As you’ve seen on the blog over the past few days, we’re in the midst of installing stylus, a project by the artist Ann Hamilton.  But what is this exhibition all about?

If you could sum it up in one word (which you really can’t) “experience” would be high on the list.  “Immersive,”  and “interactive” would work too. Ann’s installation is structured around live acoustic elements, and like many of her installations, weaves together a range of media to produce an environment that engages your senses as you move through it.  Her work responds to the architectural presence and social history of the sites she works within, and she will be interacting with the Ando building in very distinctive ways, transforming each gallery into an engrossing audio and visual environment.  Without giving all of it away, here are a few of the elements you’ll discover in the installation:

A central focus is sound, which Ann has closely worked on with sound designer and composer Shahrokh Yadegari.  Visitors will be able to interact with the sound in a variety of ways – from using a stylus and a touch pad to “sign-in,” to a steel table in the Main Gallery with a rolling tray and a microphone.   Input from these elements will feed into either the speakers on the roof of the Pulitzer building or two player pianos situated in the Cube and Lower Galleries, which will then transmit the sounds.  There will also be record players throughout the exhibition, five rolling platform ladders with rotating projectors, jumping beans, taxidermy birds, a wall of cast paper hands that visitors can wear, concordance texts produced from the daily newspaper…. as you can see, there are many elements that will contribute to your overall experience.  The hope for these materials is to engage a relationship between the individual and the group, a single voice and a chorus, a silent book and a spoken reading, and finally, between a solitary listening and a collective hearing.

Whew.  Our posting on 2buildings1blog this month has slowed, but our overall blogging activities are currently at full steam.  We’ve launched a website for Transformation – the community programming organized in conjunction with the Matta-Clark exhibition (which you can also explore online here).   A few highlights:

The Panel Series:  We’ve organized a panel discussion each month to explore topics related to Matta-Clark’s work within the context of St. Louis.  The key question we’ll address in each panel: “How do communities evolve and in what ways can their members guide the process?”  Within this online section we’ll feature interviews with the panelists, research info related to the topic, and full audio from the discussion shortly afterward.  I also attempt (key word) to live tweet each panel (http://twitter.com/thepulitzer).  The next panel just happens to be tomorrow (Oh! You’re in luck! And it’s free!).

Local Artists:  This is where the bulk of the blogging happens.  We’re documenting the three artist-run projects throughout the course of Transformation – hear updates from the artists, watch videos of the classes, even watch DIY videos to learn some of the skills yourself, and generally stay up-to-date as each project evolves.

Your St. Louis:  Definitely the most interactive of all the sections.  We’re posting candid interviews with St. Louis residents, to help paint a fuller portrait of the community.  Show us your St. Louis by adding photos to our Flickr group.  Show off your favorite route, by creating a custom Google Map for others to use.  We want to showcase what St. Louis means to those of us who live here.

Forum:  We’re hoping this section will grow into a place for discussion.  Want to expand on ideas you heard in the panel?  Want to ask an artist a question about their project?  This is the place to do it!

This website will continue to grow and shift as the programming grows and shifts, and as always, we’d love to get your feedback.  Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Our online catalogue for the exhibition, Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark, is now up!  Check it out here.  If you don’t have an opportunity to visit St. Louis in the next few months, the website gives you a glimpse into what it’s like to see these works within this space.  We’re also excited to feature a video interview with Jane Crawford, the director of Matta-Clark’s estate and his widow.  She speaks about his buildings, his community, his sense of humor, among other topics, along with commentary on a few of the works on view within the exhibition.

In addition to this exciting launch, we’re also kicking off the first in our Transformation programming tonight.  At 7:30pm we’re hosting a panel discussion called “The City as Studio,” where we’ll explore how creative acts and alternative arts spaces can impact a community.  We have a fantastic group of panelists who will lend their perspective and expertise to the topic:  Theaster Gates, an artist from Chicago (who is also participating in the 2010 Whitney Biennial); Mary Jane Jacob, Director of Exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Juan William Chavez, an artist and the Director of Boots Contemporary Art Space; Luis Croquer, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; and moderated by Christy Gray, Director of the Whitaker Foundation.  If you’re unable to attend, we’ll be posting the full audio from tonight’s panel for you to download as a podcast.  I’ll also try to tweet updates throughout the night – follow us @thePulitzer!

Happy New Year everyone!  We’re officially back in full swing, with lots of new projects buzzing in the air.  But I thought before we dive into 2010, we should take a little look back at ol’ 2009.  It was a busy year for the Pulitzer.  We read Ovid for 2 days, rapped about St. Sebastian, built a wall out of garbage, opened a new exhibition, and added a few staff members along the way.

Here are a few of the highlights:

In addition to our continuing concert, film, and symposia programs, our community activities really blossomed in 2009.  Former prisoners re-interpreting art with theatre in Staging Old Masters and a collaboration with the Alzheimer’s Association and Cole Elementary in Let’s Look. We also saw our Main Gallery filled with individuals from across St. Louis to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses for two days.  A major focus of our activities, our programming only promises to increase in 2010 as Transformation gets underway.

We closed Old Masters in 2009 and began the installation for Urban Alchemy: Gordon Matta-Clark.  From our first guerilla marketing campaign, to the installation of Bingo and the construction of  Garbage Wall, seeing this exhibition in our galleries and hearing feedback from our visitors on how they see it relating to their city has been inspiring.

