Blank Canvas Qualities: On Reverb in Eureka, Missouri

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There are fifty-two World War II munitions storage bunkers twenty-five miles west of St. Louis on Tyson Research Center’s two-thousand acre property in Eureka, Missouri. The exterior of Bunker 3 forms a half-hex that gestures at a mound. Trees push up from the thin layer of soil covering its top. In ten big steps you can scramble to the bunker’s flat cap and stand eye-level with the woodpeckers. Moss outlines the concrete form. It’s easy to feel comforted by nature’s soft edges and the encroaching new growth. But a deep disturbance remains.

At one time, the former military base was called the Tyson Valley Powder Farm. The name is a collision between nature and war, as if bombs could be harvested from the land. But the name is also strategically vague. It doesn’t necessarily read as a military base. During the war, soldiers built twenty-one miles of roads and a perimeter fence along with the 1,750 square foot bunkers. They rode the perimeter on the backs of mules and in jeeps mounted with machine guns to ensure secrecy from the outside world.

Tucked deep in the heartland, among Missouri’s Crescent Hills and out of view from the city, the bunkers were unlikely to be detected. Despite the cover, everything American has passed through here, from white settlers to radioactive waste, from ballistic weapons to amusement park rides and endangered species.

A visible bunker has no strategic value, yet it still operates on its surroundings. The structure dominates the setting, refusing to decay with the rest of the woods. As one bunker scholar has observed, a visible bunker has “uncanny affective power as something hidden that has come to light.” But decommissioned sites often generate rumors and legends—Mothman’s home turf is an ex-munitions base with the same “igloo”-style bunkers as Tyson. Invisible forces are still at work alongside this concrete evidence of the past. The forms demand to be reckoned with. Reverb, a new project of St. Louis artists and curators, works on these themes. Inside Bunker 3, artists confront the site’s history of violence and explore the disturbed state of the forest. 

That most Reverb attendees had never heard of Tyson might suggest there’s not much connection to St. Louis. But the changes to the land here have always been linked to the city. In the 1870s, the industrial Mincke mine was set up. The area sits on top of the Kimmswick Formation of high-calcium limestone. The site has been mined for millennia, though early indigenous people mined flint. The Mincke mine provided material for a rapidly expanding city: early St. Louis literally stood on limestone foundations. A company town grew around Mincke, with housing and goods controlled by the mine and workers isolated in the woods. Today at Tyson you can step onto the overgrown train platform that once linked Mincke to St. Louis. 

When the U.S. Army moved in during the 1940s, they turned the blasted-out mining cavern into a garage for jeeps. As a wartime ordnance testing facility, Tyson was still for blowing things up. Meanwhile, in downtown St. Louis, scientists were making key contributions to the atomic bomb. Uranium processed in St. Louis was used in the first sustained nuclear chain reaction. In 1946, radioactive waste from this process made its way into a few of Tyson’s igloos. Sometime before 1948, the waste would be transported away without a trace. In 2001, one hundred thousand baby teeth were discovered in one of the Tyson bunkers. The nuclear program’s secrecy and pollution created distrust after the war. St. Louis community members devised a survey that asked kids to donate their baby teeth to be tested for radiation. The survey proved that radiation levels rose when atomic tests were conducted states away, and helped pass national safety policy. At an unknown point decades later, the teeth had nowhere to go and got stashed in a bunker. 

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There’s a long history of using decommissioned sites and abandoned spaces for art and fun. The appeal of military ruins to many artists is their blank canvas quality. Of course, Tyson’s two thousand acres were never truly empty ecologically or culturally. In its current configuration, you could write off this patch of woods as irrelevant, a surplus area with no connection to broader issues. But its postwar uses reveal a tension between violence and shelter that continues to resonate.

In the late 1940s, St. Louis County leased six of the bunkers to a commercial mushroom farm. The damp conditions were ideal for growth and there was a sense of optimism in housing food, not bombs. The fifty-two structures with their identical driveways and plots weirdly resemble a postwar suburban neighborhood. Concrete would have been increasingly familiar to St. Louisans, as concrete architecture went up across the city and miles of new highway were poured.

Happy plans continued to develop when St. Louis County opened an amusement park elsewhere on the property, complete with hotdogs and a miniature train. Equally distant from the spirit of war was the decision to open a wildlife refuge. Ten buffalo from Oklahoma, twenty elk from Yellowstone National Park, and fifteen white-tailed deer from the estate of local beer magnate August A. Busch made Tyson their new home. Caring for animals is one of Tyson’s legacies. Multiple wildlife refuges still exist at Tyson today: the World Bird Sanctuary, Endangered Wolf Center, and Lone Elk Park all border or sit on the property.

Man-made wildlife sanctuaries can be precarious, particularly when the military is involved. By 1958 the introduced elk herd had grown. The Army was active on site following their return during the Korean War. Penned in by the perimeter fence, many elk couldn’t roam to find sufficient food. After a bull elk rammed into a truck, the herd was declared dangerous. As local historian Shelley Powers imagined the elks’ experience: “The scents must have been confusing: faint shadows of mushroom and hot dogs overlaid by that of TNT.” Without enough food to forage, the elk were expensive to feed. Soldiers rounded up and shot the 108-strong herd, then donated the meat to a local food pantry. 

