We’ve decided to change our header. Let us know what you think.

Just kidding–I’ve been rummaging in a folder called “2005 Beginnings of Blog” and discovered what look to be mock banners for 2b1b. Take a look here at a template from 2005 for the layout. Legend has it that there was a Pulitzer blog before 2buildings1blog and that it was actually the first art museum blog ever. (I’ll let you know once I find the evidence, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.)

As we prepare to celebrate the Pulitzer’s 10th-year anniversary this fall, the Pulitzer staff has been thinking a lot about how it’s changed over the years–the development of programs, exhibitions and web presence. This blog has been a wonderful tool to keep track of what the Pulitzer has been doing  since July 12, 2005, the day of its first post.

In conjunction with the current exhibition Dreamscapes, on view until August 13, the Pulitzer will host an event that showcases dream-related films by local filmmakers. These shorts will be projected on several exterior surfaces at the Pulitzer on Friday, June 24, at 8:00 p.m.

One of the works–chosen by the Pulitzer and Cinema St. Louis–will be highlighted at the event, and the filmmaker will receive a prize of $500.

Cinema St. Louis will also choose several of the films to screen as part of the
St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase, held in early August.

READ MORE AT CINEMASTLOUIS.ORG.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Panelists Britt-Marie Schiller and Rose Holt talk about Kiki Smith’s Pee Body from a psychoanalysis perspective, during a Dreamscapes panel discussion on April 7. For more clips from the panel discussion, visit the Pulitzer ’s YouTube channel.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In this video, Lisa Harper Chang, Community Projects Director, talks about her personal connection to Do Ho Suh’s Staircase. She was a speaker for Frame of Reference in March. The next Frame of Reference is this Saturday, April 2 at 1pm. For a list of speakers, visit our main website.

Frame of Reference was developed in the context of Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta Clark, when we invited non-art specialists (e.g. architects, social workers, patissiers) to talk about individual works in the context of personal experience.  The idea was born out of our docent program Exploring Art.  One pitfall of Exploring Art is that it is a lengthy time commitment for some guests, so we wanted to find a way to bring the diversity of our docents to the forefront in a bite-sized portion. 

We are continuing this program in conjunction with Dreamscapes, every first Saturday of the Month.  In March, talks were given by a curator from a lending institution and focused on the historical relevance of Max Beckmann’s work.  After his 15 minute talk, Lisa Harper Chang, Community Projects Director at the Pulitzer spoke about her personal connections to Do Ho Suh’s Staircase-Pulitzer Version.  In each talk, guests were able to understand the speaker’s interest in the work and possibly relate to the art in a different way than they might have already seen the work.

In future presentations, there will be multiple guests speaking on the same work.  In this way, in 15 minutes you can have a completely different impression of a work of art.  We invite you to attend and see how artworks’ meanings change through the lens of others.

South African artist William Kentridge talks about Max Beckmann’s manipulation of physical space and its influence on his work. Max Beckmann’s The Dream is on view in the exhibition Dreamscapes.

On March 2, in the Pulitzer galleries, the Pulitzer and Washington University hosted a panel discussion for graduate students on the artistic practice of William Kentridge. Panelists included: William Kentridge, Artist; John Hoal, Chair of the Urban Design Program and Associate Professor at Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts; Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator at Kemper Art Museum; and Francesca Herndon-Consagra, Senior Curator at the Pulitzer. 

If you view some of Kentridge’s animated films, you can see how fitting it was to discuss his art amidst Dreamscapes, which is filled with recurring dreamlike and hallucinatory imagery. In an Art21 video, Kentridge explains that his characters Felix and Soho came to him in a dream and he later found that they were actually self-portraits, as if not he but his distinct dreaming-self had planned it that way. Most of Kentridge’s works are not intentionally connected to dreaming, though they lend themselves to conversations about topics, such as trauma, memory and the ephemeral, which arise in the current exhibition.

Listen to the rest of this fascinating panel discussion on the Pulitzer’s YouTube channel. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

Visitors at the Dreamscapes opening reception share their thoughts on the exhibition. Artworks they refer to include Do Ho Suh’s Staircase–Pulitzer Version, Kiki Smith’s Pee Body, Wolfgang Tillmans’s Forest (Briol II), Philip Guston’s Dark Room and Edge and Max Klinger’s A Glove.

Last Friday’s opening reception for Dreamscapes was an all-out success. I know we always say that, but it’s always true in my opinion. Hundreds of art enthusiasts roamed the galleries from five to nine, and the gallery assistants actually had to invite many to leave so they could close for the evening.

While there, I took a few videos of visitors sharing their thoughts so far on the exhibition. We’ve done these “In Your Own Words” clips for the last two openings, and it’s been eye-opening to hear what people see on their first visit.

