From StudioSTL’s Saturdays @ the Studio workshop coordinator, Nicky Rainey:

For little kids sitting around lunch tables eating fish sticks, “telling dreams” is an excuse to make up weird stories and entertain friends.  Truly, the dream world is a place where logic becomes unusual or irrelevant and where anything might happen–what a relief! What a forum for children’s humor!  (And SO potentially scary!) 

This Saturday, April 4, StudioSTL is teaming up with the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts to take fifteen children on a writer’s tour of the exhibition Dreamscapes.  Amy Broadway (writer, dreamer and Pulitzer staff-member) , a handful of mentors and I will explore with young writers, as they take notes about what we see and invent versions of the artists’ dreams.  

StudioSTL is a creative writing center for kids located in the Centene Center for the Arts–just a few blocks away from the Pulitzer in Grand Center.  Our slogan is “Write and Shine,” we celebrate young people’s personal voices by creating forums for them to write, polish and publish.  StudioSTL’s weekend program, Saturdays @ the Studio, relies on expert community members to help us put together whimsical, theme-based writing workshops for elementary aged kids. I can’t wait to hear our kids’ perspective’ on Dreamscapes.

On May 28, StudioSTL kids will get their teddy bears, put on their jammies (metaphorically), and return to the Pulitzer for Dreamtime Storytime, an open “dream story reading” for kids and grown-ups alike.

To become a mentor or register a child (ages 6 – 12) for StudioSTL’s free writing workshops, call 314-289-4080 or email me at nicky@studiostl.org. I am also constantly searching for community experts to lead whimsical writing workshops for kids. 

P.S. Attached is a picture of two dreamy spaceships drawn by one of our young writers.  Grown-up writers, the tables are turned–what kind of dream do you think could have conjured up these amazing creations?–Nicky Rainey

Nicky Rainey is a writer and StudioSTL’s Director for Saturdays @ the Studio. She will be guest-hosting the series Poems, Prose and Pints at Dressel’s Pub in the Central West End on Tuesday, May 10th.  She’ll be sharing some original work–check it out!

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

Last Thursday evening marked the first time that contemporary dance has been featured within the walls of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Four Webster University dancers—Hope Harl, Julie Opiel, Matthew Schmitz, and Audrey Simes—activated Ann Hamilton’s stylus and the building’s architectural features through improvisational movement.

The performers moved in dialogue with the live percussion of local composer/musician Scott Rice, who, dressed in black, drummed mostly at the north end of the Main Gallery, but occasionally made his way through the gallery space playing on a portable drum.

The dancers, barefoot and clad in comfortable white clothing, transformed themselves into moving projections of stylus. Throughout the evening they moved freely about the galleries, dancing at different tempi and in a variety of configurations: as an ensemble of four, in solo, in trio, or as a duet.

Each performer identified a different source of inspiration within the installation.

“Working with the hands was a lot of fun for me,” Julie Opiel said. “I used them as props for movement, but also as a costume.”

For dancer Matthew Schmitz, the most inspirational elements were the projections across the walls and ceiling combined with the architectural structure of the stairs.

“I found the movement of these projections to be helpful in developing directional focus,” Schmitt said. “The video content—the moving stylus and shifting images of letters and words—helped me create a vocabulary of movement.”

All of the performers incorporated facets of the installation and building—newspapers, hands, a neglected wall or corridor—into their dancing, thereby illuminating details of the Pulitzer environment that might have, otherwise, been overlooked.

The mood was both low-key and friendly. Visitors sat on chairs in the main gallery, stood, and walked about the building, absorbing at an easy pace the sights, sounds, and movements that the evening had to offer.

For more photos of this event, please visit our Flickr slideshow.

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!

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

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!