http://www.vimeo.com/27209882

Theaster Gates and his students talk about Gate’s summer course through Washington University in St. Louis. During the class, students worked with Gates to rehab a house in Hyde Park and devise ways in which the house can be used as an arts hub for the neighborhood.

Community projects at the Pulitzer have always raised questions of sustainability. In understanding our institution’s ever-evolving role within the community arts of St. Louis, we are a catalyst, incubator, and (at our best moments) innovator. We work to enhance the already-impressive, effective, and inspiring work of our colleagues by bringing both the strengths of a cutting-edge arts institution dedicated to promoting the personal experience with all arts and social work practice. This means, however, that we are at risk of violating one of the founding principles of community practice by parachuting into a community then exiting quickly, without sustaining commitment to the communities with whom we worked. In principle, we are keenly aware of this and have attempted to balance our institutional identity with ethical community practice by forging partnerships with institutions that have the potential to carry the innovation forward. As this department is coming upon its fourth year, we are still in the process of learning what it means to “carry the innovation forward” and just how much continued support and involvement it might take from the “catalyst”.

Take Theaster Gates in Hyde Park for example. Theaster entered this community through our project, which was a collaboration between Holy Trinity Academy and Succeeding with Reading, a program that had existed at Holy Trinity Academy for a few years preceding Urban Expression, the Pulitzer-catalyzed program inspired by our exhibition, Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark. He was captured by the community—particularly, the kids—and became committed to arts-infused community development in the neighborhood. While our exhibitions changed (and the programs with it), we were able to stay involved by co-sponsoring the CityStudioSTL (Somethingness: Ways of Seeing and Building) with the Sam Fox School of Visual Art and Design at Washington University in St. Louis. In so doing, we are figuring out our institution’s role in ensuring that Theaster’s commitment to Hyde Park (through Rebuild Foundation) has a better chance at success. It’s a work in progress, but the brilliant work of Theaster, his employees, and the students of this summer class have provided another huge step toward fulfilling the potential of a beautiful, if neglected neighborhood and doing so by forging partnerships between existing community members and those from the outside. We’ll keep you posted as his work evolves.

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

As a final project for its concordance workshop, a St. Elizabeth Academy film class produced this video, “Juxtaposition.” Their teacher John Adams describes the ideas behind it in the following.

After returning to the classroom from seeing stylus in the fall, the class had a spirited discussion around the word “perception,” particularly with regards to the connection between perception and reality, and how the media shapes and forms perception through the juxtaposition of words and images. My students repeatedly stated that when they mentioned the city of St. Louis to friends and family who lived outside of the city or who had never ventured into the city, too often the words that were associated with St. Louis were dangerous, crime-ridden, and poor. As the students examined their concordance they made from their research, they developed a series of questions to guide their analysis:

1. What descriptive words or phrases are associated or juxtaposed with our spine words?

2. Are the descriptive words or phrases positive or negative?

3. What perceptions might readers/listeners/viewer form from these juxtapositions?

4. How does the media reporting shape the perception of the community, both by the people who live within and those who live outside of it?

Ironically in the midst of their analysis, local and even national media became fixated on a report that claims St. Louis is now the most dangerous city in America. My students, angered by the report, wrestled with a way to respond to it in light of their research and their personal experience of living in the city and attending a school that has been in same neighborhood since 1882. Taking their cue from stylus, they decided to respond by creating a concordance–in the form of a video–that uses juxtaposition “to create new possibilities and contexts for meaning.”

In the students’ video concordance, they themselves and their “I-am” statements become the principal words within the “walls” of the video. In Hamilton’s concordances, the “exterior register of the world’s events [. . .] culled from six world newspapers [are] pulled from their context in the newspaper to create this new field of text.” In the students’ video, the exterior register is culled from the broadcast videos juxtaposed against one another, the manipulated still images from F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, and the serenely idyllic video footage of St. Louis. The juxtaposition of the first part of the video with the second part with the students results in an ironic contrast and new possibilities of meaning and perception.–John Adams

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 »

Urban Wave pastes the hand from stylus on a building in Old North St. Louis, for the first time.

A mock-up for the Urban Wave postering project depicts how the stylus hand image might look in a proposed location. Urban Wave members submitted mock-ups, such as this one, to stylus curator Matthias Waschek and artist Ann Hamilton for curatorial approval.

It’s almost go-time.

Tuesday night, I submitted the first fifteen mock-ups for the Urban Wave postering project: photographs of specific locations in and around Old North City, with images of Hamilton’s posters superimposed in the position of their proposed installation.

