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

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 »

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.

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.

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 »

Robert E. Gard

In the third weekend of September, I attended the Gard Symposium in Madison, Wisconsin. The conference was dedicated to the life work of Robert E. Gard, a community arts developer out of Wisconsin. Robert E. Gard is known for his community work in theatre, creative writing and folklore. (To read more about Robert E. Gard and his foundation, please click here). The symposium, inspired by Gard’s life work, called participants to discuss the future of community arts development.

I made the journey to Madison with a friend from the social work program at Washington University (she is also the founder of the Community Arts Initiative at the Brown School). We attended the conference to hear the testaments of those who have been actively bridging the arts with unlikely sectors. The symposium aimed to address “healthy communities” by presenting viewpoints of seemingly different disciplines: economics, sociology, technology, politics, religion and social work. Community arts practitioners responded to each discipline’s approach to a healthy community by offering ideas in which the arts might be integrated. It is important to note that healthy, in the symposium and the social sciences speak, refers to an overall, holistic health.

Though the presenters provided strong evidence of the powerful abilities of integrating the arts into diverse sectors, I was particularly moved by the expressed views of Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton. The Lt. Governor’s perspective was fresh, independent and innovative, as she understood that the arts were not only essential a healthy community but also an integral aspect of democracy. As stated in her paper written for the symposium, the Lt. Governor writes, “[the arts and humanities] provide the creativity and spontaneity and sense of freedom necessary to fuel the ongoing struggle that is democracy. A politically healthy community invests in the arts to ensure the context and conditions that will make it robust and prosperous.” It is my hope that symposia such as this catapult community arts development into common dialogue.