As I’m sure all of you already know (because you follow our blog, facebook and twitter accounts faithfully) our Urban Alchemy / Gordon Matta-Clark exhibition opening took place last Friday from 5pm to 9pm. Admittedly, scheduling a 4 hour opening did seem like a long amount of time and we therefore planned to evaluate the visitor attendance flow every hour to figure out if, for future openings, we should open later or close earlier. Much to our excitement, we found that our 900 visitors came in a steady stream – showing up on their way home from work or arriving after a dinner on the town for a glass of wine on our mezzanine. It certainly didn’t hurt the event when the skies cleared just hours before we were slated to open, giving our guests an amazing view of a setting sun against a St. Louis skyline.

Read the rest of this entry »

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). Directed by Max Reinhardt. Shown from left: Mickey Rooney, Olivia de Havilland. Photographer; Mickey Marigold. Warner Bros./Photofest. © Warner Bros.

This Friday, June 26, we’ll be celebrating the summer solstice by projecting Max Reinhardt’s 1935 version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at 9pm in our courtyard. Doors open at 7pm.

Since it doesn’t get dark outside until 9pm, we’ll be entertaining our guests for the first two hours in a variety of ways. The most exciting of which, to me, is a reunion of the performers from the Pulitzer’s now finished series: Staging Old Masters: Former Prisoners Perform at the Pulitzer.

Select scenes, such as the St. Sebastian, Self-Portrait with an Easel, and As You Like It – Shepherd & Shepherdess, will be performed in our courtyard throughout the night. These performances were originally done in front of specific artworks in our galleries, but by moving them outdoors, we hope to accomodate a bigger audience than was allowed indoors. In addition to these skits, we’ll be serving free refreshments and as usual, our Old Masters exhibition will be on view for the duration of the evening.

Are you excited to come? Have you circled the date and time in red marker in your calendar? Are you waiting with baited breath? I am too, but never fear, Friday will be here soon enough!

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1. 1

This event is free and open to the public, so bring your friends!

Back in May, I posted a blog about Installing Art Electronically – where I described working with curators to design the Pulitzer’s upcoming Old Masters exhibition by hanging electronic paintings on electronic versions of the Pulitzer’s gallery spaces. The images that I posted in that blog were nondescript, only showing gray squares where artwork should have been. Since that post we have gone through many different gallery mockup scenarios, which were determined by a constant flow of ideas but also by the availability of works from the St. Louis Art Museum and Harvard.Well, for those of you that were frustrated by the lack of details from my previous posting, I am here to show you light and color! I have permission to share with everyone the next step in that digital process. Using pictures taken of the Pulitzer galleries, I inserted the Old Master paintings onto the walls to give the curators an even better view of how these paintings will look when hung.

Read the rest of this entry »

At our staff meeting last week, our community engagement interns wagged their fingers at the staff members who had yet to donate lamps to the upcoming Light Project. The disappointment in their eyes spurred me to start my search to find the perfect lamp that I would contribute. Being the renter of a small apartment, I don’t have any extra or unusual lamp shades laying around so I made plans with my sister to visit a thrift store in Dayton, Ohio during my trip home for the holiday weekend.The Valley Thrift Store is a unique enterprise because not only are they open on major holidays but in addition everything in the store is 50% off the already thrifty prices! As I was driving up to the store parking lot, I got a glimpse of what I was getting myself into. I had to wait 15 minutes just to find a parking spot and I spent that time psyching myself up for the in-store experience. It’s a good thing too because when I finally entered the front doors the sea of bargain-searching customers was overwhelming. I linked hands with my sister and swam straight, albeit slowly, to the narrow brick-a-brac isles. It took me a while to spot my finds perched high on a shelf and as I saw the man in front of me reach to grab the soccer ball lantern I coveted my breathing hitched – oh, good, he grabbed a pair of binoculars instead. After a long wait my hands finally closed around the lamps I wanted and I considered my venture a success. For two days I owned two $2.50 lanterns before I handed them over to the interns on Monday. Here’s how you can donate too!

