Regina Martinez and Emily Augsburger, from the Pulitzer’s Community Projects department, stand in front of The Heidelberg Project in Detroit, MI.

Two weeks ago we traveled to Detroit to attend the Rust Belt to Artist Belt III conference. The mission of the conference was “to create the foundation for a sustained dialogue that connects an entire creative supply chain; from creative practitioners such as individual artists and designers, to creative sector business owners, to advanced manufacturers and prototypers”. The mission alone piqued our interests, and once we glanced through the panel topics, we knew we had to go. The conference started two years ago in Cleveland, Ohio, a city also grappling with its post-industrial identity. The conference moved to Detroit as the city has some words to offer on the matter. As native St. Louisans, we have witnessed a similar identity struggle here. But as we learn to address the challenge and what it means to be a post-industrial city, we are provided an amazing opportunity for transformation.

Rust Belt to Artist Belt provided a framework in which we could view the myriad of issues facing rust belt cities and how these issues can be addressed by using the resources within the creative community.  As conference participants we were asked to re-think artists and the creative community by acknowledging their very active role in our future-making. We agree that artists play an essential role in the revitalization of landscapes and the vibrancy and cultural connectedness of a place. The conference, however, focused so heavily on building the creative community by calling for new individuals to cities, that we feel it did not fully recognize the creative assets already present. We must recognize, support and connect the creative assets already alive in our cities.

Individuals participating in a panel discussion entitled “The Power of Race in Placemaking and Community Development” shared our sentiments. Not only was this particular panel discussion vital to understanding a community, the conversation is key to many Rust Belt cities. We all have prejudices.  Art is a means of facilitating conversations and social issues that have destroyed and isolated us in the past.  Artists express, artists can be anyone, and art has the capacity to build bridges across all divides.  Art and life are not so separate, and it can be through our collaborative storytelling that we grow to greater connectedness and understanding of one another. 

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Dream Sounds poster, designed and printed by The Firecracker Press

Reached just before naptime, St. Louis spoken word artist Brett Underwood said, “I don’t know what to expect, so how can you? Josh and I will be having some of the same kind of fun that we had when I followed him on the air all those nights. I have written one new piece for this session already…what’s it called?…oh, ‘The Liar Has a Squirrel’…and hope to write another or three this week. We are both flattered and excited about the opportunity to play Ear Doctors in such a setting.”

This Sunday, from 1-4pm, as CAM is celebrating Misterios de Mayo/Running of the Bulls Family Day Fun Run next door, the Pulitzer and 88.1 KDHX will offer Dream Sounds, the first in a series of music shows inspired by Dreamscapes. Late-night radio veterans Josh Weinstein (also a sound waves veteran) and Brett Underwood will bring you a subtle and surprising array of music and spoken word to enhance your dreamlike experience as you walk through our current exhibition.

Weinstein’s All Soul, No Borders and Underwood’s The No Show graced, amused and opened the ears and minds of KDHX listeners for several years before Underwood left the airwaves to concentrate on the promotion of live music and his own writing and performance. The two are reuniting to offer a jazzy and surreal array gleaned from artists who have composed, improvised and recorded outside the bounds of the mainstream throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Weinstein trained in Jazz Studies at New York University and under master NYC avant-garde jazz bassist William Parker. He has performed improvisation with Zimbabwe Nkenya, Bobo Shaw and K. Curtis Lyle and the St. Louis groups Human Arts Trio, Melodies of the Kabbalah and May Day Orchestra.

Underwood comes from a free and automatic writing “school of thought”. He has performed with Get Born and Chance Operations. He has been published in Bad Shoe, 52nd City and The Bicycle Review. He will be reading from his own work and that of select Surrealist poets on Sunday.

Following Dream Sounds will be on July 30 and August 13, from 6-9 p.m. Admission is always free.

