KDHX DJ Josh Weinstein and jazz legend Charles “Bobo” Shaw talk about playing at the Pulitzer during sound waves: Jazz on November 18. They and composer Zimbabwe Nkenya played alongside stylus and Weinstein’s jazz tracks.

You can see photos of the event on KDHX’s website and learn more about the event on our events page.

If you’ve visited stylus at the Pulitzer or if you’ve spent time perusing the web catalogue, chances are you’ve encountered the Mexican jumping beans that are a part of Ann Hamilton’s installation. In a previous post, I discussed how these little seed pods are actually filled with the larva of a jumping bean moth. In order to avoid overheating, which could dehydrate and kill them, the larvae snaps its body in an attempt to roll to a cooler surface. This accounts for the “jumping” behavior that is observed by gallery visitors.

In their natural habitat in the mountains of Mexico, the seed pods are regularly exposed to rain. At the Pulitzer, in order to keep the beans healthy and hydrated, they are also “watered.” This process involves heavily spraying the beans with distilled water and then allowing them to air dry. Watering the beans restores their weight and helps to extend their lives.

To complete the process, every three weeks Courtney (our Visitor Services Manager) and I pour the beans onto a surface covered first with plastic and then with kraft paper.

Read the rest of this entry »

Urban Expression reunites at the Old North Restoration Group.

“On November 13, 2010, at the Old North Restoration Group, Urban Expression had a reunion between Pulitzer organizers, teaching artists and students from Holy Trinity School. For a few hours that afternoon, old friends ate snacks together, looked at their past artworks and noted how much taller everyone looked. The Pulitzer awarded certificates of completion, and students harvested their photographs, which were framed and displayed on the walls. This celebration wasn’t just one more final conclusion to last spring. Urban Expression has plans for the future, and this jamboree was actually to celebrate the program’s new stage…”

Read the rest of this post on our Transformation site.

Concert-goers in the Grand Foyer at Powell Symphony Hall

Working in Grand Center, or the “the intersection of art and life,” I inevitably pal around with other arts institutions, and experience different forms of art. Friday, November 12, was the fifth annual “Bloggers’ Night” at our neighbor/partner in crime Powell Symphony Hall. Eddie Silva, the St. Louis Symphony Publications Manager, invited me and several other St. Louis bloggers to attend a concert in exchange for online digests of our experiences.

Let me first say that I love Powell, and if you haven’t been to the Symphony in a while, go. You’ll immediately feel more cultured, happier and as if you’re really living, even if you know nothing about classical music. Pronouncing the names of composers is intimidating, and I’ve wondered if I’m not refined enough to touch Powell’s red velvet handrails, but you don’t need to be an art major to enjoy the Pulitzer, and you don’t need to be a classical musician to enjoy a concert. Read the rest of this entry »

From left to right: Chloe Bethany, Emily Task, Regina Martinez

For each exhibition, the Pulitzer experiments with how Social Work and Art can benefit each other. It’ll be interesting to see how Urban Wave, made up of two social work students and an artist, combines their skills for the project this fall. Now that you know the general idea about the pasting project, we’d like to give you some background about this interdisciplinary team.

Chloe Bethany is a multi-media artist and writer from Charleston, South Carolina whose work in drawing, painting and installed objects investigates the abstraction of language through manipulations of color, form, space and syntax. In May 2010, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Washington University in St Louis and has since been exploring the role of the artist within her community. She is a founding member of a small-scale collaborative art space, Pig Slop Studios, located in South City, St Louis, an enthusiastic member of the Pulitzer Foundation’s outreach team, and a recently-hired after school art teacher at the Most Holy Trinity School in North City, St Louis.

Emily Task is completing her MSW at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University, with a concentration in Urban Education, Youth Empowerment, and Community Development. Emily served as the Program Director of the Diversity Awareness Partnership from 2007-2010, and currently is the Co-Chair of the Community Arts Initiative, in partnership with the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. She is a 2009 Community Arts Training Institute Fellow from the Regional Arts Commission in Saint Louis.

Regina Martinez is currently working on a Masters of Social work at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. She is concentrating in Social and Economic Development with a special interest in utilizing the arts to strengthen communities. For the past year, she worked as an advocate for the educational rights of children living in East St. Louis with the Education Advocacy Project – a pilot program established in collaboration between Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation, Inc., and Griffin Center after-school programs. She is currently working with the community outreach arm of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, with a focus on planning, implementing and evaluating community arts programming tailored to the St. Louis region.

Charles “Bobo” Shaw plays a two-valve bugle in the Main Gallery, during the rehearsal for sound waves: Jazz.

