Ann Hamilton, a round, 1993

Within the exhibition of stylus, there are multi-sensory experiences that the audience is encouraged to interact and engage with. Ann’s artwork has often dealt with text and our human experience with its exchange, verbal, gestural and poetic. During the exhibition at the Pulitzer, various groups have been invited to come into the space and activate stylus with their voice, poetic movement or instrumental accompaniment. With “stylus” as its title, it seems appropriate to ask a community of knitters to come to the exhibition space and activate their art and sound. At early stages of installation, Ann was interested in experimenting with what kind of sound this might generate within the space as well as encourage this visual connection between the physical act of knitting and the title of the exhibition.

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As a final project for its concordance workshop, a St. Elizabeth Academy film class produced this video, “Juxtaposition.” Their teacher John Adams describes the ideas behind it in the following.

After returning to the classroom from seeing stylus in the fall, the class had a spirited discussion around the word “perception,” particularly with regards to the connection between perception and reality, and how the media shapes and forms perception through the juxtaposition of words and images. My students repeatedly stated that when they mentioned the city of St. Louis to friends and family who lived outside of the city or who had never ventured into the city, too often the words that were associated with St. Louis were dangerous, crime-ridden, and poor. As the students examined their concordance they made from their research, they developed a series of questions to guide their analysis:

1. What descriptive words or phrases are associated or juxtaposed with our spine words?

2. Are the descriptive words or phrases positive or negative?

3. What perceptions might readers/listeners/viewer form from these juxtapositions?

4. How does the media reporting shape the perception of the community, both by the people who live within and those who live outside of it?

Ironically in the midst of their analysis, local and even national media became fixated on a report that claims St. Louis is now the most dangerous city in America. My students, angered by the report, wrestled with a way to respond to it in light of their research and their personal experience of living in the city and attending a school that has been in same neighborhood since 1882. Taking their cue from stylus, they decided to respond by creating a concordance–in the form of a video–that uses juxtaposition “to create new possibilities and contexts for meaning.”

In the students’ video concordance, they themselves and their “I-am” statements become the principal words within the “walls” of the video. In Hamilton’s concordances, the “exterior register of the world’s events [. . .] culled from six world newspapers [are] pulled from their context in the newspaper to create this new field of text.” In the students’ video, the exterior register is culled from the broadcast videos juxtaposed against one another, the manipulated still images from F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, and the serenely idyllic video footage of St. Louis. The juxtaposition of the first part of the video with the second part with the students results in an ironic contrast and new possibilities of meaning and perception.–John Adams

On Saturday, December 11, we gathered in the galleries of the Pulitzer to celebrate the wrap-up of our high school concordance program. After several months of researching, writing and reflecting upon the meaning of community with high school students from across the St. Louis region, the participating student groups came together to share their experiences with each other and to celebrate time spent on the project. The collaborative schools included: Gateway to College, Nerinx Hall, Normandy High School, and St. Elizabeth Academy, and representatives from the schools joined us at Saturday’s event with their reflective creations in tow. The students reflected on their community research using varying media forms. Nerinx and Normandy each wrote creative writings. St. Elizabeth students created a video entitled “Juxtaposition,” and Gateway to College designed and decorated sneakers based on what the students envisioned for their communities. Needless to say, each student group brought beautiful and creative analysis to their reflections. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrea Johnson, Young Adult Provider at the St. Louis Public Library, worked with the Pulitzer’s Community Projects Coordinator Emily Augsburger during the concordance workshops. She reflects on the partnership in the following.

On the morning of Tuesday, October 26, 2010 about thirty students from St. Elizabeth Academy visited their high school’s neighborhood public library, the Carpenter Branch Library. The students arrived armed with paper and red pencils engraved with the school’s name. Their goal: to find newspaper articles about their community using the print materials and online databases available in the library. These articles would be scanned and used to create concordances.

