A second life you can climb into
At City Museum in St. Louis, discarded objects become places to go. Follow the baking pans, industrial parts and artists’ hands, then choose your own way through the climbing spaces and quieter collections.
Inside this guide
A baking pan has a fairly specific job. At City Museum in St. Louis, enough of them become a wall. A plane gets another career above a parking lot. Inside the former shoe warehouse, the distance between looking at an object and finding a way through it can be remarkably small.
That is the useful starting point for this place. Follow a material for a while: the repeated indentations in metal, a piece of carved stone, a coil large enough to enter. The climbing gives you one way to understand what the artists have made. Looking closely gives you another. Both belong in a visit.
Start with the baking pans
In a 2024 interview published by Explore St. Louis, creative director Rick Erwin described buying baking pans after Hostess filed for bankruptcy in 2012. CupCakes, Ding Dongs and Twinkies had left behind equipment with possibilities beyond the bakery. The museum could build walls from it.
Look at the photograph of the pan wall in Labyrinth. Rows of small metal recesses make a surface that is busy at close range and orderly from farther away. Colored light picks out their repetition. You can appreciate the pattern before knowing what made it; learning its former purpose gives the pattern a second reading. Industrial repetition has become an artistic resource.
Labyrinth opened on the fourth floor on July 4, 2025. Its materials come with unusually specific biographies: gears from the Mel Price Lock and Dam, glass recovered during Central Library’s centennial renovation, and red pipes from the museum building’s own fire system. The museum also identifies syrup tanks and a turbocharger saved for its snail-like shape. These are objects gathered across different kinds of work, brought into a new relationship.
Their earlier jobs help explain why the installation looks the way it does. A gear arrives with teeth, a tank with a curve, a pipe with a route built into its form. Working with those shapes imposes decisions on the artists. The resulting puzzle begins well before a visitor tries to find a way through it.
If Labyrinth is high on your list, its admission is included with a general ticket. The museum describes an approach up the stone steps from the third floor, between the Spider Net and Toddler Town. Ask staff about a suitable route if those steps present a difficulty; the existence of elevators elsewhere in the building does not establish access to every part of an installation.
