Bob McCabe, Morning Host for KWMU, reads during A Marathon Metamorphoses.

“…how does one communicate the experience of an ephemeral two day reading in our exhibition space?” our director, Matthias Waschek asked today in his very first blog post for the Pulitzer. He is, of course, reflecting on last year’s marathon reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which has so far been the only event of its kind in our building.

To capture the experience, a local videographer video taped the almost twenty hours of reading in the Lower Gallery. He then edited the footage down to eight minutes, which includes a shot of each of the seventy-four readers. You can now watch the video and read Matthias’ reflections on it on our A Marathon Metamorphoses blog.

Organizers, visitors and participants talk about Art/Food during the event.

All afternoon this past Saturday, a crowd milled about the Art/Food tent trying local concoctions, such as South County honey,  Vanilla Cream Ale, and s’mores from a sun oven. In the video below, Chef John Judy, from L’Ecole Culinaire, describes the Gordon Matta-Clark gumbo that was served. For a full recap of the event, watch the video above.

With the dismantling of the folding tables, came the conclusion of Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark. If you’re ever feeling nostalgic, you can always visit the Transformation site and the web catalogue, which document the exhibition and the ambitious programs associated with it. What was one of your favorite parts of Urban Alchemy?

As we evaluate the achievements of the past few months, we’re also revving up for Ann Hamilton’s stylus. The Pulitzer will be closed for installation until July 9, the exhibition’s opening reception. (To be continued…)

Chef John Judy shows L’Ecole Culinaire’s recreation of Gordon Matta-Clark’s gumbo, which they served at Art/Food.

Kathryn Adamchick, an Art/Food organizer, talks about how Art/Food relates to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark.

This is a the last week for Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark. As a special farewell to the exhibition, the Pulitzer has joined forces with Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis for a celebration of food and art on Saturday, June 5, 1-4pm, titled Art/Food.

Art/Food will offer dishes prepared from local food by local chefs from a few of St. Louis’ favorite restaurants. Organizations, such as Earthways Center and Slow Rocket Urban Farm, will talk about local food and offer interactive activities that demonstrate sustainable practices.

Admission is free, but there’s a suggested donation of five dollars, or flour, oil, and vinegar to go to St. Louis Campus Kitchen, a non-profit student organizations that feeds people in need.

For full event details, visit our event page.

Slow Rocket Urban Farm talk about their urban farm in South St. Louis. They will give a presentation on their work during Art/Food.

As we’ve said before, part of the Pulitzer’s identity is that it doesn’t have labels for the artwork, however for the next three weeks, the Ando building will boldly declare its address in neon, as part of 2010 Whitney Biennial winner Theaster Gates’ exhibition Dry Bones and Other Parables from the North.

Dry Bones will open this Saturday along with three projects during the Transformation Project Walk. In case you haven’t been reading the news or listening to St. Louis Public Radio, the Walk will be a big bash that concludes all of the community programming we’ve worked on throughout the Matta-Clark exhibition. Similar in scope to The Light Project, the Walk will be one of those special events that encourages all of St. Louis to explore the Grand Center neighborhood and experience each unique project site.

This Saturday, May 15, from 3-7pm, the Pulitzer will provide a shuttle and trolley service to those who want to see what Transformation has accomplished this spring. Each stop will exhibit inspired works by program participants, which are sure to demonstrate how art can affect social change and further conversation on the St. Louis urban landscape. For a full description of the event and programs, visit this page.

Robert Longyear talks about the chairs in his installation and how they relate to the theme of “congregation.” Like Gordon Matta-Clark, who used titles like “A W-Hole House” and “Reality Properties / Fake Estates,” Robert also incorporates word play into his artwork. For more information on his project visit the Urban Evolution blog.

A still from Gordon Matta-Clark’s film Food, which documents Food, the restaurant in SoHo Matta-Clark operated with fellow artists.