How did we get here? Last week, I visited the neighborhood (roughly the boundaries established by the Old North Restoration Group and a little north into Hyde Park) several times to make photographs and measurements. Regina Martinez, Emily Task and I did the initial exploration together, gloriously on foot in what felt like the first real days of fall. On return visits, I was generously assisted by Nathaniel Zorach, a partner in the continuation of Theaster Gate’s Urban Expression, a program which began as a Pulitzer initiative. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of the stylus’s community programming, the members of Urban Wave are also leading hand making workshops at various St. Louis schools. Chloe Bethany, a graduate of Washington University’s Sam Fox School, worked on the paper hands in Ann Hamilton’s installation (read story here), so she knew what she was doing last week when she instructed students at Metro High School on how to make their own. From Chloe:

Last week, two compatriots from the Brown School of Social Work  and I conducted a hand making workshop at Metro High School.

Metro is just a few blocks west of the Pulitzer. As we unloaded clay model hands, paper, and glue onto a cart to bring upstairs, we wondered whether this was just a normal day at Metro. We were greeted at the door by high school students wearing togas and eating chocolate chip cookies. It was immediately a friendly place, amplified by what we learned were the accoutrements of school spirit week. The mood continued all the way into the classroom, where we were met art teacher Tom Tobias and a class of around twenty-five students.

I enjoy teaching the workshops. As the sort of art-logistics member of the team, I get to do what I like best: get my own hands dirty and help others do the same. Emily Task and Regina Martinez handled what we’ve designed to be the content-focusing aspect of the workshop, a pre- and post- question: what does an open hand mean to you?

I spoke a little about the exhibition, and then a clay hand was passed out to each student in the class. The clay is oil-based, meaning that the hands stay soft and pliable. After the discussion of the hand as a symbol of nonverbal communication, many students were eager to form their hands into peace signs and other ambiguously positive gestures (we discourage the obvious offensive gestures that many high school students find highly amusing). And then, we got messy! Read the rest of this entry »

Sean Thomas, the director of Old North Restoration Group, shows Urban Wave’s Regina Martinez and Chloe Bethany a building in Crown Village as a possible spot for a hand poster.

stylus is the Pulitzer’s first commission-based exhibition, and the new territory offers us a chance to closely merge our programming activities with the installation concepts through direct communication with the artist. In yesterday’s video, Lisa touched on collaborating with Ann Hamilton and Matthias to design programming that “amplifies” the installation and still practices social work. One program that emerged from their conversations is Urban Wave, a project with two students from Washington University’s Brown School of Social Work and two from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts.

Urban Wave hopes to extend stylus’s theme of “call and response” and to activate the installation outside of the building, as the sound from the bell speakers does. Over the next few weeks, its interdisciplinary team will paste more than thirty posters of stylus’s image of a hand–the one seen on the projections, flyers and web catalogue–in various spaces in St. Louis, particularly in Old North.

“We’re in the phase of deciding sites based on input from people in the community,” says Regina Martinez, the Pulitzer’s current practicum student from the Brown School and a member of Urban Wave. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a symposium titled, “Breaking the Rules of Engagement: New Perspectives on Thinking about Art,” at the Denver Art Museum, or DAM, as it is so lovingly called. The weekend included art, culture and new ideas about museum goers and supporters. I explored the museum and city, but  I was there particularly to meet with other museum professionals and discuss the future of docent programs.

The symposium centered on new ideas in docent presentations. Three interesting speakers at the conference were James Chung, Michael Cassin and Shelly Casto. They talked about tapping into proven trends and integrating new and creative ways to actively engage a visitor’s quest for the visual. Many discussed that the old ideas about tours were not the way to entice audiences. Instead, engaging in interesting conversations surrounding the work of art is the preferable method. Read the rest of this entry »

In our video recap of the Transformation Project Walk, Katy Mike Smaistrla, Education and Volunteer Coordinator at Earthways Center, explains the structure above, which a Construction Careers Center shop class built as part of their workshop with the Pulitzer, Earthways Center and the Lawrence Group. Last Thursday, the program, which was inspired by the Garbage Wall and formulated to teach sustainable design, drew to a close.

For the final session, representatives from the partnering organizations met with the students in their computer lab to discuss what was accomplished over the past few months. Everyone sat in a circle and took turns explaining what they learned. Afterwards, the class filled out surveys on the computers, as I pulled a few students out into the hallway for some digital feedback. Here is what those students had to say: Read the rest of this entry »