A particular comment from last week, which highlights the Pulitzer experience, involves one visitor’s walk down the hallway on the lower level to discover at the end of it Wolfgang Tillmans’s Forest (Briol II). This print depicts a man with his back to you, walking down a path in the forest. Like him, you discover a path, the hallway, which seems to lead you into unknown territory. When I dream, there’s always the feeling of “what happens next?” and I love how the placement of this piece leaves you with that feeling. The Pulitzer’s architecture is also known to do that.

So what happens next with this exhibition? As always, the Pulitzer will be offering public programming in conjunction with the exhibition and the themes it encapsulates. We will have a Dreamscapes Concert Series and every Saturday at 1pm offer regular programs, including Frame of Reference, Exploring Art and Dreamtime Storytime, a kid-friendly series in which special guests tell stories related to–you guessed it–dreaming.

We’ll also be asking you to share your dreams. As our senior curator Francesca Consagra said in her video introduction, “This exhibition privileges the idea that art and dreaming does serve a purpose. By engaging with a painting, by trying to recall a dream, you may learn a little bit more about yourself.” We hope that you will join us in exploring concepts around dreaming and the artworks on view and, at the same time, learn about what dreams your mind has to offer.

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

Soprano Susan Narucki and violinist David Halen discuss performing Gyorgy Kurtag’s Kafka-Fragmente, after rehearsing for this week’s concerts.

The stylus Concert Series begins tonight and tomorrow night with Gyorgy Kurtag’s Kafka-Fragmente. For more information on these and other concerts at the Pulitzer, visit our concerts page.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The founders of All Along Press talk about printing the concordance texts and demonstrate part of the process. Smudge the dog performs tricks.

When you enter stylus, one of the first things you see is a steel table, with a half-circle cut from it, where a concrete pillar shoots through it and two floors of Pulitzer building. On top of the table are what look like newspapers. You start to read one (yes, you’re allowed to touch them) and it feels like you’re doing so from inside a dream; the text consists of a column of repeating words and what, at first skim, is gobbledygook to either side of it. Here’s a short section from one of these papers:

“No one charged us a penny for our pleasure in…disconcerting. I appear to be strangely distracted and barely…bid to become an action star proper looks a fairly safe bet. Just…and deputy prime minister, has admitted that he changed his…by BBC political editor, Nick Robinson.”

“It’s kind of interesting to think about what sentence might have gone with what paper,” says Courtney Henson, our visitor services manager.

These “concordance texts” have their own unique trajectory in becoming part of stylus. Each week, Ann Hamilton chooses specific words, and with computer software, pulls sentences containing those words from the RSS feeds of eight international newspapers to generate the document. An index of those words is ordered alphabetically down the center of the page so you can see how often they’re mentioned in the collage of articles.

“She’s directing that news around the words this exhibition hovers on,” Courtney says, noting two words that Ann has chosen before: light and listening.

Besides in the Entrance Gallery, concordances are placed on the Mezzanine and near the miked table on the stairs to the Lower Gallery. Gallery assistants invite visitors to read the concordances out loud at these stations as a way to activate the installation and be a part of stylus. (You can see Ann reading a concordance on one of the ladders, at the opening here.)

On the top, right corner of a concordance, next to Ann Hamilton’s name is “All Along Press,” the tag of the printing press that is printing, folding and delivering this weekly for the duration of the exhibition.

“If you come in any Friday afternoon, that’s what we’ll be doing for the next six months,” says Elysia Mann.

Elysia Mann and Steven Brien founded All Along Press, a cooperative printing shop, two and a half years ago on St. Louis’s hopping Cherokee Street, a confluence of art galleries, antique shops and Mexican restaurants. Since Rachel and I worked with them last year on our Urban Alchemy guerrilla ad campaign, they’ve moved down the street to a bigger space to fit their growing enterprise. The concordances are their first long-term printing job that requires so many prints be made within a relatively short amount of time.

“We have a few hours to print a hundred and fifty of them by hand and get them to you guys by the next morning,” explains Steven. It usually takes the printmakers around six hours to complete the project.

Every Friday, Ann emails the two a file of the concordance, which they then have printed out at Kinko’s. That copy is what they use to make a film positive, by imbuing it with baby oil. The baby oil method helps them meet their deadline and also gives the final prints a more handmade feel than an actual film positive, which is what Ann Hamilton wants.

Each week, Ann picks a different shade of ink, to further add to the novelty of each paper, and sometimes Steve and Elysia make their own shade off of what Hamilton has wanted in the past. As with other aspects of stylus–the bell speakers, the paper hands–the concordances have been prescribed a basic structure by Ann Hamilton and then given leeway to evolve as others have a hand in their making.

For  a mere $2, you can own one of these prints, designed by Ann Hamilton and facilitated by our friends at All Along Press.

A visitor examines a concordance in the Entrance Gallery.