photography at Smith College. Born in St. Louis, Jamal earned their BA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and their MFA from Tulane University of Louisiana. Their visual practice explores the relationship between the memorialized and the imagined. Through their work, which includes photography, non-linear video, installation, and performance, they engage with the vacant space as inherently Black. Through this framework, they understand physical, political, and socio-economic spaces through the possibilities that arise when engaging with the inherited backward and forward motions that are inherent to spaces rendered as “empty.”

Celebrate the opening of these exhibitions on Friday, October 3rd, from 5-8pm, during our monthly First Friday event. Enjoy music, family-friendly art activities, and refreshments from the Foundry bar. All At Once by Addyson Hoey will be on view in the East Gallery.

Out of the Closets and to the Front! And The Spirit of St. Louis will be on view through November 15th.

For more information, please visit us at foundryartcentre.org or email Jessica Mannisi, director of exhibitions, at jmannisi@foundryartcentre.org.

About the Foundry Art Centre
As a vibrant home to the arts, the Foundry Art Centre raises awareness and appreciation of the arts throughout the region. Alive with activity, the Centre’s programming reinforces the importance of the arts and helps ensure that arts and culture remain vital. Artists, patrons, young people and the community at large continually find new ways to interact at this unique facility.

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The Foundry Art Centre
520 N. Main Center, St. Charles, MO 63301
636-255-0270 | foundryartcentre.org