The actors have been busily learning, creating, and sharing through a variety of ways. Recently, the company created haiku inspired by the workshops, the building, and the exhibition. It’s important to note that the word company actually includes staff, too, and another valued returning staff member from Staging Old Masters is Rosemary Watts, our stage manager. For those of you who have worked in theatre productions, you know just how valuable a good stage manager is. S/he is the “mom” of the group, loosely translated into the heart, the note-taker, the conscience, the observer, and the consummate model and teacher for company behavior. Rosemary asked to share haiku she wrote to describe the group process. Click here to read Rosemary’s haiku. 

Tony Wagner, Actor, in the Watercourt; photograph by Sevda Safarova

With Staging Reflections of the Buddha we are fortunate to have some very talented program staff members who were also part of Staging Old Masters. Among these returning members Maggie Ginestra, who wears multiple hats in this project. Her post today represents a very special role–that of biographer and recorder of the life accomplishments of our actors and staff.

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by Maggie Ginestra, Assistant Scriptwriter for Staging Reflections of the Buddha

As Assistant Scriptwriter, I’m enjoying the opportunity to interview each person involved with Staging Reflections of the Buddha toward short biographical blurbs that will be up on the blog for your perusal and enticement, future audience members.

So far, I’ve been sneaking moments with the actors when they’re not busy, and sometimes even when they are (because an idle moment with Agnes Wilcox is rare). One of the great things about interviewing actors who have rarely or never been on stage before is that their performance background really is, as one actor told me, their whole lives. Another actor’s father taught him to read by handing him the business section after dinner and stomping a foot if he spoke softly or incorrectly. If that isn’t a cure for stage fright…?

Over half of the actors, men and women, are Veterans whom we had the privilege of celebrating last week, and many have traveled all over the United States, one even by bike, though most were born and raised in St. Louis. I’m enjoying the theme of return, and even renewal, as each actor speaks with a sublime blend of openness, humility, and curiosity that seems to be contagious around here.

I still have some interviews to go, but soon we’ll have the privilege of introducing you to the incredible company of eyes, ears, and voices that we hope will magnify and enrich your experience of Reflections of the Buddha. If you haven’t seen the exhibition yet, I recommend checking it out before we open in February. We all had a chance to just look and see before we began to talk and listen—so you should too!

Staging Old Masters, 2009, Ideal (Dis-) Placements: Old Masters at the Pulitzer.

by Lisa Harper Chang, Community Projects Director

Once in a great while, we are fortunate enough to have professional experiences that are revelatory and make profound impact on our hearts, as well. I was fortunate enough to have one of these experiences with our 2009 project Staging Old Masters. The actors with whom we had the privilege and joy of working simultaneously put into question and answered what shape this collaboration between social work and arts could take.

It is with great hope, a healthy dose of intimidation, and endless excitement that I share with you the news that we will be offering Staging Reflections of the Buddha, a project inspired and informed by our previous Staging program and by the amazingly thoughtful exhibition curated so brilliantly by our senior curator, Francesca Herndon-Consagra. With this iteration of Staging, we will continue our work with Prison Performing Arts (PPA) and Employment Connection while expanding our partnerships to include St. Patrick Center. While all of our actors last time were new clients to our social service partners, we thought it would be both impactful for all involved and meaningful to integrate alumni from Staging Old Masters and PPA with new clients. All of our actors are in some state of transition–homelessness, formerly incarcerated, ex-military (combat and non-combat)–just at different stages of their journey. Their journeys unite with ours through theatre experiences amidst the art and through shared ritual in an exhibition-inspired lantern ceremony marking the end of the exhibition and commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Pulitzer.

Over the coming months we are thrilled to share with you the intimate details of the program. Please join us on this journey, as we explore how to unlock the creative potential in all of us.

FULL STAGING WEBSITE LAUNCHING SOON

http://www.vimeo.com/27209882

Theaster Gates and his students talk about Gate’s summer course through Washington University in St. Louis. During the class, students worked with Gates to rehab a house in Hyde Park and devise ways in which the house can be used as an arts hub for the neighborhood.

Community projects at the Pulitzer have always raised questions of sustainability. In understanding our institution’s ever-evolving role within the community arts of St. Louis, we are a catalyst, incubator, and (at our best moments) innovator. We work to enhance the already-impressive, effective, and inspiring work of our colleagues by bringing both the strengths of a cutting-edge arts institution dedicated to promoting the personal experience with all arts and social work practice. This means, however, that we are at risk of violating one of the founding principles of community practice by parachuting into a community then exiting quickly, without sustaining commitment to the communities with whom we worked. In principle, we are keenly aware of this and have attempted to balance our institutional identity with ethical community practice by forging partnerships with institutions that have the potential to carry the innovation forward. As this department is coming upon its fourth year, we are still in the process of learning what it means to “carry the innovation forward” and just how much continued support and involvement it might take from the “catalyst”.

