If you missed Open Studios this year, don’t worry, there is always next year. A previous blog post already mentioned the Preview Party which had a record breaking 720 people in attendance. Special thanks goes to the River City Professionals for co-hosting the program, helping to promote the event, and bringing all of their members to party. In addition to the 150+ Open Studios artworks on display in the galleries, Pi on the Spot, also known as PiTruckSTL on Twitter was parked outside the building serving up fresh pizzas straight from truck’s oven. As a local phenomenon, Pi has been embraced by the St. Louis community and even Chicago based Senator, turned president Barack Obama has endorsed the iconic deep dish pizza with his seal of approval. Just recently, chefs of Pi were flown to the White House to caterer an event especially for the president. Alongside the Pi Truck, a Frosty Treats ice cream truck was also parked outside for those looking to fill their sweet tooth on a hot summer’s evening.

As an added bonus to the Preview Party, guests were encouraged to enter a bike raffle to win a Electra Pink Hawaii Cruiser donated by Big Shark Bicycle Company. Ramona Scott was the winner and stopped by the museum the next day to pick up her prize and even rode it home.

With temperatures reaching over 99 degrees, that still did not stop the devoted cyclists from riding over 14 miles and stopping at a variety of studios along the way. Led by Greg and Alex from Bike Shark Bicycle Company, the bike tour departed the Contemporary on both Saturday and Sunday at 10am. Special thanks also goes to Bike St. Louis, a division of Great Rivers Greenway for endorsing the program and helping to make bike riding in St. Louis safe and accessible.

Later that day, Director Paul Ha and Associate Curator Laura Fried introduced themselves at the museum to over 30 people that registered for a 4 hour bus tour to select studios. As visitors boarded the luxurious air-conditioned bus provided by BEST Transportation St. Louis, “Pops” the driver greeted them and drove them all over the city to studios chosen directly by both the director and the curator.

On Sunday, winners from our Facebook competition joined Joe and Jeff from Glide St. Louis Tours for a segway excursion to select artist studios. Director of Individual Giving & Stewardship Emily Klimek acted as the Contemporary representative on the tour. If you applied to win a spot on the segway tour, do not give up, become a Fan of the Contemporary on Facebook now and look out for the next opportunity on this platform. Those that won the Facebook competition also received a free meal ticket to the Open Studios BBQ.

What better way to end a whole weekend of programs and tours plus a Homegrown Summer for that matter then to enjoy barbeque from Pappy’s Smokehouse and ice cold beer from Schafly. The watermelon was sweet and chilled to perfection, but the pulled pork sandwich was definitely the crowd favorite. Normally, you would have to wait hours to get a taste of Pappy’s perfectly cooked BBQ, but at the Contemporary it was all there for the taking for only $10 a meal. In addition to the BBQ, sides, and beer, Ted Drewes frozen custard was offered as an additional summertime treat.

What could be more “Homegrown” than Ted Drewes, Pappy’s, Schlafly, 150+ local artists, and the Great Rivers Biennial exhibition? Well, you asked for it… the Rum Drum Ramblers, with upright bass, harmonica, and banjo guitars rocked the courtyard with down and dirty St. Louis blues. The summer might not be over, but this year’s Open Studios was the climax of the Contemporary’s Homegrown Summer, a series of programs featuring local art, food, and music.

It is summer time for the Contemporary. Which means we get to start on projects that we normally can’t because it is too disruptive for our visitors or simply we don’t have the time or the person power to do so. A great example of a summer project is painting.  We normally repaint our interior walls for each and every exhibition but the outside areas, we do once a year.  So please excuse the drop cloths and “wet paint” signs when you arrive at the museum. And oh, don’t lean on anything that looks shiny.

Sean and I, fountainside, in Washington Square Park

Last week I spent three days working with Sean Landers in his Chelsea studio, preparing the design for his upcoming catalog. The major monograph, produced in conjunction with his recent exhibition at the Contemporary, will focus on Sean’s work produced in the early nineties. In my three-day visit, we roughed in some 300+ pages of exhibition shots, individual works, and running quotations from Sean’s paintings, diaries, and prose.  The above picture was my view of the city looking up the Hudson River for those three days. Below is a picture from the back of the studio looking out the windows. You can see Sean and his two studio assistants, Allison and Cindy working away.

The studio is filled with bright natural light, which can make viewing work on the monitors difficult.  On the desk you can see a Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis baseball hat that was there before I arrived, and which serves as the official studio sun visor. On the monitor is the catalog in progress.

