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!

Ah, the mesh. . . At the Contemporary, everyone likes to touch the mesh.  Due to the recent shortage of rain, it’s pretty dirty..  Don’t get me wrong—our stainless steel wrap looks clean and beautiful (it even shimmers in the sunlight). However, if you run your hand along the outside of this bad boy, you’re in for a dirt-black-hand shock. Regardless, people find our mesh wrap fascinating, and that’s part of the reason our MESH magazine is its namesake.  MESH is an intense labor of love.  Articles and features are written by staff, and graphic design is handled internally.  We handle just about everything – except house the  press that it is printed on. 
My past two months have been spent writing articles and then, more recently, editing them.    I know each and every one like the back of my non-dirty hand (I don’t touch the mesh).   I’m thankful that the issue is finally at press and it will soon be in your mailbox.   We hope you enjoy the newest issue of Mesh as much as we did putting it together.
For this issue, our environmental footprint was reduced (due to the paper we’re using) and this is what we’ve saved: 6 tress, 4 million BTUs of energy, 663 lbs of CO2 greenhouse gasses, 2,175 gallon of water, and 360 lbs of solid waste.

Today our Assistant Curator, Education Director, and Gift Shop Manager met to discuss literature for the Maya Lin exhibition (at least I’m guessing that is what they were meeting about. . . they had books spread across the desks and it appeared to be a very passionate, involved, and fun conversation. . . ). We offer a wide selection of literature related to the artists we show – whether the books and materials are related by influence, medium, social/cultural context – and offer these to the public in our Education Resource Center. Many of these materials aren’t available at the local library, and often they aren’t available at local colleges and universities, so the museum is a great location to visit to research contemporary art and make connections that go beyond what you see in the exhibition. Three titles are confirmed on the list, and I’ll share those with you, in case you want to have some advanced reading: Topophilia by Yi-Fu Tuan, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, and Boundaries by Maya Lin.

Happy reading!