Everybody eats (See Sesame Street clip, ca. 1970s), and, as we should know by now, the way we get and eat food fundamentally defines our way of life. Drive-thru windows. Pre-packaged food. Devotion to convenience in the United States leaves cooking as a hobby rather than a part of being human.

Next Thursday evening, the Pulitzer will present “Food, Art, and Community,” its final panel discussion in the series fired by Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark. Panelists will talk about offsetting disengagement with what we gobble and how blending art with urban farming, farmers’ markets and food has the potential to strengthen whole communities. This topic was inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark’s use of cooking in his artwork and the artist-owned/run restaurant Food, which offered a “perpetual dinner party” to SoHo in the early 1970s.

This week, Rachel and I decided to highlight an example of art and food fostering fellowship in St. Louis by interviewing a founder of Sloup, a monthly soup dinner that donates its proceeds to artistic ventures. Below is my interview with Amelia Jones.
What is Sloup exactly? What is the rationale behind it?

Sloup is a monthly soup dinner that funds artists’ grants in greater St Louis. The idea is that it doesn’t take a super large amount of funding to bring art projects to fruition.

Read the rest of this entry »

Construction Careers Center students examine Gordon Matta-Clark’s Reality Properties: Fake Estates. For more photos from this program visit our Flickr page.

Tuesday morning, students from a Construction Careers Center shop class toured Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark for the first time. They have been hearing about the exhibition for months. Last fall, while requesting garbage donations, Jenny Murphy and Lisa Harper Chang visited CCC, a construction-focused charter school, to talk about Gordon Matta-Clark’s work and sustainable design. Jane Crawford made a special appearance at the school during the week the Wall was constructed.

In early February of this year, the Pulitzer, along with the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Earthways Center and the Lawrence Group, began the current program. Representatives from each organization and a teaching artist have been meeting with the class for lessons on community building, sustainability and design. The students are planning with their teacher to eventually build their own version of the Garbage Wall.

Faydreauna, a student at Construction Careers Center, shares her observations on Garbage Wall.

Kathryn Adamchick is the teaching artist for the Pulitzer’s spring program Arts and Aging.

Two Saturdays ago, medical students from St. Louis University and adults from Oasis met for the first in a series of discussions on contemporary art, urban blight, the creative process and the revitalization of St Louis, in connection with Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark. The group started at the Pulitzer, where they became familiar with the work of Gordon Matta-Clark. As a way to get to know one another, they followed that with a group exercise in the conference room next door at CAMSTL.

Oasis is an organization that originated in St. Louis and now has a national presence. The organization provides unique learning opportunities for older adults. Oasis and the Pulitzer designed Saturday’s program, Arts and Aging, to provide a forum where medical students and older adults can come together to share a museum experience and discuss substantive issues relating to the art and the St. Louis community. The program’s goal is to encourage inter-generational communication and break down stereotypes regarding age. Read the rest of this entry »

This past December, local architect John Pankey and I led a writing workshop for literary center StudioSTL, using the setting of Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark as our muse. It was the second time the Pulitzer and this Grand Center neighbor have come together.

Over the summer, StudioSTL’s director, Beth Ketcher, read for A Marathon Metamorphoses and wrote on the event’s corresponding blog what she felt the marathon was about. Her attitude reflected a principle StudioSTL and the Pulitzer share: the arts are for everyone.

The goal of December’s workshop was not for the participants to produce refined art reviews but to get them to think comfortably, descriptively, analytically, and creatively by jotting down verbal sketches of what they saw in the galleries. Given optional cues in a worksheet, the young authors were asked to investigate the space, write down what they thought, and read their writing to everyone as a conclusion to the session.

Below, one of StudioSTL’s mentors reflects on the workshop.

Paula Davis is an Engineering student at Washington University and a mentor for StudioSTL.

On the twelfth day of the twelfth month, a few young writers–high school students–and a number of volunteers from StudioSTL, sat holding gray pamphlets, on the gray concrete floor of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, in its gray concrete building, under St. Louis’ cold gray sky. It was quiet. 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 »