Last week was Greek Week at Washington University, and as part of the garbage collection process for Garbage Wall, the Pulitzer’s Community Engagement Department organized a clean-up/trash collecting competition with the sororities and fraternities there that Friday.

In the following video, Jack Zhou, a fraternity leader who helped arrange the Pulitzer-Greek collaboration, sports his Gordon Matta-Clark bandanna and explains Greek Week and how the Pulitzer clean-up fits in with its other festivities. (Off camera, he also assured me that fraternity life is not like Animal House, which was supposedly based on a screenwriter’s Wash U experiences.)

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Emily Augsburger is a Brown School of Social Work practicum student in the Pulitzer’s Community Engagement Department.

Last Saturday, Jenny, Aaron, Craig, Lisa, and I set up a table at the Earthways Green Home Festival with old newspapers and a Plexiglas box ready to be filled with garbage. The morning was cool and breezy, and the news forecasted rain, but we were warmed by coffee and eagerly waited for festival tourists.

Within minutes of the kickoff, we made a friend, whose mom was volunteering with Earthways. Henry, a student from Loyola Academy, became an amazing assistant to the Pulitzer’s booth. He joined our recycling paper task force and eventually became an expert with the hand-crank blender used to make the paper pulp.

Henry, Jenny, and Emily demonstrate making paper pulp and paper out of recycled newspapers. Read the rest of this entry »

The last days of an exhibition are always bittersweet, and Old Masters is no different. The memories of the light playing with my perception of the works and the voices of the many who have presented, acted, and read in the exhibition still linger. It’s easy to take an exhibition for granted, especially one that’s been here for a longer period, but when it’s gone, I know I’ll miss the faces, the forms, the landscapes, and all of the stories, including the ones depicted and the ones that were created in the galleries.

This in no way diminishes my excitement about our upcoming exhibition, Urban Alchemy / Gordon Matta-Clark, and the promise of the variety of interactions and opportunities the exhibition inspires. The work for Matta-Clark has already begun, as you’ve been reading about in this blog recently, but now you have a chance to come learn more about our upcoming exhibition, play with building a garbage wall yourself, and see the potential in trash by turning discarded newspaper into fun and functional items.

We will be hosting a table at the Earthways Green Homes Festival in Grand Center this Saturday, September 26. Our table will be open from 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. (the festival continues through 6:00 p.m.), and we are very excited to share with you information about Gordon Matta-Clark and our plans for the exhibition, including the Garbage Wall. So please come by and see us, say hello, and bring home a handmade kite, paper, or a seed planter as a souvenir and a reminder to come back and see us beginning October 30!

A little treasure hunt, a little Archeology, a little Anthropology.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Loyola Academy students pose in front of their simulated wall of garbage.

Yesterday, Jenny, practicum student Emily Augsburger, and I rode in Jenny’s gold truck to Loyola Academy, a nearby all-boys school, to spread the word about Garbage Wall.  We hauled bins of junk and a six-foot-tall Plexiglas box with us.

In the art room, Jenny announced to a table of middle school boys the upcoming exhibition, asked if they knew what “alchemy” was, and then connected the term to Matta-Clark’s transformative art. She prompted the class to hypothesise how a 2’x2’ mock-up of Garbage Wall, left in the classroom the day before, had been built. Then the class thought of more ways to renew trash.

Some students casually rested their heads on the table in front of them, but they all readily chimed in and paid attention when others spoke. Still, after we paraded outside for the kids to simulate their own garbage wall, the adults truly witnessed unbridled energy, as the students, wearing blue latex gloves, eagerly explored the junk bins.

“So what do you think of this project?” I asked one boy, who had been pretending his gloves made him a superhero.

“It’s fun,” he replied, “I wish we could glue it together.”

Melba, the art teacher, who the Pulitzer collaborated with for the Community Light Project, assured her pupil that the class would get their chance to use elements of Garbage Wall in one of their upcoming assignments.

Jenny Murphy specializes in found art and recently received her BFA from Washington University. She previously interned at the Pulitzer, collecting lamps for The Light Project, and is now collecting garbage for Garbage Wall, a piece in the upcoming exhibition Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark.

Amy Broadway: Jenny, you have been deemed “Garbage Specialist” in our Community Engagement Department and will lead the gathering of refuse for Garbage Wall, a re-creation of Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1970 Garbage Wall. The wall will be 72″x72″x18″. How do you plan to get all that trash?

Jenny Murphy: We’re collecting garbage from a few different angles. Since we want the items that go into the wall to reflect the St. Louis community, we’re trying to get different groups of people around the city interested in the project. We’ve asked local schools for student contributions and organized neighborhood clean-ups with Big Brothers Big Sisters and Washington University Undergrads. It’s a strange request to ask people for their trash, but once people learn about Gordon Matta-Clark and see the sample garbage wall, people are intrigued by the idea of transforming garbage into a functional and artistic structure.

To make sure we have enough garbage, I’m also traveling around the city collecting discarded items from thrift stores and picking up residential bulk trash that’s left on the curbs in front of houses. Read the rest of this entry »