In her latest exhibit at Bruno David Gallery, Yvonne Osei’s creative practice explores beauty, systemic racism, colonialism, clothing politics, and the erasure and distortion of history. In The mess is us, she employs photo-based textile works to confront cultural amnesia and spotlight narratives of racial violence in the United States, grounding her inquiry in St. Louis, where she lives and works.

The exhibition builds upon a textile collection Osei designed in 2020, also titled The mess is us, which investigates systemic violence against Black bodies and communities. She transforms her own photographs and historic images of St. Louis neighborhoods, landmarks, residents, and beyond into intricate textile patterns. Osei applies these dynamic patterns onto construction materials like metal, ceramics, wood, and plexiglass. These works juxtapose imagery of destruction—such as the 1972 demolition of Pruitt-Igoe and the burning of the QuikTrip gas station during the 2014 Ferguson Uprising following Michael Brown’s death—with raw building materials, creating a striking visual paradox of loss and reconstruction.

This exhibition reveals racial injustice as part of the nation’s framework—built into its foundation, reinforced in its structure, and present in every layer of its design. It challenges viewers to recognize their role in a system that both creates and erases histories, complicit in the cycle of violence and forgetting. Osei’s The mess is us asks: Who owns the mess? What does it mean to live within the mess? Who should clean it up? Who gets to walk away from it? Who is forced to live in it? And what does rebuilding look like when the foundation itself is fractured?