Panelists Britt-Marie Schiller and Rose Holt talk about Kiki Smith’s Pee Body from a psychoanalysis perspective, during a Dreamscapes panel discussion on April 7. For more clips from the panel discussion, visit the Pulitzer ’s YouTube channel.

From Brett Kostrzewski, the host of “This Week at the Symphony” on KSLU:

Music commonly conveys familiar emotions such as the triumph of Mahler’s second symphony or the heart-wrenching sadness of Tchaikovsky’s sixth. Less commonly, however, music can become a dream based on a famous tale, containing both sleep’s intrinsic darkness and the constant rumble of reality. This is Salvatore Sciarrino’s opera Lohengrin, performed by musicians of the St. Louis Symphony and David Robertson at the Pulitzer this past Wednesday.

“It’s a bit unusual,” said bassoon player Felicia Foland. This may be the understatement of the year, as the bassoonists were tapping the reed with their tongues, the flutists were blowing through the instrument without pitch, the strings glissed like I’ve never heard before, and the percussionist gently rumbled thunder on a large bent piece of steel. A daunting and confusing score was visible over the Maestro’s shoulder, demanding such difficult and unusual sounds. It was executed with surreal mastery by his musicians.

Yet the most unique sounds and the most energy came from soprano Marianne Pousseur, and if any emotional connection could be made with this piece, it would have to be with her performance. Dreams occur in the brain, but somehow our logic escapes us as the impossible seems routine, and even the inexplicable images can leave us with a sense of loss or love when we awake. Pousseur served as this bridge to the heart, pouring energy into her “singing” that one could feel across the small space. Read the rest of this entry »

From StudioSTL’s Saturdays @ the Studio workshop coordinator, Nicky Rainey:

For little kids sitting around lunch tables eating fish sticks, “telling dreams” is an excuse to make up weird stories and entertain friends.  Truly, the dream world is a place where logic becomes unusual or irrelevant and where anything might happen–what a relief! What a forum for children’s humor!  (And SO potentially scary!) 

This Saturday, April 4, StudioSTL is teaming up with the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts to take fifteen children on a writer’s tour of the exhibition Dreamscapes.  Amy Broadway (writer, dreamer and Pulitzer staff-member) , a handful of mentors and I will explore with young writers, as they take notes about what we see and invent versions of the artists’ dreams.  

StudioSTL is a creative writing center for kids located in the Centene Center for the Arts–just a few blocks away from the Pulitzer in Grand Center.  Our slogan is “Write and Shine,” we celebrate young people’s personal voices by creating forums for them to write, polish and publish.  StudioSTL’s weekend program, Saturdays @ the Studio, relies on expert community members to help us put together whimsical, theme-based writing workshops for elementary aged kids. I can’t wait to hear our kids’ perspective’ on Dreamscapes. Read the rest of this entry »

Shelly Goebl-Parker is an Art Therapist. This Saturday, she and artists Hap Phillips and Nita Turnage will lead a Social Dream Matrix. Find out more from Shelly:

Human beings have shared dreams with one another for as long as we have been human.  Social Dreaming is a large group “method for capturing dreams”.  Described as an “opportunity to share one’s dreams with others in a matrix.  The focus is on the dream not the dreamer” that was developed by Dr. W. Gordon Lawrence (2005), a British group psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Institute in 1982.  Dr. Lawrence went on to develop and use the process largely for consulting with businesses and supporting work on visioning and dealing with shifts and changes in organizations, training people to use this process in many venues (1998). 

 
St. Louis art therapist Dr. Carol Lark encountered a Social Dream Matrix at an international conference for group psychotherapists.  She brought this experience back to St. Louis and to her professional communities, eventually combining the experience with art process. She gathered a group of artists in the fall of 2008 to meet and engage in a project she called Artists as Visionaries.  She was curious about this way of working having an impact on artists’ creative process.  After beginning work in the fall of 2008, this group continued meeting in the studio she set it up in – even past her original leadership and eventual passing from leukemia in 2009. Read the rest of this entry »