With the close of Water fast approaching, thoughts have turned towards the opening of our next exhibition – Dan Flavin: Constructed Light – and what that means for our respective jobs here.  For me, that means lots of press, marketing, and new website sections.  We’re meeting with our design company soon to discuss concepts.  Something I’ve been drawn to lately is non-traditional advertising – not just the typical ads in the typical magazines.  But what exactly does it include?  I’m trying to learn more.  Any suggestions for good sites to research?  Interesting ad campaigns that have really struck you? I’ll keep you posted on anything I find too.

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the ongoing web projects I’m working on is adding video to our site. We’ve started working on this during Water, and have used this exhibition to figure out what kinds of videos we want to do, how we want them to appear online, etc. For Flavin, we’re hoping bring the video section out in full force.

One of the video experiments we worked on was during the local filmmaker event. Webster University students split into 4 different groups and filmed the event in their own way. It was perfect for the nature of the event, which was all about showcasing different filmmakers’ takes on one subject – water. The resulting videos created by the students are fantastic – and each has it’s own unique spin on the evening. We’ll be uploading these to our website soon — in the meantime, here’s a sneak peek at one of them!

When you walk in the back door of the Pulitzer building (which is the way we enter and exit when the galleries are closed), you come up a stairway along side the watercourt. Sometimes this can offer a variety of surprises first thing in the morning — we’ve had swirling steam in the winter, and massive grasshoppers on the window in the summer. However, this morning we encountered the biggest surprise yet — a falcon sitting at the end of the watercourt taking a bath. I took a bunch of photos for the blog (of course) and saved them in a folder called “PFA wildlife” where I also put photos of our local cat, Untitled.

Here you can see where he was sitting in the relation to the rest of the watercourt…

And here he is up-close:

We called him our Thanksgiving Falcon. Not really sure what that means, but it seemed appropriate right before we closed up for the holidays.  We’ll be taking a mini-hiatus on the blog too.  Our galleries will still be open, however, on Wednesday and Saturday — so come by and see if he’s still hanging around. Now we just need to come up with a name for him….

It’s been so busy around here lately, that I haven’t even had time to mention that we’ve just hired two new people to our staff!  Lauren, our new Assistant to the Director and Event Coordinator,  has been here just about two weeks now (wow, time flies!).  And Lisa, our new Manager of Community Engagement, started this week.  With two symposia, a board meeting, film event, and upcoming poetry event and concert, they’ve pretty much started smack in the middle of the busiest part of this exhibition.  When things slow down a bit, I’m going to coerce them to do an interview with me for the blog.  In the meantime, I’ve just finished printing out the program and Peter Greenaway’s statement for tomorrow night….

As of today, I have more news on the Greenaway films front…. Diane Carson, an active member of the St. Louis film community, will present the films and lead a discussion with the audience afterwards.  Wondering which of his many water-related films we’ll be showing?  You’re in luck, because we have that information now too!  We’ll be showing, in chronological order:

Intervals (1969)
Water Wrackets (1978)
Making a Splash (1984)
26 Bathrooms (1985)

These films are rarely screened and definitely worth coming out to see, especially if you’ve been a fan of his work.  And even though Greenaway himself can’t attend, he’s writing something specifically for this event.  But you’ll have to come Saturday night for that.

Breaking news on the Peter Greenaway front….unfortunately we’ve learned today that he’s no longer able to attend this weekend’s film screenings. However, this is no reason to stay at home — we’ll still be showing his water-related films as planned, and the full feature of Drowning by Numbers will still take place Sunday afternoon at SLAM. I’ll keep you updated on the specifics…

In unrelated news, I read this LA Times article this morning from a link on Tyler Green’s blog. If you’re interested at all in arts education, it’s a must-read.

Last week we had our first of two symposia during the Water exhibition.  It included graduate students of art, art history, and curatorial studies from Ohio State, University of Delaware, and Bard College.  The students are going to provide written responses reacting to the discussions that took place.  These will be posted on our website.  Our second symposium during Water happens next week.  This will be recorded, and clips from the participants will be posted online.

We’ve just begun to document our symposia on the website, and I’m always looking for new ways to make our programs interesting and interactive online.  I’m open to suggestions — let me know if there’s any method that would be interesting to you!

What does it mean to really love a work of art?  Perhaps nothing less than to infuse your life with its image for all time with a tattoo.  I used to a know a guy who had Michelangelo’s famous hands of God and Adam tattooed across his shoulder blades.  I thought that was devotion.  But today I have discovered a tattoo that puts those hands in perspective.  Look at this tatoo of Max Beckmann’s “Fisherwomen” on the arm of Sal, one of the guys who helped install the Pulitzer’s current exhibition (which includes “Fisherwomen”). Not only is it huge, it’s personalized: the two figures on the right have been made to look like him and his girlfriend!  That is some serious devotion.  Wow.

I unfortunately missed last night’s concert, but I heard a mini-rundown this morning and apparently it was a good one.  The highly anticipated Crumb piece that included musicians in masks and amplified instruments was apparently the highlight.  Blue lighting was another requirement, which according to one of my co-workers, “created a rock-star vibe”.  If you want to hear a few of the musicians talk about performing last night’s pieces, their comments are now on our audio player here.  And hopefully we’ll be getting the recording from the concert online in the next few weeks.  If only we had a video!