Take Theaster Gates in Hyde Park for example. Theaster entered this community through our project, which was a collaboration between Holy Trinity Academy and Succeeding with Reading, a program that had existed at Holy Trinity Academy for a few years preceding Urban Expression, the Pulitzer-catalyzed program inspired by our exhibition, Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark. He was captured by the community—particularly, the kids—and became committed to arts-infused community development in the neighborhood. While our exhibitions changed (and the programs with it), we were able to stay involved by co-sponsoring the CityStudioSTL (Somethingness: Ways of Seeing and Building) with the Sam Fox School of Visual Art and Design at Washington University in St. Louis. In so doing, we are figuring out our institution’s role in ensuring that Theaster’s commitment to Hyde Park (through Rebuild Foundation) has a better chance at success. It’s a work in progress, but the brilliant work of Theaster, his employees, and the students of this summer class have provided another huge step toward fulfilling the potential of a beautiful, if neglected neighborhood and doing so by forging partnerships between existing community members and those from the outside. We’ll keep you posted as his work evolves.

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.

How frequently do you stop and consider your First Amendment Rights as an American citizen? You know the ones that protect my ability to express my thoughts, ideas, and beliefs freely in spaces like this blog, or the ones that enable me to choose my own faith and place of worship. Throughout time and around the world, people have died fighting for far less civil and religious freedom than that guaranteed by our Constitution. These religious and civil liberties are easy to take for granted, which is why events like the Banned Book Reading this Thursday are so important.

In the spirit of full disclosure here, I started my career in nonprofit at Americans United for Separation for Church and State, so the defense of these civil liberties has long been a cause dear to my social consciousness. Ever wonder why, driving through many American towns and cities, the number of churches far outnumbers almost any other institution you might see? Our religious liberties have allowed a plurality of faiths to flourish within the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

Lisa Harper Chang and her son Liam.

In April, I gave birth to our first child, a little boy, whose first cries announcing his arrival into this world reached superhuman pitches–so piercing and consistent that by the third hour, my husband and I both questioned our decision to become parents. Those difficult yet precious days have faded into a sleep-deprived haze, but I find it serendipitous that his first months coincided with the opening of stylus, as both have given me different yet intimate experiences with the notion of call and response.

Few calls rival the primal nature of the cries of a newborn, and the urge to respond transcends, at least in my experience, reason. So, too, does the nature of the response, as I’ve found myself responding with more energy than I could ever have fathomed having on this little sleep and less regard for propriety than I feel comfortable admitting. The past few months have been my own personal experiment on how “call and response” can dictate one’s life, down to the minute details – how one responds emotionally, physically, intellectually and how this newly unfolding relationship determines how or if you call to others and what responses you expect, desire, appreciate, and eschew. Read the rest of this entry »

Realizing that I never finished my blog about Day 2 at the Harvard Art Museum’s Art and Medical Education conference, I thought I would add to those thoughts now. Coming off our visit to Detroit, where both the DIA and MOCAD sit in close proximity to the medical center, and headed to a visit to the Frist in Nashville, who maintains a strong relationship with Vanderbilt’s medical center, it seems as if there is growing energy and propelling those of us working in the art world to bridge the gap with those in the medical world. The points of intersection are numerous, whether they exist with engagement of patients, medical teams, students, residents, or otherwise.

As my position is jointly appointed with the Brown School of Social Work, who recently founded the Institute for Public Health, this is adding further fuel to this intellectual fire. For this particular partnership, my current mode of exploration, while broad in focus, continues to return to the theme of health disparities—how can art museums use an engagement around art to address health disparities? I would love your thoughts and comments about this particular train of thought.

Crew members from Earthworks Urban Farm in Detroit pose with their produce.

So my personal Detroit visit included conversations with Matt Sikora, head of evaluation at the DIA, and Jennifer Czajkowski, Direct of Interpretive Programs at the DIA. For those of you into evaluation, the DIA conducts what I consider to be an unprecedented amount of formative evaluation, or evaluation that is done during the formation of an exhibition (like market testing), which dovetails nicely with their strong commitment to innovative interpretive strategies, an effort in which Jennifer is highly instrumental. These interpretive strategies, the incorporation of which is based on the theoretical work of Abigail Housen and stages of aesthetic readiness, include thematic curation of exhibitions, specific language in wall text that isn’t necessarily rooted in art history, and other assistive devices, such as “I Spy” plaques and, my personal favorite, the table in their Fashionable Living exhibition that shows pieces on display being used in an 18th century dinner. The truly innovative model of how learning and interpretation (formerly, education) and curatorial interact to create one type of “optimal visitor experience” is somewhat antithetical to our approach, yet both of our institutions are striving toward the common goal of supporting the relevance of art in everyone’s lives. Read the rest of this entry »

The decline of the American City, particularly those for whom manufacturing was the primary economic driver, is long-standing topic of study and debate—a casualty of the most recent economic crisis or of more long-term political, social, and economic decisions and impasses. An expedition party from the Pulitzer ventured to Detroit recently, visions of Gordon Matta-Clark dancing in our heads and curiosity about how the arts were surviving in what is inadequately-described-as a challenging urban environment.

The flight to Detroit already spoke volumes, as we encountered what is becoming increasingly rare in this economy—a relatively empty flight. A friendly seatmate and Detroit suburb native shared with me the story of what industry still exists within Detroit, namely the military industrial complex that enables Windsor (part of Detroit’s metropolitan area) to continue to thrive. He also shared with me what would be the first of many glimmers and even rays of hope about the state of the arts—that he, a dedicated military contractor with very little arts interest otherwise, was a frequent and ardent visitor for the Detroit Institute of the Arts. We were greeted in Detroit by a sparkling new terminal, complete with indoor fountain, tram, and light and sound installation, and fairly easily found our way to Midtown Detroit, roughly equivalent to Grand Center in St. Louis. Read the rest of this entry »