The Pulitzer’s web catalogue for Dreamscapes launched last week, and we’re really excited about it. The catalogue serves not only to give a glimpse at the works in their temporary habitat, but it offers a  background to the exhibition, artists quotes, and documentation of our events and programs. Here’s an overview of dreamscapes.pulitzerarts.org:

Introduction: Read introductions from Emily Rauh Pulitzer and senior curator Francesca Herndon-Consagra about the exhibition. Download a checklist of all the works featured in Dreamscapes.

Exhibition: Explore the works in Dreamscapes, beginning with a beautiful mosaic of installation shots. Click on works to see additional images and artist quotes. Click on “The Space” for a map of the galleries, and see how the works are placed within the Ando building.

Events & Programs: Stay up to date on what’s happening at the Pulitzer and see what has already happened in conjunction with this exhibition.

Community Projects: Learn about the social work programs related to Dreamscapes. The Pulitzer is partnering with Beyond Housing, an organization that offers an array of services to the St. Louis community.

Exhibition Blog: Click on categories to see blog posts related to what you want to know about, whether that’s programming, particular artists, or social work projects.

For some background on The Dream Journal Project, read here.

Dear Dreamers,

I woke up this morning in a peculiar quandary. I could only remember parts of my dream. It was as though I had experienced what, in a recent panel discussion at the Pulitzer, artist William Kentridge called the “dreamer’s dilemma”, which he defined as having feeble insights into one’s dream upon awakening. I lay there, remembering what Kentridge had said, wondering what had just happened. Where had I been on this journey through my subconscious?

If you have been to Dreamscapes already, you may know all about the dreamer’s dilemma. Two black telephones hold place for Janet Cardiff’s own dream processing. She tells you fragments of her dreams in a breathy haze after awakening from her sleep. I feel as though, like Cardiff, we have all experienced this dilemma of fragmented remembering.

According to Kentridge, the mind remembers only fragments by necessity. It is protecting and guarding us from memories that may be too painful, too scary or too joyful. If we remember every detail in perfect moment-by-moment playback we would refuse to ever wake up. Conversely, if a nightmare could never be forgotten we would refuse to ever sleep, fearing its return.  At the Pulitzer, Kentridge said, “We rely on being able to hold onto some [dreams], but have others fade away.” Having recently experienced Kentridge’s dreamer’s dilemma, and having tried to write down the dream fragments in my dream journal, I began to wonder if this is a common experience. Have you, dear dreamer, also experienced the dreamer’s dilemma? If so, what did you do? When you were journaling your dream or dream fragments, what did your dream look like? How did it sound?

Pleasant dreaming,

Megan Johnson

(MSW expected 2012)

Dream Journal Project Coordinator

Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

Find out more about Swoon and this video on Saint Louis Art Map.

Megan Johnson is the Pulitzer’s newest practicum student from the Brown School of Social Work, and she is currently coordinating the Dream Journal Project in connection with our current exhibition. In the letter below, Megan explains the project to those who signed up at the Dreamscapes opening reception. We want to hear your dreams too! Please sign up for the Dream Journal Project with Megan Johnson, Dream Journal Coordinator, at mjohnson@pulitzerarts.org.

Greetings, Fellow Dreamers!

Thank you for joining us for the opening of our new exhibition, Dreamscapes, and for participating in the Dream Journal Project. I hope this email helps answer any questions you might have about it.

We invite you to join us as we explore our dreams, nightmares, inspirations and thoughts. The dream journal you received the night of the opening (or any journal you wish to use) can serve as a place to explore your dreams using any medium you desire, be it painting, drawing, writing, collage, photography or any other. There are no rules stating how the themes of your journaling should be expressed.

Throughout the course of Dreamscapes, you will receive emails from me encouraging you to continue examining your dreams, as well as providing prompts if you are experiencing dreamer’s block.  These prompts are in no way mandatory and are solely provided to help you continue your explorations. If you happen to have a prompt idea, please send it in!

Toward the end of Dreamscapes you will receive an invitation to the Dreamscapes finale. The finale will include an opportunity for you to share your journal in a number of ways. You can submit your journal prior to the finale to be on display for all visitors to peruse, or you are welcome to bring your journal with you and share it personally. The day will also feature time when Dream Journal participants can read from their journals.

In all aspects of the Dream Journal Project, please share your dreams in the manner that is most comfortable for you—authored or anonymously.  And, if you choose to donate your journal for the finale, you are welcome to include your name or not, as you prefer.

Happy dreaming,

Megan Johnson

(MSW expected 2012)

Dream Journal Project Coordinator

The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

The Pulitzer’s senior curator, Francesca Herndon-Consagra, describes the exhibition Dreamscapes, which opens on Friday, February 11.