In two weeks, the Pulitzer will be hosting a poetry event focusing on the theme of Light. This June 25th event will be different from any other poetry event we’ve done in the past and it is all due to a “happy accident” that occurred during the Water poetry panel back in early December 2007.The Water poetry event was set up as a panel format, where four poets would direct their thoughts to a public audience. Due to a huge snow storm, that audience was brought down to just ten people. There was never any discussion of cancelling the event and in the moment it was decided that we would arrange chairs in a wide circle and have the audience and poets sit and discuss together. As the evening wrapped up, all of the participants, both poets and non-poets alike decided this new, more intimate setting allowed for better discussion and was overall a great success.

Planning for the June 25 poetry event, it was decided that we would continue to test this new round table discussion format. Working with the Poetry Foundation out of Chicago, we have invited four out-of-town poets (Joseph Donahue, Albert Mobilio, and John Yau) along with some local writers. As always, the subject of Light relates to the current exhibition at the Pulitzer- Dan Flavin: Constructed Light. The discussion will be recorded and will then be available for download on the Pulitzer’s and Poetry Foundation’s websites.

Matthias returned from vacation this week, and when he arrived it made me think about all of the things that we were wrapping up in preparation for his departure late last month. I remember the Thursday before Matthias left, it became clear that there was no way we could get all the work done we needed to before he left, so Matthias and I made the decision to come in and work on a Saturday.The day’s major project was to work on the layout for the main gallery for our upcoming exhibition: The Ideal (Dis)-placement: Old Masters at the Pulitzer. Matthias hopes to realize this exhibition by borrowing old master works from two major art collections (I’m not allowed to say yet who). The main gallery will be arranged with groupings of paintings on both the east and west walls. With this decided, the next step was to figure out a way to organize the selected works into medallions. Issues of size, shape, color and theme all needed to be taken into consideration.

This is where I came in, as neither Matthias nor the two curators from the partnering collections were able to work independently with Photoshop. Using dimensions for the main gallery spaces, I created wall mockups for the different Pulitzer galleries and inserted scaled images of selected artworks. Once that was finished, we took the digital paintings and arranged them on the digital walls. This was what we spent the bulk of our time doing on Saturday. We arranged endless combinations of artworks: Check out this mockup of the east wall:

(sorry, but I can’t show you specific images yet either – are you intrigued yet or just annoyed?).

I was surprised upon talking to a couple of museum people that the idea of using digital gallery spaces for the curatorial process is still relatively new. Virtual Gallerie is a company that has developed software that creates 3-d mockups for galleries and museums. Its pretty fascinating stuff, especially considering some museums still use something similar to a doll house (they would probably call them “scaled mockups”) to create their exhibitions, with mini reproductions of artwork – something Barbie would probably love – but doesn’t seem very efficient to me.

Regardless, I was thrilled to be sitting in while the exhibition was taking shape. It was very exciting to see how the curatorial concepts developed and I considered it to be a worth-while experience to give up my Saturday for more productive pursuits besides watching weekend movies on channel 6.

Next week the Pulitzer building will resonate with the sounds of intellectual conversation as we host a student symposium for the Flavin exhibition. This private event will pull together graduate students and professors from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, University of Texas-Austin and Washington University, along with Tiffany Bell and Steve Morse from the Dan Flavin Studio and the Pulitzer’s director Matthias Waschek, founder Emily Rauh Pulitzer and curatorial assistant Camran Mani.Over the 2 days the group will wind its way around the galleries, stopping to talk at strategic points. Camran is organizing the program and does a great job of explaining the intent of the event: “The kind of symposium we are hosting is almost an inversion of traditional academic exchanges: the emphasis is not on presenting findings but posing questions that might generate work later on. The program is primarily a series of open-ended conversations about aspects of art, architecture, and exhibitions with our Flavin exhibition as their point of departure.”

For those of you who are nosy and want to know what is discussed during these closed door sessions: never fear, the conversations will be recorded and portions will be posted on our website for your voyeuristic pleasure.

