The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and the Contemporary Art Museum joined forces to offer Big Brothers Big Sisters matches the opportunity to creatively explore the visual arts. Our Saturday interactive workshop incorporated the Gedi Sibony and Bruce Nauman exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis as well as the Old Masters works from the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.

After travelling through the galleries at the Pulitzer and the Contemporary to explore the concepts of light, framing, and portrait, the participants made masterpieces of their own. Each big and little sister/brother pair received a Polaroid camera and created 10 self-portrait photographs. Nicholas Regnier’s Self portrait with a Portrait on an Easel from the Pulitzer and Bruce Nauman’s Self Portrait as a Fountain from the Contemporary were especially inspirational for this project. Then participants used colored paper, markers, and even pretzels to create a frame for their art. A second project (inspired by Bruce Nauman’s use of wordplay) used pretzels to create an edible work of art of words and sentences.

We had a blast with this incredibly creative group. Thanks to all of the matches who came and spent their Saturday with us!

Both yesterday and today, sculpture students from Washington University have been busy installing the Bruno David Gallery (across the street from the Pulitzer) in anticipation for tonight’s exhibition of their artwork.

And we’ve been busy videotaping the whole process – we’re getting footage of the installation, tonight’s performances (there will be a few) and interviews with each of the students about their works.  They all relate to the Flavin exhibition in really interesting ways and deal with the idea of objecthood.  We’re continuing to post updated information on our website here – check back for the videos and further info soon.  On that page, you can also take a look at our past collaboration with Wash U art students for the Portrait/Homage/Embodiment exhibition.

In addition, the St. Louis Beacon posted a wonderful article this morning about tonight’s opening, which is from 6-9pm.  Click here to read.

Here’s the promised video from last week’s student event (I actually got it to work!). As the culmination of a program with the Pulitzer, Washington University students in Jill Downen’s studio class created works of art in response to portraiture. The works were exhibited across the street from the Pulitzer in the Bruno David Gallery. Their exhibition was incredible — I wish it had been up for a longer period of time!

Enjoy a video of artist Lainie Turkish talking about her work, Katrina. It’s hard to get a good look at it in the video (we’ll be posting still photographs of each artist’s work to the Wash U program section of our website soon), but it consists of portraits of people who were affected by Hurricane Katrina. She submerged these portraits and then sealed each one in a plastic zip lock bag, where each eventually molded over.

Last week, we were paid a visit from students from Shaw Elementary School who are involved in an ongoing program with the Pulitzer. Tim, our Visitor Services Manager who’s heading up this program, met with the students in the galleries and discussed the subject of portraiture.

The students also created some art work of their own. When our Minimalism and Beyond exhibition ended, we had quite a few leftover pieces of paper from the Felix Gonzales-Torrez work, Untitled (Somewhere better than this place, Nowhere better than this place). Steve G., our Facilities Manager, took the leftover paper over to Shaw for the students to use for art projects. As a thank you, they sent Steve a package filled with art they made. He hung these on a wall in our receiving area, and they really brighten up the room. Take a look:

There will be more in the upcoming weeks from Shaw –some of the teachers have been working on blog posts which will be featured in a section of our website.

In other news, the blog will be taking a hiatus starting Thursday for the Thanksgiving holiday. We’ll be back in action on Monday, November 27th. See you then!