Ultimately, a surviving bull elk—Lone Elk himself—was found, a new herd was imported from Yellowstone, and Lone Elk Park was established as it stands today. Visiting Lone Elk Park is like someone’s idea of a Missouri safari: you inch forward in traffic on a single-lane road, unable to leave if you wanted to (at least the weekend I went), while massive elk look at you, sometimes threateningly. The encounter is unsettling even without knowing the history of the herd.

The highly altered state of Tyson’s environment underlies the biological research station run by Washington University that is based here today. As Tyson Staff Scientist Beth Biro scientist put it to Student Life, “part of why [Tyson has] come to be an asset for researchers is allowing them to do large landscape projects where they can manipulate the environment more, because [the area has] such a disturbed history.” This disturbance is affective as well as empirical, which makes the site intriguing to both artists and scientists. Reverb curators Sophia Hatzikos and Carmen Ribaudo collaborated with WashU scientists to gain access to the site and learn about its history. 

Artists and scientists share an interest in military-altered landscapes worldwide. Artist Matthew Flintham studies the black mold that grows in abandoned nuclear bunkers in Norway. The survival of this nonhuman “culture” is the focus of his work. The mold is thriving, but it is toxic to humans, so the original purpose of the bunker for sheltering people is totally void. In an underground bunker in Poland, biologists discovered an ant colony made up entirely of ants that had fallen down a pipe. The ants can’t reproduce because of the temperature, but the colony is constantly replenished by the pipe. The ants have created a unique, self-sustaining colony in total darkness. In both cases, the bunkers are interesting because of their show of strength and order. But by now most have been abandoned. The apocalypses they were built for haven’t come, and now the structures play a role outside of human control.

When Reverb co-curator Sophia Hatzikos first got access to the site in 2022, she was drawn to the bunkers and started documenting them as part of her own art practice. She visited Tyson weekly for nine months. In a series of videos she refers to as “blue glove explorations,” she recorded herself exploring the landscape. She made audio notations inside each of the fifty-two bunkers. She experimented with wood casts and concrete, the same materials used to construct the bunkers. She encountered hibernating bats, discovered that one had died, and built a memorial. She created catalog cards for each bunker containing dimensions, facts, and geographic coordinates. She also considered historical military maps. Using digital tools, she redacted most of the content of these maps, leaving only text headings and the positions of the bunkers, which appear to be floating in space. The resulting images feel calm, with a pleasing technical aesthetic and minimal typefaces. At the same time, they reflect the secrecy of the military and the erasing of context when new structures and creatures are introduced to a place.

The impulse to document and inventory abandoned bunkers has a strong lineage among artists. If you look up “bunker art,” you will come across Bunker Archeology as a foundational work. In 1975, writer and artist Paul Virilio produced an exhibit and book of that name. He had spent seven years creating photographs and architectural diagrams of abandoned Nazi bunkers along France’s Atlantic coast. His writing has a lot of muscular, poetic, and even mystical statements about bunkers. He saw them as ushering in a new, terrifying configuration of the world: “Space was at last homogenized, absolute war had become a reality, and the monolith [the bunker] was its monument.” Having lived through WWII in Europe, war wasn’t abstract for him. In an age of airplanes and nuclear bombs, distance no longer offered protection from harm. “Retreat was now into the very thickness of the planet and no longer along its surface,” he wrote, referencing how bunkers blend into the earth. His project is grounded in factual, technical details: timelines, maps, black and white photographs, and bunker typologies. More recently, online communities of enthusiasts have compiled tons of data on bunkers, creating websites full of diagrams and maps. Thinking about Hatzikos’ work in this lineage, I wondered why bunkers create this strong desire to classify.

Reverb opened on a warm Saturday in October. I park in a field near some solar panels. Hatzikos is driving a shuttle—I slide onto the bench seat of a Tyson Research Center truck to get a ride to the art. Some insects have made a nest in the AC vent. We pass evenly spaced bunker plots until swerving to the right. The gravel gives a familiar, homecoming crunch as we roll to the end of the driveway. Greeting us is the blank cement face of Bunker 3, nestled in a wooded hillside. Inside the bunker, it’s incredibly loud. It’s impossible to hold a conversation because of the intense echo. Someone stepping on a leaf outside the door sends noise bouncing off the walls.

The local artists featured in Reverb 2024, Layla Zubi and Erin Johnston were asked to create site-specific work. Both artists focus on the relation of the bunkers to the wider world. Zubi lives across the Mississippi River from St. Louis in Illinois. She explores her Palestinian and Uzbek heritage in the context of the Midwest. A project prior to Reverb documented places names in Southern Illinois adopted from the Middle East and Africa—“Little Egypt,” Lebanon, Palestine, Thebes, Cairo, Karnak. The names were chosen because the two mighty rivers – the Mississippi and the Nile – create a similar climate and landscape. Zubi is skilled at connecting local and global histories in her work.