And we can’t leave out the blog, of course, where we’ve launched a number of new video series, aimed at giving you an even more varied look at what’s happening around here.  We feature architectural and facilities details in “The Ando Building,” the perspective of our gallery attendants in “From the Galleries,” updates from the various departments in “What’s Happening, (fill-in-the-blank),” and a monthly update from Matthias in “From the Director.” Expect much more to come in 2010.   We’re also proud to be a part of another collaborative blog, Saint Louis Art Map, where we’ve recently launched yet another video series called “Catching Up” (hmm, I’m noticing a trend…).

What was your favorite memory at the Pulitzer in 2009?  And what would you like to see from us in 2010?

Tomorrow is the last day for the Old Masters exhibition – which means the works of art we’ve been living with for about a year will be heading home.  This also means that next week we begin the installation for Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark.  As has been well-documented here in the past, install is my favorite blogging time of year.  And with these works, I know we’ll have lots to talk about.

New exhibition season really kicked off today with the Citygarden’s newest installation on their video wall, featuring two works chosen by our Senior Curator, Francesca Herndon-Consagra, for their relation to the exhibition.  The videos are shown in tandem, and in both, the abandoned and the discarded are transformed into art.  First is Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1975 film Conical Intersect in which you see him literally carving out circles in an abandoned Parisian house.  This film will also be on view in our exhibition, after it opens on October 30th.  The second is called The Way Things Go by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss and features a 100-foot long chain reaction they created out of discarded and common items inside a warehouse.  You can also see more of their works on view right now in the Contemporary’s current exhibition.

We took a field trip down to Citygarden this morning to check it out:

A few young kids were sitting close-by, completely wrapped up in the action of Conical Intersect. As Gordon took the first chunk out of the wall one of them squealed in excitement, “He’s cutting through the building!”.  Stay tuned kids, it only gets better from there.

Last weekend, during Grand Center’s Dancing in the Street festival, a visitor named Marc Lopata captured an incredible photograph on his cell phone, which he was kind enough to share.  A view along Spring Avenue, of our neighbor the Contemporary’s building:

As you can probably tell by the frequency of blog posts lately, the activity level in the summer (especially in August) is on the low side around here.  Though that’s not to say that we’re not busy – there’s a lot of gearing up towards our Fall exhibition happening right now.  Over the next week or so, Amy and I are going to do some pestering – I mean! – gently inquiring our fellow Pulitzer staff members to reveal what they’re currently working on in regards to our upcoming Gordon Matta-Clark exhibition.  A little peek into our prep.  As always, if there’s anything you’re curious about and want to know, leave it in the comments!  We’ll add it to our list of questions.

Art:21’s blog has been running a fantastic series over the past few months called “Flash Points”.  They present topics related to contemporary art and ask a variety of guests to write about it from their perspectives.  In my opinion, it’s one of the most interesting and well-presented contemporary art discussions happening online.  Currently, the series is focusing on themes within their upcoming 5th season, the first of which is “Compassion“.

I wrote a post on one of their featured artists, Doris Salcedo, whose work Atrabiliarios is one of the few owned by the Pulitzer.  To me, Salcedo goes beyond compassion to fully envelop herself in the reality of her subjects.  Check out the full post here.

A few weeks back, I posted that our Lower Gallery will become home to two photographs by Thomas Struth for the remainder of the Old Masters exhibition.  I can give you a sneak peek at one of the photographs, The Restorers at San Lorenzo Maggiore, Naples:

Thomas Struth, The Restorers at San Lorenzo Maggiore, Naples, 1988, 1989
Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
Image courtesy of the artist

The placement of the Old Masters works within our exhibition accentuates their physicality and helps the viewer to re-imagine the galleries as reminders of historic spaces for which such works were either conceived or in which they were later presented, such as the Grande Galerie of a seventeenth-century palace or the interior of a Renaissance of Baroque church.

The paintings Struth depicts in this photograph are stacked one against the other in an open loggia, reminding us of the physicality and ephemeral quality of Old Master paintings before they are hung in a church for devotion of a museum for admiration and study.

Both photographs will be on view starting Wednesday, June 24th.

Two great posts I just finished reading about social media (which reminds me that I still want to do a major recap of what I’ve learned from Museums and the Web…).

This article from NPR discusses the shift from the web being page-based (and focused on displaying past information) to a constant stream of active information (a la Twitter) and what that says about our society today.  The Pulitzer has a Twitter page and participates in this “stream” – do you?  And do you think this type of constant information will eventually replace static information on the web?  Which also ties in with something else I heard on NPR this morning – will these musings online have any hope for longevity?  What will our version of Shakespeare’s sonnets be?

The other piece I just finished reading was by Kimberly from the Kemper.  She wrote about social media and art on the Saint Louis Art Map and discussed how what we do on the web as museums needs to relate back to our mission and audience.  It reminded me of the paper Nina Simon presented at Museums and the Web, which takes this idea one step further.  She discussed how our approach to an online presence – with it’s emphasis on accessibility and the interactions with Web 2.0 – and how we should bring these ideas back inside the galleries.  As she calls it, “going analog”.  It’s an interesting read -check it out here.