The Pulitzer has been closed to the public, since January 22, for the installation of Dreamscapes. The opening reception for Dreamscapes is this Friday, from 5pm to 9pm. Here is the official description of the exhibition taken from the press release:

“The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts is pleased to announce Dreamscapes, on view February 11–August 13, 2011. This exhibition incites questions about the act of dreaming—a succession of thoughts, images, sounds or emotions, which the mind experiences during sleep. The artworks on view and their juxtaposition with Tadao Ando’s architecture offer new ways to think about the content and purpose of dreams on numerous levels: physiological, psychological, cultural and spiritual.

Dreamscapes is organized by Francesca Herndon-Consagra, senior curator at the Pulitzer, and opens with a public reception on Friday, February 11 from 5pm–9pm.

The concept behind the exhibition began with the Pulitzer’s Watercourt. Its meditative reflecting pool and hewed boulder – Scott Burton’s Rock Settee (1988-89) – create an insular dreamscape in the middle of our city. A glass wall divides the Watercourt from the rest of the Pulitzer building. Similarly, René Magritte’s Le monde invisible (The Invisible World) (1954) depicts an incongruous boulder in a room with open glass doors that frame a waterscape beyond. This painting, along with others depicting boulders floating in air, create a unified yet disorienting space out of both the Entrance Gallery and the adjacent Watercourt. Mimicked is a dream that presents ambiguity between indoor and outdoor spaces, refutes gravity’s powers, and shuffles a mundane object like a boulder into different settings. Read the rest of this entry »

Philip Guston, Dark Room, 1978, Oil on canvas, Private collection, © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

Over the past year the Pulitzer’s curatorial staff has been hard at work securing loans, conducting research, and designing layout for Dreamscapes, which opens Friday evening, February 11. The exhibition is an exploration of dreams and the dreaming process and will feature 26 carefully selected paintings, sculptures, prints and installations from public and private collections across the United States. Widely disparate in terms of style, period and genre, these works will appear in unexpected juxtapositions with one another and with the distinctive architectural features of Tadao Ando’s building.

Located in the Main Gallery are paintings and sculptures that articulate artists’ hallucinatory responses to personal or societal trauma. One of my favorite works in this group is Philip Guston’s Dark Room, painted in 1978, just two years before the artist’s death. The work is a self-portrait, but the artist’s face eludes us. Rather, objects and fragments from Guston’s everyday life stand out brazenly against a black, chasm-like background. At left is a cartoonish representation of the artist’s right forearm resting against the arm of a bulky easy chair. His awkward, paw-like hand smolders with the same chimerical intensity as that of the burning cigarette lodged between his fingers. Guston’s wristwatch is also suffused with that incendiary light, as if to underscore the artist’s (and perhaps our own) anxious awareness of time running out. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Robert E. Gard

In the third weekend of September, I attended the Gard Symposium in Madison, Wisconsin. The conference was dedicated to the life work of Robert E. Gard, a community arts developer out of Wisconsin. Robert E. Gard is known for his community work in theatre, creative writing and folklore. (To read more about Robert E. Gard and his foundation, please click here). The symposium, inspired by Gard’s life work, called participants to discuss the future of community arts development.

I made the journey to Madison with a friend from the social work program at Washington University (she is also the founder of the Community Arts Initiative at the Brown School). We attended the conference to hear the testaments of those who have been actively bridging the arts with unlikely sectors. The symposium aimed to address “healthy communities” by presenting viewpoints of seemingly different disciplines: economics, sociology, technology, politics, religion and social work. Community arts practitioners responded to each discipline’s approach to a healthy community by offering ideas in which the arts might be integrated. It is important to note that healthy, in the symposium and the social sciences speak, refers to an overall, holistic health.

Though the presenters provided strong evidence of the powerful abilities of integrating the arts into diverse sectors, I was particularly moved by the expressed views of Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton. The Lt. Governor’s perspective was fresh, independent and innovative, as she understood that the arts were not only essential a healthy community but also an integral aspect of democracy. As stated in her paper written for the symposium, the Lt. Governor writes, “[the arts and humanities] provide the creativity and spontaneity and sense of freedom necessary to fuel the ongoing struggle that is democracy. A politically healthy community invests in the arts to ensure the context and conditions that will make it robust and prosperous.” It is my hope that symposia such as this catapult community arts development into common dialogue.

Paul Shattack, Assistant Professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, shares memories conjured by Gordon Matta-Clark’s Bronx Floors.

Another month has passed, and it’s time again for Frame of Reference, a regularly scheduled program at the Pulitzer. Since our last exhibition, Ideal (dis-) Placements: Old Masters at the Pulitzer, the Pulitzer has hosted monthly in-gallery discussions, led by individuals with a range of backgrounds, about the artwork on display.

Visitor Services Manager Courtney Henson geared this Saturday to combine the perspectives of those specializing in art and those in social work. Our Senior Curator, Francesca Herndon-Consagra, who is the curator for Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark, will be among the speakers.

You’ll note that the schedule for these 15-minute forums has changed from previous sessions to be all within 1-2:30pm, rather than at the beginning of every hour. This way, we hope you can stay for all of them and give your special viewpoint.