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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

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!

Look/Listen

Ecology of Absence

Architectural Ruminations

StudioSTL

Rustwire.com

Urban Review STL

Dotage-St. Louis, Missouri

UEU314

Art-Patrol

Digging Pit

Please feel free to leave links to any other posts on Urban Alchemy in “comments.” And thank you to all who have helped spread the word about this exhibition in any way.

Pulitzer visitors talk about Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark.

Thank you for sharing, everyone.

We beseech you too, dear readers, to tell us what you think of Urban Alchemy, in the galleries and online, here in this very blog’s “comments” and on our Urban Alchemy Facebook group, and wherever else you want to talk about it. As they say, “We want to hear from you!”

From an e-mail yesterday:

“Hi Amy…!!!!

I was getting coffee this morning, and I saw one of your wooden screen printed ads for the Gordon MC show. It looked really cool!”

Those exclamation points make me happy.

Since last Wednesday, after a trip to All Along Press, the Pulitzer’s communications team has been re-abandoning bits of wood, wallpaper and granite, printed with Urban Alchemy advertisements, around town. This guerrilla marketing campaign was implemented in the spirit of Gordon Matta-Clark, who renewed unwanted objects in much of his artwork. In the next few days, as you’re sipping espresso at a coffee joint or skimming a bookstore’s magazines, keep an eye out for this latest pop at inviting you to come to our approaching exhibition.

To learn more about this project and to view related photos visit our Flickr set.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jenny scavenges. I lend a hand.

I’ve tried potato chips taken (still packaged) from a Trader Joe’s dumpster. I’ve hauled faded chairs out of alleys and chipped window frames out of garages, and in the middle of a college school night, I ransacked a Goodwill dumpster, amazed at the junk people were dismissing, but I’ve never given a hard study to what goes into the practice of scavenging and am glad to say I can do that now and say it’s job-related.

On September 1, Jenny Murphy, who is leading garbage collection for the Garbage Wall, invited me to go to her first official dig. Before picking a dumpster, Jenny called around town to different thrift stores, asking for permission. Only one gave it, but we won’t say which, in case you dear readers decide to pillage all at once—the staff there might not like that.

According to Jenny, someone at the thrift store had said, “You can come after four, when the diggers show up.” “Diggers” is what the staff calls their regular dumpster divers. There was a digger present when we arrived. Thin and smoking a pipe, with Bob Dylan hair, he rummaged in one can as we did the other. He didn’t say a word to us, but I wanted to believe there was solidarity as a fellow recycler, a rebel against society’s need for newness. Jenny thought he might just have wanted us off his turf, which makes sense. He was there first.

We plunked bit by bit into Jenny’s plastic blue bin and were presented with obvious questions: how long did it take someone to suck all those Altoids? We found things a thrift store isn’t likely to sell (e.g. a porcelain clown with its head broken off), which made me wonder what went through people’s heads when they dropped off their donation. Could they not bear throwing their castoffs away themselves? How could so much waste be prevented? What would Altoids look like in bulk?

After the digger left in his 90s sports car packed to the brim, a couple in their 50s drove up, both saying not quite in unison as they stepped out of their car, “Finding yourself some treasures?” The woman lugged a box into the store, and Jenny and I struck up a conversation with the husband Brian, who calls himself a “salvage expert” and talked about his recycling experience.

“I hate to see things thrown away,” Brian said, “It’s a loss of resources.”
 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Brian talks about bulk trash at Princeton.

After Brian and his wife left, Jenny topped off the bin and put it in the back of her truck. The mission was successful, and since then Jenny has collected a couple truck loads of stuff for our Assistant Facilities Manager, who will be building the Wall.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the video above, Director Matthias Waschek describes how community engagement is incorporated into the Pulitzer’s primary identity as an arts institution. This is the first in what we plan to be a series of “From the Director” clips in which Matthias presents topics unique to the Pulitzer.

If you have a question, please feel free to leave it in a reply. We want to know what you want to know.

The basic strategy for this blog is to offer some background information and updates related to the event at this month’s conclusion. Throughout August, we’ll sprinkle a few words on Ovid here, some on Wtewael there, and tie everything together with the narration of Hannah, as she’s the event’s manager. But like other aspects of the laboratorial Pulitzer, the blog doesn’t have a cookie-cutter recipe, which makes me, as a web communications assistant using an ever-changing form of documentation, wonder what exactly this web page should be made of.  

The Pulitzer has a few other web sites/blogs with the same layout, such as Let’s Look, Sorrento Springs, the French Program, but if you look at those pages linked to on our Collaborative Programming page, you’ll see that the events or programs are different from one another and have been documented in diverse ways. The French Program, periodic visits from Lindenwood, can be posted about per visit. The Sorrento Springs trip was a one-time occurrence and written about from various witnesses’ perspectives.

Now when it comes to A Marathon Metamorphoses, an event which will last just one weekend but include people from all over St. Louis and span art forms and areas of study, we’re working with a whole other animal. What should be recorded in the event planning? How do we make the page worthy in itself aside from the event? Does that matter? How do we tell people about Ovid et cetera without becoming too “educational” and departing “blog”? What will readers want to know? What will the pace be?

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.