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Visitors at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts give their impressions at the opening reception for stylus: a project by ann hamilton.

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On May 15, the Pulitzer celebrated the culmination of Transformation with an art walk that showcased the work of each program. In the video above, visitors, participants and organizers talk about the different programs and locations for the Transformation Project Walk.

The Transformation Project Walk sites will be on view until June 5, as the Pulitzer staff prepares for a final Urban Alchemy event. Perhaps after that, we’ll have time to process the assorted layers of the T-series and all that happened during the Walk. As a Pulitzer camerawoman (we use a Flip), I try to focus on perspectives and moments that expose some of the big picture of events, some of which don’t always make it into footage. As I followed the site map on May 15, I saw a range of reactions. Here are a couple of times that stood out to me:

1. While riding the shuttle from Bruno David Gallery to Hyde Park, I met two people who came to the event to see what was happening in the North St. Louis neighborhood. One was a man, who rehabbed in Hyde Park in the 1980s. He had more stories than could fit into the ride, including the tale of how his house burned down. The other visitor was a woman who grew up in Hyde Park during the 1950s and went to Holy Trinity Catholic School. It was the first time she had seen her childhood home in years.

2. At the Woolworth Building, I saw James, an Urban Renewal participant, shake hands and talk with strangers about his chair, as if he regularly hosted a gallery. After an interaction with one man, James looked as if the breath was taken out of him. I asked him how he was, and he said he was moved by all the visitors’ compliments and that perhaps he’ll continue refurbishing chairs, since people liked his chair so much.

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Panelist Paul Ha, Director of Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, explains his relationship with Food and that food and art have always gone together.

If you’ve been paying attention to our Transformation site, you know that tomorrow the Pulitzer is hosting “Food, Art, and Community,” its final panel discussion in the series fired by Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark. This week’s topic relates to Gordon Matta-Clark’s fondness for using cooking in his artwork and the legendary Food of 1970s SoHo . Panelists will discuss how combining art and food movements can lead to social progress. You can RSVP to this event on Facebook.

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Visitor Services Manager Courtney Henson drives around North St. Louis and talks about developing the program Exploring Art for Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark.

By coupling tours of the Pulitzer’s galleries with those of sites in the vicinity, Exploring Art aims to invoke connections between Gordon Matta-Clark’s work and our community and an enhanced understanding of each. Docents for this program will accompany visitors on their excursions to stir conversation and encourage personal experience. You have a choice of three specially designed tours: 1) the galleries, 2) the galleries plus the downtown oasis Citygarden, or 3) the galleries and a trip around Midtown and Old North, which ends with a bite at our friends’, Urban Studio Cafe.

The third (and second to last) session of Exploring Art is swiftly approaching. April 17 is the date, but if you want to attend a tour that Saturday, you need to RSVP by April 10 to our visitor services manager. For details on registering, visit the event page on our main website.

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Ward Stare, Resident Conductor for the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, talks about Ingram Marshall’s Fog Tropes, in front of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Bingo. Stare will conduct Fog Tropes for the concert tomorrow, March 10, 2010. (Tickets for tomorrow’s concert are SOLD OUT.)

One of them, Naheem Houston, is diligently pursuing his dreams of helping youth avoid the path he once followed while finishing up coursework at Florissant Valley Community College. The following are words from Naheem.

Naheem Houston describes what he likes and what he doesn’t really like about Urban Alchemy.

Naheem Houston:

I was looking forward to last Tuesday night since the Pulitzer sent me the invitation. I love and appreciate everybody that had anything to do with the success of the Staging Old Masters ensemble. The experience was truly a blessing that I will forever cherish, and the food was always a plus. I enjoyed meeting up with old friends and conversating about how life has been since we went our separate ways. I wish all the actors and staff could have made it out, just so I could see the look on everyone’s face in unity. We were the first in the pilot program, so we made history.

Pulitzer visitors talk about Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark.

Thank you for sharing, everyone.

We beseech you too, dear readers, to tell us what you think of Urban Alchemy, in the galleries and online, here in this very blog’s “comments” and on our Urban Alchemy Facebook group, and wherever else you want to talk about it. As they say, “We want to hear from you!”

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Art handlers move a re-creation of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Garbage Wall from a construction space into the Pulitzer galleries, before adding the final touches of trash to its exterior.

Finally, here’s a glimpse at the Garbage Wall we’ve been blogging about for several weeks. Look closely at the video of it being moved into the building, and perhaps you’ll see a sneaker you threw out during bulk trash week.

Visit Transformation’s landing page for a video of the initial assembling of the Wall, which features Jane Crawford talking about its history.

Art handlers install Gordon Matta-Clark’s Wallspaper.

With titles such as “Pier In/Out” and “Reality Properties: Fake Estates,” Matta-Clark is known for his fondness for word play. “Wallspaper” is another example. Wallspaper consists of photographs of the interior walls of dilapidated buildings, which have been reproduced as colored prints and stapled to a wall, playing with the idea of wall paper.

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Art handlers install Gordon Matta-Clark’s Bingo for Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark.

Above is a preview to one of Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark’s star pieces, Bingo. In 1974, Matta-Clark severed these hunks of facade from a condemned house along the Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, NY, which became environmentally infamous for 21,000 tons of toxic waste that was buried beneath it by a chemical company. Matta-Clark moved the facade to Artpark, an important space for the Land Art movement and the site of a previous industrial waste dump.

You can view Matta-Clark’s documentary video of Bingo on UbuWeb Film.

You can view Bingo in person this Friday for our exhibition’s opening reception, 5-9pm.

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Manager of Community Engagement Lisa Harper Chang describes ideas behind outreach programs for the past exhibition, Ideal (Dis-) Placements, and for the upcoming Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark.

Looking back on last Spring’s Let’s Look and Staging Old Masters, Lisa Harper Chang considers the transformative power of art and how it will again be harnessed for the highly anticipated Urban Alchemy. The Pulitzer has already begun partnering with schools and artists for this exhibition, which opens October 30, and is planning a series of panel discussions on themes in Matta-Clark’s art. You can learn more about these and other exciting new programs on our budding website Transformation.

Transformation, tangible and abstract, was the essence of much of Matta-Clark’s work. With Garbage Wall, he reaped castoffs of everyday life and made them functional, visually compelling, and community building. He fried Polaroid pictures in Photo-Fry, intersecting the transfiguration that occurs in cooking, in film development, and in artistic creation. For Food, an artist-run/owned restaurant, Matta-Clark and his SoHo peers turned dinner into performance and a common space for neighbors. Most notably, he asked spectators to reevaluate the way they view architectural spaces, by cutting parts of buildings away.

Matta-Clark’s activism through creative acts easily relates to the activities on Transformation. For the site’s “Your St. Louis,” St. Louisans will be asked to relay stories and offer photos of their urban landscape and to perhaps, by learning what others have to share, further understand and value their city. In “Local Artists,” read how Robert Longyear and Jenny Murphy use art as a way to foster community, empower youth, and prompt questions about the value of discarded objects. Hear from North St. Louis’ Holy Trinity students on how they see their community as opposed to how it’s defined by outsiders.

Matta-Clark strived for inclusivity in his work. Besides being a resource on how art can foster community, we hope St. Louis residents will feel free to contribute to Transformation, in online discourse and “Your St. Louis” projects.