When Co-Executive Director of KDHX  Nico Leone met with Ann Hamilton and Shahrokh Yadegari to discuss what kind of music would best fit with the installation stylus, they decided that an important element would be that it represent a range of cultures, in the same way that Ann’s outgoing message for the bell speakers invites you to “share a vocal call from any cultural tradition.” For September and October, sound waves spotlighted rhythms from Brazil and the Balkans. For the remaining shows, it will offer some of our regional musical DNA with hip-hop, blues and jazz. This Thursday is sound waves: Jazz and will feature musicians Charles “Bobo” Shaw, Zimbabwe Nkenya and DJ Josh Weinstein.

In the video above, free jazz drummer Charles “Bobo” Shaw tries out the sound of a bugle in different parts of the Main Gallery during last week’s rehearsal. Born in Pope, Missouri, Bobo has played music for over 50 years, and has worked with a number of artists in St. Louis, New York City and Europe. He was a founding member of Black Artists Group, an arts collective in St. Louis in the 60s and 70s, and continues to play locally. He also drums with Josh Weinstein. Read the rest of this entry »

Back when stylus was but a mere twinkle in all of our eyes (for that matter, so was yet-to-be-born Liam), the notion of hand gestures caught Ann Hamilton’s fancy–a fascination that bears fruit in many forms within the exhibition. Both as a social work presence at the Pulitzer and a new mother, I continue to be fascinated by this–the idea that hand gestures of the simplest kind can, in an instance, indicate warmth, welcome, anger, alienation and many other emotions. Liam is just starting to understand his effect on his world, specifically that he can now gesture toward things and people that he would like to touch. Just yesterday, while I was holding him, he gestured by holding his arms out wide and leaning toward Debra, one of his teachers at day care, indicating that he wanted to give her a hug goodbye.

I expect that, any day now, Liam will start using the one gesture that, to Ann, encapsulates all that the Pulitzer has been trying to do these past few years with community engagement–the waving hand. The waving hand is a universal representation of both welcoming and parting ways, but it is a gesture imbued with warmth and general friendliness. You can see her playing with this gesture throughout the exhibition, both through projection and material components. An interdisciplinary team of artists and social workers are offering paper hand making workshops to schools and organizations, so that you can learn to make your own hands modeled after the same paper hands that entice you to play, learn and explore within the installation. Descriptions at their most eloquent equate putting on the hands as “an act of empathy”, but they are also a fun, self-revelatory way to experience Ann’s own curious explorations of the hand and its use in gesture, composition and craft.

We are also taking the waving hand outside of our walls in an institutional effort to wave welcome to the St. Louis community. In an experiment of sorts, Urban Wave has been working on the mechanics of pasting this image of welcome in the Old North neighborhood in St. Louis. If we could, we would blanket the entire city with this image, to further highlight both our commitment to engaging the entire community, while sharing our excitement about how art can, in large and small ways, bring people together.

Urban Wave pastes the hand from stylus on a building in Old North St. Louis, for the first time.

The Pulitzer and the St. Louis Public Library work with schools to build concordances, based on words they find used to describe their neighborhood.

Over the past few weeks, the Pulitzer’s community projects department has teamed up with the St. Louis Public Library to get teenagers thinking about community and how their community is portrayed by the media. The idea for the project came from the concordances in stylus, which draw text from newspapers from all over the world (find out more about them here).

For these concordance workshops, students from four different schools (Normandy High School, Nerinx Hall High School, Gateway to College and St. Elizabeth Academy) research articles about their neighborhood and think about the authors’ word choice. The texts are then filtered into concordance-making software, and the students choose words to be highlighted in the concordance index. As a final touch, Robert Duffy, Associate Editor at the St. Louis Beacon, is visiting the schools to talk about media literacy.

A mock-up for the Urban Wave postering project depicts how the stylus hand image might look in a proposed location. Urban Wave members submitted mock-ups, such as this one, to stylus curator Matthias Waschek and artist Ann Hamilton for curatorial approval.

It’s almost go-time.

Tuesday night, I submitted the first fifteen mock-ups for the Urban Wave postering project: photographs of specific locations in and around Old North City, with images of Hamilton’s posters superimposed in the position of their proposed installation.

How did we get here? Last week, I visited the neighborhood (roughly the boundaries established by the Old North Restoration Group and a little north into Hyde Park) several times to make photographs and measurements. Regina Martinez, Emily Task and I did the initial exploration together, gloriously on foot in what felt like the first real days of fall. On return visits, I was generously assisted by Nathaniel Zorach, a partner in the continuation of Theaster Gate’s Urban Expression, a program which began as a Pulitzer initiative. Read the rest of this entry »