Here’s an interview I recently conducted with Audrey Sands, the Pulitzer’s Curatorial Assistant:

Amy: Audrey, how long have you been working at the Pulitzer? What is your job title and what does your job entail? What were you doing before coming to the Pulitzer?

Audrey: I moved to St. Louis to work at the Pulitzer in November of 2008. As Curatorial Assistant, I work closely with our Senior Curator, Francesca Herndon-Consagra, on many aspects of researching, planning, execution, and documentation for our exhibitions. When I arrived, my first project involved research and editing for the Old Masters exhibition catalogue, and I will be overseeing the production of our print catalogues for future exhibitions. I am also responsible for organizing our graduate student symposia and assisting with the coordination of our other symposia. I am really enjoying working at the Pulitzer so far. With a relatively small staff, we take on some ambitious projects and really get to think outside the box. Before coming here, I completed my MA in Art History at the University of Oxford and then moved back to Los Angeles, where I’m from originally, to do a one-year graduate internship at the Getty Research Institute.

Amy: What are some significant projects you’ve worked on in the past few weeks? Are there any that stick out to you as exciting discoveries? Has there been anything that you’ve particularly enjoyed doing?

Audrey: We are currently deep into preparations for our upcoming exhibition of works by Gordon Matta-Clark, so I have been doing a lot of research about the works that will be here on loan for the show. Matta-Clark died at a very young age, but he was prolific in documenting his ideas and projects. I have been reading a lot of his original writing about his works, the social relevance of architecture, and about urban issues in New York and other cities where he did building cut-outs during the 1970s. His work engaged with troubled urban areas and he worked with abandoned and condemned buildings-areas ripe for urban renewal and artistic intervention. I think that doing an exhibition on Matta-Clark here in St. Louis has the potential to create important dialogue about this city’s own fragmented urban landscape. As a newcomer to St. Louis, exploring parts of the city and trying to understand its history, I have found it really troubling to drive around and see blocks of vacant lots, beautiful old boarded-up buildings, burnt out houses-entire neighborhoods left to decay. So I am really excited to be working on this exhibition because Matta-Clark’s work offers an important critical lens through which to view some of the problems of the post-industrial American city, but it also inspires play, and might inspire some ideas about creative reuse of existing structures. Often, art institutions choose to address these problems by offering a kind of refuge, creating a kind of visible renewal with new beautiful architecture and bringing high culture into impoverished areas. Surely, the Pulitzer has done much in that direction to really reinvigorate the Grand Center community. But the choice to exhibit Matta-Clark at the Pulitzer, I would say, is a provocative one that does something a bit more incisive, a bit more sincere.

Stay tuned for much more from Audrey over the coming months, as she continues her work on this exhibition and future projects!