Fast on the heels of last week’s Symphony concert which featured only one piece, Crippled Symmetry by the composer Morton Feldman, we’re already talking with Symphony staff about the particulars for the next symphony concert on April 23rd which features four pieces:

BERIO: Sequenza V for trombone

LIGETI: Sonata for Solo Viola

BERIO: Sequenza VIII for violin

LIGETI: Poème symphonique

I think the most exciting piece will be the final work of the evening, György Ligeti’s Poème symphonique. This piece calls for 100 wind-up metronomes (which the Symphony is now in the process of trying to locate – apparently not an easy task in today’s high-tech age). I spoke with Eric Gaston from the Symphony on Friday and he called to my attention a YouTube video where the metronomes for this piece were all started with a machine. Check it out here.

Instead of using this fancy machine we are going to be using ten people who will be responsible for starting ten metronomes a piece. The goal will be to start each metronome as quickly as possible so that the least amount of time exists between when the first object is started and the last. Eric has given us at the Pulitzer the task of figuring out how to best present these metronomes for the concert. We will be taking into consideration that the setup needs to easily allow the winders (my own technical name for the people who will start the metronomes) access to each object and that they will be waiting in the wings during the other three performances. Maybe we’ll think of a really creative setup that involves different podiums of different heights interspersed around the room or maybe we’ll just setup an 8ft table and call it a day. Feel free to give us your suggestions.

I think my reasons for liking this piece the most out of the four is due its association – at least in my mind – with concepts that were explored in the visual arts. The glorification/transformation of the musical aid brings to mind Marcel Duchamp’s readymade objects.

Okay, despite this work being my obvious pre-concert favorite, there are merits and exciting elements to all of the pieces playing on April 23rd – but I think I’ll wait till a time closer to the concert to figure them all out. ‘Til then!

My name is Lauren and I started working for the Pulitzer in November of ‘07. I am Matthias Waschek’s new assistant and I will also be coordinating events for the Foundation.

I’ve been asked the same question over and over by all of my friends and family during the holidays: “How’s the new job?” Well, my response has been steadfast: I LOVE working for the Pulitzer Foundation.

This may sound too jubilant for some of you but I can’t help it, it’s true! The positive aspects of my job are too many to mention in this short amount of space, so I’ll just name some of the biggies (in no particular order).

1. I get to see amazing artwork everyday. For example, when I look outside my office window, I’m looking at the inspiring Richard Serra creation: “Joe.” Not a bad background to have while I’m clicking away on my keyboard.

2. Working closely with Matthias, I get to see how the whole process of creating an exhibition takes place – how exhibition themes emerge, how artwork is selected, how we go about securing loans, etc. To a regular museum goer, for the most part, none of these things are known and yet I feel having the knowledge gives more weight to the exhibition and makes the experience stronger for me.

3. I am surrounded by fantastic artistic minds. Granted, I’m scared to strike up intelligent artistic conversations, but, for instance, during our last symposium, I picked up Achim Borchardt-Hume (Curator for Tate Modern in London) in my slightly messy vehicle and took him to his hotel. All I did was point out some local landmarks and the trip was over, but still, he was sitting in the passenger seat of my car! It’s just so glamorous to me, and I can’t help but think: “Who’s next, Jasper Johns?”!

I admit, maybe I’m foolishly star struck, but being around artwork and people who hail from the top art institutions around the world – I could be eating garbage off our kitchen’s floor and I think I would still love it – not that I’m comparing my job to eating garbage off of the floor – far from it! Keeping Matthias’s creative mind organized is very satisfying to me because I know it allows him to produce great things and I like being a part of that in my own way. Someone else might bring up the point that I could get this experience at any museum but I would then bring up my final point:

4. The Pulitzer staff is fantastic. Everyone works as one happy, helpful unit to get things done and I think in any profession, that is a rare gift.

Okay reader, you can grab your trash can now if you feel the ole gag reflex acting up, I’m finished with my glowing review. It’s time for me to get back to work! If Rachel will let me, I’ll post again if I have anything of import to share.