Tuesday evening when we were done working, we headed home along the High Line.  What a beautiful transformation, from a neglected elevated rail to city park.

Stay tuned for the catalog.  It will be our largest to date, weighing in at approximately 400 pages!

The fourth iteration of the Great Rivers Biennial opened Friday night, April 30. The Biennial is a collaboration between the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the Gateway Foundation designed to strengthen the local art scene in St. Louis. This innovative program identifies talented emerging local artists and mid-career artists whose work explores new directions, and provides them with financial support as well as local and national visibility.

This year’s Great Rivers Biennial 2010 artists, Martin Brief, Sarah Frost, and Cameron Fuller, each received $20,000 to help support their practice, in addition to the opportunity to mount an exhibition in the Contemporary’s Main Galleries. The Great Rivers Biennial is one of the most widely anticipated exhibitions presented by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. The energy it has generated has galvanized the arts community in St. Louis, contributing to an enhanced quality of life for St. Louis area residents.

This year’s exhibition includes the following:

Martin Brief’s suite of twenty-eight new drawings, collectively titled Amazon God, appear at first glance to be seismographic in nature, the recording of tectonic shifts. In fact, they meticulously inventory the results of a search for “God” on Amazon.com. Brief records the thousands of book titles his search unearthed on scroll-like sheets of paper with a Rapidograph pen.

Sarah Frost’s installation, Arsenal, had its beginnings on the internet, too, though YouTube provided the impetus. Frost found there a community of young boys who self-publish instructional videos for making elaborate paper guns. Guided by the boys’ videos, Frost fashioned a paper cloud of weaponry suspended from the gallery ceiling, which shares the space with YouTube stills.

Cameron Fuller’s The Institute for the Perpetuation of Imaginal Processes reveals his interests in folk art, Native American artifacts, and the natural history museum. Upon entering his “museum within a museum,” you’ll encounter As It Is, a life-size diorama, and then, in adjoining rooms, Remembering Washington, The Guidance of Disaster, and Where My Heart Will Lead Me, an allusion to the itinerant tinker.

The Great Rivers Biennial 2010 runs through August 8. For more information, visit www.camst.org.

We’re just two days away from Dada Ball 2010: Dada Rocks with Decades! Full-access tickets have sold out and the wait list is growing. But we do have tickets for the infamous After Party! Come mix and mingle with the celebs and VIPs on our star-studded guest list: Chloë Sevigny, Golden-Globe winning actress; Karlie Kloss, St. Louisan and Vogue supermodel; Cameron Silver, fashion master and owner of Decades LA; and Derek Blasberg, fashion writer and author of the just-released, best-selling book Classy. (Don’t miss his Dada booksigning at Left Bank Books Downtown, Sat., 4/17, 2:00 pm.)

Friday night, Cameron and Derek lead a fashion-oriented panel discussion in Wash U’s Steinberg Hall, another Dada don’t-miss. And did you catch Cameron this morning on KMOV. He spoke eloquently about vintage fashion: how to wear it, where to find it. If you missed it, check him out here. 

But you want to know about the After Party, right? A $35 ticket (sold online, by phone (314-535-0770 x204) or at the door the night of the party), includes: complimentary valet parking, an open bar, savories and sweets from Mosaic and Ruth’s Chris, and the chance to win Best Dressed in a contest produced by St. Louis Magazine. Two winners will take home a $500 gift card from Saks, a $100 gift card from Ruth’s Chris, plenty of swag, and the all-important bragging rights.

So put on some glam! Come be a diva on the Contemporary’s dance floor! Make the Dada Ball After Party your late-night destination on Saturday. Doors open at 10 pm. See you there!

I’m Michael Goodwin, and I have been working as an intern at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Recently, I began the detailed project of revamping the Contemporary’s library. My goals were to catalog the museum’s book collection, marking each publication with CAMSTL’s stamp, and then categorize the diverse subject areas for ease of use. And when I started, I was concerned about whether or not everything could be accomplished before summer began and my internship ended. 

Enter: LibraryThing.com. LibraryThing is an online book community, a cataloging tool, a social network of book lovers, and a nexus for book reviews, local book events, and book discussions. LibraryThing welcomes both personal and organizational catalogs, and a number of likeminded museums are already part of its network.

Twenty-first century technology and new fields of social networking have made the process of cataloging and searching for books a breeze. What once may have been a long, monotonous process is now as simple as using Facebook, which is second nature for any college student.

