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

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

http://www.vimeo.com/19980837

Visitors at the Dreamscapes opening reception share their thoughts on the exhibition. Artworks they refer to include Do Ho Suh’s Staircase–Pulitzer Version, Kiki Smith’s Pee Body, Wolfgang Tillmans’s Forest (Briol II), Philip Guston’s Dark Room and Edge and Max Klinger’s A Glove.

Last Friday’s opening reception for Dreamscapes was an all-out success. I know we always say that, but it’s always true in my opinion. Hundreds of art enthusiasts roamed the galleries from five to nine, and the gallery assistants actually had to invite many to leave so they could close for the evening.

While there, I took a few videos of visitors sharing their thoughts so far on the exhibition. We’ve done these “In Your Own Words” clips for the last two openings, and it’s been eye-opening to hear what people see on their first visit.

A particular comment from last week, which highlights the Pulitzer experience, involves one visitor’s walk down the hallway on the lower level to discover at the end of it Wolfgang Tillmans’s Forest (Briol II). This print depicts a man with his back to you, walking down a path in the forest. Like him, you discover a path, the hallway, which seems to lead you into unknown territory. When I dream, there’s always the feeling of “what happens next?” and I love how the placement of this piece leaves you with that feeling. The Pulitzer’s architecture is also known to do that.

So what happens next with this exhibition? As always, the Pulitzer will be offering public programming in conjunction with the exhibition and the themes it encapsulates. We will have a Dreamscapes Concert Series and every Saturday at 1pm offer regular programs, including Frame of Reference, Exploring Art and Dreamtime Storytime, a kid-friendly series in which special guests tell stories related to–you guessed it–dreaming.

We’ll also be asking you to share your dreams. As our senior curator Francesca Consagra said in her video introduction, “This exhibition privileges the idea that art and dreaming does serve a purpose. By engaging with a painting, by trying to recall a dream, you may learn a little bit more about yourself.” We hope that you will join us in exploring concepts around dreaming and the artworks on view and, at the same time, learn about what dreams your mind has to offer.

Andrea Johnson, Young Adult Provider at the St. Louis Public Library, worked with the Pulitzer’s Community Projects Coordinator Emily Augsburger during the concordance workshops. She reflects on the partnership in the following.

On the morning of Tuesday, October 26, 2010 about thirty students from St. Elizabeth Academy visited their high school’s neighborhood public library, the Carpenter Branch Library. The students arrived armed with paper and red pencils engraved with the school’s name. Their goal: to find newspaper articles about their community using the print materials and online databases available in the library. These articles would be scanned and used to create concordances.

As an employee of the St. Louis Public Library, working with St. Elizabeth Academy and the Pulitzer Foundation on the stylus teen program was a unique way to partner with two community organizations. As a part of Teen Services, outreach to city middle and high schools is a significant part of my job. It is important to us to reach as many middle and high students as possible in order to inform them of the many resources and programs that are available to them for free at their public library. Working with St. Elizabeth Academy through the Pulitzer Foundation provided a great opportunity for the students to not only learn about the library’s resources, but to actually get into the library and use them for themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Four dance students from Webster University explore stylus through movement before performing on Thursday night.

There will be dancing in the galleries. Four dance students from Webster University have been exploring stylus and the Pulitzer galleries in terms of movement, and will be showing how their art form can activate the space. In the video above, watch them physically brainstorm sequences they might make tomorrow night. They will be accompanied by percussionist Scott Rice, who also drummed for this fall’s Brazil and Balkan sound waves.

Dance in stylus is Thursday, December 9, from 7 to 9pm. This event is free and open to the public.

An instructor at Gateway to College describes her aim in working with the Pulitzer and the concordance workshop. Students share personal thoughts on their community.

Besides broaching topics related of media literacy, the concordance workshops, led by Community Projects Coordinator Emily Augsburger, ask students to think about their own community. As the workshops highlight, society tends to pigeonhole neighborhoods.  We generally take where we live personally, and a hope with this program, as is with Urban Expression, is that participants will feel empowered by where they live as they research, understand and take ownership of it, in all its complexities.

KDHX DJ Josh Weinstein and jazz legend Charles “Bobo” Shaw talk about playing at the Pulitzer during sound waves: Jazz on November 18. They and composer Zimbabwe Nkenya played alongside stylus and Weinstein’s jazz tracks.

You can see photos of the event on KDHX’s website and learn more about the event on our events page.

From left to right: Chloe Bethany, Emily Task, Regina Martinez

For each exhibition, the Pulitzer experiments with how Social Work and Art can benefit each other. It’ll be interesting to see how Urban Wave, made up of two social work students and an artist, combines their skills for the project this fall. Now that you know the general idea about the pasting project, we’d like to give you some background about this interdisciplinary team.

Chloe Bethany is a multi-media artist and writer from Charleston, South Carolina whose work in drawing, painting and installed objects investigates the abstraction of language through manipulations of color, form, space and syntax. In May 2010, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Washington University in St Louis and has since been exploring the role of the artist within her community. She is a founding member of a small-scale collaborative art space, Pig Slop Studios, located in South City, St Louis, an enthusiastic member of the Pulitzer Foundation’s outreach team, and a recently-hired after school art teacher at the Most Holy Trinity School in North City, St Louis.

Emily Task is completing her MSW at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University, with a concentration in Urban Education, Youth Empowerment, and Community Development. Emily served as the Program Director of the Diversity Awareness Partnership from 2007-2010, and currently is the Co-Chair of the Community Arts Initiative, in partnership with the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. She is a 2009 Community Arts Training Institute Fellow from the Regional Arts Commission in Saint Louis.

Regina Martinez is currently working on a Masters of Social work at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. She is concentrating in Social and Economic Development with a special interest in utilizing the arts to strengthen communities. For the past year, she worked as an advocate for the educational rights of children living in East St. Louis with the Education Advocacy Project – a pilot program established in collaboration between Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation, Inc., and Griffin Center after-school programs. She is currently working with the community outreach arm of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, with a focus on planning, implementing and evaluating community arts programming tailored to the St. Louis region.

Charles “Bobo” Shaw plays a two-valve bugle in the Main Gallery, during the rehearsal for sound waves: Jazz.

When Co-Executive Director of KDHX  Nico Leone met with Ann Hamilton and Shahrokh Yadegari to discuss what kind of music would best fit with the installation stylus, they decided that an important element would be that it represent a range of cultures, in the same way that Ann’s outgoing message for the bell speakers invites you to “share a vocal call from any cultural tradition.” For September and October, sound waves spotlighted rhythms from Brazil and the Balkans. For the remaining shows, it will offer some of our regional musical DNA with hip-hop, blues and jazz. This Thursday is sound waves: Jazz and will feature musicians Charles “Bobo” Shaw, Zimbabwe Nkenya and DJ Josh Weinstein.

In the video above, free jazz drummer Charles “Bobo” Shaw tries out the sound of a bugle in different parts of the Main Gallery during last week’s rehearsal. Born in Pope, Missouri, Bobo has played music for over 50 years, and has worked with a number of artists in St. Louis, New York City and Europe. He was a founding member of Black Artists Group, an arts collective in St. Louis in the 60s and 70s, and continues to play locally. He also drums with Josh Weinstein. 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.