As an employee of the St. Louis Public Library, working with St. Elizabeth Academy and the Pulitzer Foundation on the stylus teen program was a unique way to partner with two community organizations. As a part of Teen Services, outreach to city middle and high schools is a significant part of my job. It is important to us to reach as many middle and high students as possible in order to inform them of the many resources and programs that are available to them for free at their public library. Working with St. Elizabeth Academy through the Pulitzer Foundation provided a great opportunity for the students to not only learn about the library’s resources, but to actually get into the library and use them for themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Thursday evening marked the first time that contemporary dance has been featured within the walls of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Four Webster University dancers—Hope Harl, Julie Opiel, Matthew Schmitz, and Audrey Simes—activated Ann Hamilton’s stylus and the building’s architectural features through improvisational movement.

The performers moved in dialogue with the live percussion of local composer/musician Scott Rice, who, dressed in black, drummed mostly at the north end of the Main Gallery, but occasionally made his way through the gallery space playing on a portable drum.

The dancers, barefoot and clad in comfortable white clothing, transformed themselves into moving projections of stylus. Throughout the evening they moved freely about the galleries, dancing at different tempi and in a variety of configurations: as an ensemble of four, in solo, in trio, or as a duet.

Each performer identified a different source of inspiration within the installation.

“Working with the hands was a lot of fun for me,” Julie Opiel said. “I used them as props for movement, but also as a costume.” Read the rest of this entry »

Bob Case & Billy Barnett “My Home is St. Louis”

This Thursday will be our fourth sound waves and feature DJ Ron Edwards and musicians Bob Case and John Erblich performing blues. Ron Edwards hosts 88.1 KDHX’s “Nothin’ but the Blues” every Sunday evening and often links his playlists to the rich history of blues in St. Louis. Bob Case and John Erblich are both prominent musicians in the St. Louis blues community and have been playing live for years. Check out Bob Case’s style in the video above. His website claims that “he always involves his fans in his performance,” so tomorrow night may be an even more interactive experience than usual at our current exhibition.

Join us Thursday, 6-9pm, for a truly unique mixture of blues and contemporary art. There will be chairs to sit on and refreshments to drink. This event is free and open to the public. For more information, visit our main website.

On the stylus web catalogue, you can create your own concordance by selecting three words from a database provided. ‎Sharpening, acoustic, swirls; parking, moral, baconnaise; neglected, rich, rhinoceros are a few sets that constitute those created by Internet surfers so far.

Concordances have become another medium of communication around here. An MFA student gave her response to the St. Louis Symphony Chorus in one.  Ann Hamilton writes us weekly through printed concordances in the exhibition. For Community Projects’ concordance workshops, students from around the St. Louis area talked about their neighborhoods using the format.

Below, you can see a section of a concordance built by students at St. Elizabeth Academy. The concordance workshops concluded last week, and as a fond farewell, we  invite you to submit your own concordances using words that say something about your community. Here is mine, dedicated to Grand Center. Read the rest of this entry »

Four dance students from Webster University explore stylus through movement before performing on Thursday night.

There will be dancing in the galleries. Four dance students from Webster University have been exploring stylus and the Pulitzer galleries in terms of movement, and will be showing how their art form can activate the space. In the video above, watch them physically brainstorm sequences they might make tomorrow night. They will be accompanied by percussionist Scott Rice, who also drummed for this fall’s Brazil and Balkan sound waves.

Dance in stylus is Thursday, December 9, from 7 to 9pm. This event is free and open to the public.

Members of the St. Louis Symphony Chorus interact with stylus on Thursday, November 4, 2010.

Yesterday evening, the St. Louis Symphony Chorus had their second official performance at the Pulitzer, in which they used their voices to connect to the current exhibition. stylus has lent itself to more performance art than past exhibitions. For it to come alive, it needs activators. Since its opening, we’ve had classical music, three different sound waves, Intervals, the St. Louis Symphony Chorus and the Banned Book Reading. Next Thursday, modern dancers will be exploring movement in the galleries, and there’s another upcoming show involving lots of yarn and knitting needles. We’ll tell you more about that later.

An instructor at Gateway to College describes her aim in working with the Pulitzer and the concordance workshop. Students share personal thoughts on their community.

Besides broaching topics related of media literacy, the concordance workshops, led by Community Projects Coordinator Emily Augsburger, ask students to think about their own community. As the workshops highlight, society tends to pigeonhole neighborhoods.  We generally take where we live personally, and a hope with this program, as is with Urban Expression, is that participants will feel empowered by where they live as they research, understand and take ownership of it, in all its complexities.