Queen of Wands Mural

Queen of Wands is a permanent, site-specific public mural completed in Midtown St. Louis in 2024 with support from the Puffin Foundation. The mural is part of The Confluence Tarot, an ongoing body of work that uses tarot symbolism to explore healing, ecology, spirituality, and social justice within the Mississippi River watershed and its surrounding communities.

Installed on a highly visible exterior building, the work is freely accessible to the public and serves as a counter-narrative to Indigenous erasure within the urban landscape. Created to exist within the everyday life of the city, the mural places art outside of institutional spaces and directly into public view. The Queen of Wands figure represents creativity, leadership, intuition, and spiritual power, offering an affirming and visible representation of Indigenous presence and resilience. Through saturated color and layered botanical imagery, the mural asserts joy, vitality, and cultural continuity within shared urban space.

The imagery draws from the artist’s research into land-based knowledge, plants, and the ecological and cultural histories of ancestral bioregions connected by the Mississippi River. Plants function as both visual and conceptual elements, referencing medicinal, cultural, and spiritual relationships to land. Healing is presented not as an abstract concept, but as something rooted in place, relationship, and collective experience.

Queen of Wands builds upon the artist’s ongoing public art practice in St. Louis, including the nearby permanent mural Justice (2023), commissioned for the Counterpublic Triennial. Together, these works contribute to a growing presence of socially engaged public art that centers care, visibility, and community connection while challenging dominant historical narratives.