As the only major American city with free admission to all its art museums, St. Louis may be in a league of its own. Even DC, best known for the Smithsonian museums, has a few, like the Phillips Collection and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, that ask you to pay for admission.
It’s a glorious achievement, thanks to city and state support for the arts and a funding model that many of us hope will be emulated elsewhere. This financial accessibility alone makes the city an art destination, but thankfully, the museums themselves are attractions in their own right.
Yes, the land of toasted ravioli, St. Paul sandwiches, and cracker-like pizza should be on your radar for more than just food and a trip to the Eero Saarinen-designed Gateway Arch. Here are some of the art spaces and museums that prove it.
Saint Louis Art Museum
1 Fine Arts Drive (Forest Park), St. Louis, Missouri
This is the city’s impressive encyclopedic museum with a collection of work by Max Beckmann and other German modernists that will make your eyes bulge, but that’s not all. The institution is also home to fantastic collections that include Picasso, Matisse, George Caleb Bingham, Indigenous art from South America, and even a really lovely Titian, “Christ Shown to the People (Ecce Homo)” (1570–76).
Right now, the museum is hosting a massive Anselm Kiefer exhibition through January 25, 2026, filling the entrance hall and numerous other galleries. (The works are so monumental that some of the doors had to be removed to accommodate them.) During a time of political turmoil, Kiefer often grounds the viewer in a history that doesn’t always feel past tense. These works are particularly poignant for locals, as the artist drew inspiration from the Mississippi River that made the city rich in the 19th century, along with the Rhine River in his native Germany, to explore the symbolism of waterways and their pivotal roles throughout history.
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
3750 Washington Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri
Two major exhibitions, one by Haegue Yang and the other by Teresa Baker, fill this vibrant art space, which is next door to the equally lovely Pulitzer Art Foundation. If you visit before February 8, 2026, you can explore the colorful, shaped abstraction of Baker, who incorporates materials like willow, buffalo and deer hide, tree bark, corn husks, and natural and artificial sinew into her compositions. Or take a break to explore Yang’s heady staged installations, which transform often mundane materials of all kinds into theatrical scenes.
Pulitzer Art Foundation
3716 Washington Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri
This Tadao Ando-designed museum is a work of art in itself. But now you have the added benefit of seeing not only Jennie C. Jones’s sublime abstraction on the first floor, but an excellent exhibition curated by her, featuring other artists that helped establish or build on the aesthetic languages she works with, including Carmen Herrera, Agnes Martin, Martin Puryear, Alma Thomas, Mavis Pusey, and Zarina. Make sure to take some time to rest in their second-floor sitting room, read some related materials and catalogs, and enjoy a view of the city.
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, Missouri
This university museum has a few smaller permanent collection galleries that span millennia, but the real draw this season is the large exhibition of art by contemporary women artists from the Shah Garg Collection. The show brings together 80 works by 69 artists, and it is a joy to behold. Demonstrating Garg’s deep interest in art by women, it mostly avoids the scrapbook quality of similar exhibitions, while refusing to essentialize them into any neat category. Works by Melissa Cody, Simone Leigh, Kay WalkingStick, Maria Lassnig, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and Rose B. Simpson are some of the highlights, but they’re definitely not the only ones worth a closer look.
The Luminary
2701 Cherokee Street, St. Louis, Missouri
This alt-space showcases some of the best emerging art, and right now, until December 13, they’re featuring work by St. Louis-based Palestinian artist Kiki Salem. She has created 48 suspended carpets with razor wire and gauze — the term itself believed to be derived from the place name of Gaza and its historical role in textile manufacturing — that evoke the beauty and danger of a place caught between geopolitical forces and a continuing struggle against displacement and genocide.
Non Stndrd at the National Building Arts Center
2300 Falling Springs Road, Sauget, Illinois
One of the most unusual spaces in the St. Louis area — a roughly 15-minute drive from the city — is the result of the personal collecting hobby of the late Larry Giles, a historical preservationist and architectural salvager. Since his death in 2021, the National Building Arts Center has unfortunately become more weathered and worn. Thankfully, local artists are trying to shine a light on the industrial site to muster support for its restoration. The current exhibition, titled A Matter of the Invisible and curated by Pia Singh, features two new site-specific installations by Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford and Leticia Pardo. Both artistic interventions are well-suited to help us dream up new possibilities for a sprawling campus that reputedly has one of the world’s largest archives of historical brick.