Adding a book into our personal catalog is easy: enter its ISBN number. Searching for a book is just as easy. LibraryThing is able to search hundreds of global catalogs in order to correctly determine the book, an ideal feature for the Contemporary’s international collection of reference books, gallery guides, and monographs. 

Unable to find a certain book in one place? Users are also able to quickly click onto another catalog to search. Resources like the catalog of the Helsinki Metropolitan Libraries, the National Library of Taiwan, or the University of Botswana catalog, to cite a few fascinating examples, are immediately available. 

One of the huge benefits of LibraryThing is that the catalog is viewable from any computer, with or without a LibraryThing account. Visitors to the Contemporary’s presence on the site, http://www.librarything.com/catalog/CAMSTL, can browse and search the Contemporary’s catalog. And you can visit the books in person, too; they’re housed in the museum’s second-floor Exhibition Lab.

A site visitor can enjoy all of the benefits of this unique social network by joining LibraryThing for free. If you choose not to join, the browsing and searching aspects of the site are still available. The incredible accessibility and digitalization of the collection will certainly improve the Contemporary’s library experience for all. If only there was a way to digitally stamp the books as well … but who knows what the Internet will yield next?

Artist Sean Landers, whose work is in the Contemporary’s current exhibition, Sean Landers: 1991-1994, Improbable History, recently led a New Art in the Neighborhood session. His workshop focused on self exploration and expression through artistic writing, as he led the twenty students in a stimulating narrative exercise.  Landers first asked the students to write three personal truths about themselves or the world around them.  The artist then collected the statements and read them aloud to the class without revealing their authors.  The truths were poetic reflections, frank observations, and deeply personal secrets.  The thought-provoking workshop provided an opportunity for the students to express their most direct thoughts and create a picture of their identity.

 The exploratory workshop was a great segue into a NAN session led by local artist Kit Keith.  Keith, an accomplished mixed-media artist, began the workshop with a discussion of her earliest artistic influences and the lessons she learned from her father, who worked as a sign painter.  She shared with the students a history of her artistic voice, emphasizing her fascination with 1940s imagery and use of found objects, two constants in her work.  Keith brought several unfinished works with her, and worked on her art alongside students as she challenged them to make collages with found objects, found imagery, paint, and illustration.  The resulting collages were extremely diverse and channeled Keith’s techniques through pastiche and careful composition.  Students crafted their collages using newsprint, personal photographs, magazines, and textiles, and other fascinating materials. 

 Not only did these two artists share stories of their efforts to create self-reflexive artwork, but they also gave the students precious insight into their personal methods and aesthetics.  After two fun and challenging NAN workshops, the students will surely be inspired to continue creating art that gives thought to personal narrative and honesty.  It was great to see their processes develop through these two workshops.  Thanks again to Sean Landers and Kit Keith!  And thanks to the NAN students for their consistent dedication, talent, and enthusiasm!

Artist and former New Art in the Neighborhood (NAN) student Stan Chisholm recently led a NAN workshop that introduced students to a collaborative project he has been working on for the past year.  Called MoneyBags, the project “re-evaluates wealth, worth and, currency.” Stan was joined by fellow artist and collaborator Lisa Kim, and together they invited NAN students to think about art as currency and create money bags filled with objects of their own making.

Students screenprinted designs, sewed their own bags, and created numerous drawings, art items, and secret messages to include in their money bags. Each bag was designed to be placed in a public space for unsuspecting passersby to discover and keep.

Some students gave their bags to Stan, who found places to leave them; others placed the bags themselves. Those students were asked to take a photos of the bags in their new locations and send them to Stan to post on his MoneyBags website.  You can visit the site to learn more about the project and see pictures of the NAN-made money bags:  http://www.dropmoneybags.blogspot.com/

Keep an eye out for a MoneyBag near you!

The Contemporary would like to wish you and yours a very Happy Thanksgiving! The museum will be closed on Thursday, November 26 for the holiday, but will re-open on Friday, November 27. The holiday weekend is a great time to visit the museum, and is an exciting destination for out-of-town guests!

The Contemporary is taking part in Bank of America’s Museums on Us® program. This program allows Bank of America customers free admission during the first full weekend of every month to over 120 cultural, arts, and education institutions nation-wide. All customers have to do is present their ATM, credit or check card and a valid ID. Admission to the Contemporary is already free every Wednesday and Saturday, so Bank of America customers now get an extra day one weekend a month. The next free Museums on Us® free day is this Sunday, November 8.

Click here to see the full list of participating institutions.