Zubi’s video is playing. My Body is Uprising is about the silencing of dissent in rural places. In a meadow setting we see her body physically rising up. The walls start to flicker as the video casts digital light, and woodgrain appears. The material of the wall is in doubt for a split second until I reach out and touch it. It’s an impression: the concrete was shaped in timber molds and the natural lines are finely preserved. Contained by this material, Zubi’s projected movements do not spill into the forest. As a viewer, I think about walls, separation, and the ways our struggles might connect with others. 

Zubi has also made sculptures out of lounge chairs woven with kuffiyehs. Lounge chairs tend to be associated with leisure activity, time that is optional or unserious, but she challenges this. She was inspired to create the piece while

observing a young boy who had his green kuffiyeh and covered it over part of his body like a blanket while lying down on a lounge chair in the airport. It was a beautiful gesture of the simplicity of best at rest and ease for a short period as opposed to what I continue to consume through the news in Gaza of unalived individuals wrapped in white cloth. It made me think about rest as a form of resistance… I want to challenge leisure as necessary, a liberation tool to the collective livelihood.

Zubi is speaking directly to the legacy of violence that the bunker represents. She refuses to let us imagine that U.S. warmaking is a historical relic. She brings Palestinian visibility to this forest in the U.S. heartland, the type of place that keeps war out of sight for most Americans. In rural Missouri it would be easy to look away. If these particular bunkers no longer hold weapons, somewhere in the country bombs are being stored to ship abroad, and a lot of them are landing in Gaza. Standing here, I have an eerie awareness that the structure was designed to withstand blast waves. But I am safe and feel relieved. Zubi’s work harnesses this feeling and reminds us that people in the midst of war can’t experience it. I think about the thin line between violence and sanctuary throughout Tyson’s history. Overall I’m feeling shaken, but connected to events outside the bunker walls.

Turning across the room, I see a video by Erin Johnston projected on the far flat wall. Johnston envisions the bunker as an edge-habitat between human and non-human influence. To create the video, she filmed in her home and around St. Louis, projecting the resulting footage against interior and exterior walls and imposing the results. The final image is a thick super-wall, with layers of building material impossible to pry apart visually. I think of striations in the local limestone cliffs. Flickering within the wall, I catch glimpses of tiny creatures that look like tadpoles. Johnston is interested in scale, and her work depicts creatures whose bodies are infinitely smaller than our own. As a conservation ornithologist as well as an artist, she takes an ecological approach to the bunker’s context. She explores power dynamics between organisms of vastly different size.

Like Zubi, Johnston made work prior to Reverb that investigated local geography. In 2024 she exhibited Freight Line, staged in Sauget, Illinois in a freight trailer of the type used to transport Amazon goods. Sauget is an industrial area directly across the river from St. Louis that historically had little to no regulation or ecological oversight. Today it is home to a Superfund site and an Amazon fulfillment center, where Johnston worked for a short period. In Freight Line she depicted consumer debris alongside birdsong notation in vibrant collograph prints. She created porcelain reproductions of items involved in rapid production. Her portrait of the town foregrounded things that are easily ignored, like shift workers tucked in a warehouse and birdsong you can’t hear from the highway. A single place can foster drastically different relationships to time and environment. Her sensitivity to unseen place-based connections were again on display at Reverb and put her in conversation with Zubi’s work.

The sculpture Johnston created for Reverb represents the well-worn path she travels daily through her home. She made a transect of her apartment’s floor materials, moving from mosaic to wood, carpet, and linoleum. Her finely detailed ceramics are carved and glazed to mimic these different surfaces. Curving along the concrete floor, the tiles hover an inch from the ground on a welded steel frame. Similar to a worm’s burrow, this pathway visits the spaces and material touched by a single life. The bunker’s brute construction stands in contrast with Johnston’s meticulous ceramic work. All the Tyson bunkers are identical, cast in the same molds. Responding to the intensity of the concrete space, Johnston examines how shelter is constructed and what forms of life thrive as a result.

Outside at picnic tables, I eat grapes and celery with a group who drove out from the city. No one has ever been here before. A woman in overalls kneels in a creekbed to identify a plant. A jazz band sets up inside the bunker. Usually they play in Tower Grove Park. They are used to responding to their environment while they play.

This is the day’s final performance. I stand in the back, a bit overwhelmed by the wild sonic effects, even though I like the musicians. Everyone else seems calm, sitting mesmerized on the floor and nodding their heads. When they stop playing, I am the first to slip outside. It’s almost sunset and still warm.

Walking in a group toward the parking lot a quarter mile down the dirt road, a rumor starts: the wolves at the Endangered Wolf Center are about to howl. We race back to Bunker 3 and tell the Reverb stragglers to listen. The mosquitoes are biting. And true enough each night at feeding time the cry goes out.