Unless you’ve been under a rock, you  know that the largest annual gathering for the field of printmaking is happening right now in St. Louis. Yesterday, I met one of the out-of-town speakers for the SGCI Conference next to Bruno David Gallery across from the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.

Swoon, a Brooklyn-based artist, has been installing print murals around town for the conference, and the Pulitzer worked with her to install the one yesterday in Grand Center. Swoon (Caledonia Dance Curry) is the recipient of the Community Engagement Award and is giving a talk today for the SGCI Conference at 4:30pm at the Chase Park Plaza.

We’re also very pleased to announce the Pulitzer’s very own Senior Curator, Francesca Herndon-Consagra, is being awarded with the title Honorary Member of the Council by SGCI. Read about Francesca’s extensive achievements on the conference website.

Francesca Herndon-Consagra, Senior Curator at the Pulitzer, describes Dreamscapes, which opened on February 11. For a longer version of this introduction, visit dreamscapes.pulitzerarts.org.

Do dreams mean anything? Are they just erratic firing of synapses, or do they actually tell us something about ourselves and our experiences? What was going though Philip Guston’s head when he painted Dark Room, and what is it that makes something surreal, nightmarish or simply dreamy? Over the next few months, the Pulitzer will investigate the significance of dreams and art through its current exhibition Dreamscapes.

It’s been almost a month since the Dreamscapes opening reception, and the Pulitzer is just beginning to scratch the surface of the dream-themed exhibition. As many of you art enthusiasts in St. Louis know, the Pulitzer typically has two exhibitions per year, and in the time that an exhibition is on view, the Pulitzer, as part of its identity as a “laboratory”, investigates themes in the exhibition through customized events and programs.

For the duration of Dreamscapes, the Pulitzer is offering free public programs, every Saturday at 1 p.m., which include art-making, storytelling and discussion-based tours among other activities. Next month, we’ll add dream matrices to the mix, and as usual, our team of social workers will test how art can empower people and build community, beginning with The Dream Journal Project (find out more here). 

On April 7, senior curator Francesca Herndon-Consagra will moderate a panel discussion, in which psychologists from different traditions interpret artworks as they would dreams. (Apparently, stairs in dreams have been interpreted in many ways.) You’ll be able to see an archive of this and all Dreamscapes happenings on an interactive Dreamscapes web catalogue, where you’ll also be able to virtually explore the exhibition in the Ando building.

If you haven’t seen the exhibition yet, this Saturday is a great opportunity to do so, since the curator will lead visitors on a journey through the building:

Saturdays at 1 p.m.

Gallery Talk with Senior Curator Francesca Herndon-Consagra
March 12, 2011
Senior curator Francesca Herndon-Consagra takes visitors on a walk through the exhibition. Experience the shuffling and reassembling of pictorial themes and fictions that evoke a journey from one dream to the next. At the same time, learn about the artists and the thought behind each work’s composition.   

Social Dream Matrix
April 9, May 14 and June 11, 2011
Art therapist Shelly Goebl-Parker and artists Hap Phillips and Nita Turnage lead social dream matrices. The act of dreaming is normally a solitary one. Through social dream matrices, it becomes a shared experience, building a small temporary community when participants enter a dream matrix together. Sharing dreams in this way enables the discovery of new meaning and significance in dreams. The dream matrices are followed by art making as a way to reflect on newfound discoveries, reflections and inspirations

Frame of Reference
Every first Saturday of the month
Members of the St. Louis community from diverse backgrounds, from psychologists to poets to art historians to social workers, talk about their favorite work of art from their personal perspectives.

Dreamtime Storytime
Every fourth Saturday of the month
In conjunction with the exhibition Dreamscapes, the Pulitzer hosts Dreamtime Storytime, a series in which writers, artists, readers and dreamers share stories related to dreams to people of all ages. Among others, storytellers include librarians from the St. Louis Public Library and members of the literary arts center StudioSTL.

Exploring Art: Dreamscapes and Ando’s Architecture
Every third Saturday of the month
During these open tours, docents encourage group discussions on how the artworks on view and architecture relate to one another as well as how the visitors individually relate to the exhibition. Space is limited. RSVP to Visitor Services Manager Courtney Henson at chenson@pulitzerarts.org.

The Pulitzer will announce additional event details on www.pulitzerarts.org as Dreamscapes continues.

The Pulitzer is open and free to the public Wednesdays from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Pulitzer is located at 3716 Washington Boulevard, St. Louis, MO 63108.  For more information about the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, visit www.pulitzerarts.org or call 314-754-1850.

Internationally-known photography icon Larry Fink will give a free gallery talk on Saturday, February 19 at 11 a.m. at the Sheldon Art Galleries in conjunction with the exhibit, Larry Fink: Attraction and Desire – 50 Years in Photography. This overview of work by Fink includes over 120 photographs spanning his 50-year career and runs through May 21.

Visit www.thesheldon.org for more details about this major retrospective.

On view thru November 28, 2010, the exhibition at the Front Room, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, presents an installation of the Belgium-based organization, Agency, alongside a series of photographs by Miriam Böhm.

Agency, the invention of Kobe Matthys, serves as a platform for highly systematic investigations that make formal inquiry into issues of authorship, copyright, and intellectual property. Existing as a compendium amassed and catalogued by Matthys, Agency gathers facts, subjects, objects, collectives, humans and non-humans to perform speculations and conduct Agency’s exhibitions. In this installation, titled Assembly, Agency displays evidence for the copyright infringement of a certain artist’s renderings of Place des Terreaux – Fontaine Bartholdi et Hôtel de Ville, wherein dubious distribution was enacted. “Thing 001408 (Lyone (Rhône)” bears witness in the Front Room, as testament to the problematic events that take place in the realm of artistic property.

Miriam Böhm, Berlin-based artist, presents a series of recent photographs that, like Agency’s Assembly, demonstrate shifting events of perspective. Böhm’s process begins with photographing marble slabs and faux marble paintings, followed by staging the prints against a textured backdrop, which she then re-photographs – producing a different image altogether. The work emerges, much like the marble slab itself, as a layered tablet of materiality – a compression of pictorial illusion, revealing the limitations of representation.

Image Credits:

Agency & Miriam Böhm, Installation in The Front Room, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2010. Photos by Alex Elmestad.

London-based filmmaker John Smith screens Lost Sound at the Front Room today thru December 5, 2010.  From his compendium of over 40 videos, films and installations, which he presents across a variety of platforms including movie theatres, exhibition spaces and televisions, Lost Sound is specific case of film that obscures the roles of representation and abstraction, documentary and fiction.

Developing this specific kind of cinematic language, Lost Sound composes footage taken on the streets of East London: the subjects are pieces of discarded audio tape inhabiting barb wire fences, tree branches, and other miscellaneous locations within the city’s sidelines.  In collaboration with sound artist Graeme Mille, the ambient sound is skillfully mixed with audio data from the remnant music tapes found on-site, which was re-recorded and inserted back into the film’s sound design. Smith and Mille layer image and sound into an elaborate experience for the viewer to de-code, addressing traditional roles of environment and viewer, perception and narrative.

Image Credit:

John Smith, Flag Mountain (Southern Nicosia, looking towards the border with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), 2010. HD video, color, sound, seamless loop (8 minutes cycle). Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery.

Part of my role at Saint Louis University’s Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MOCRA) is coordinating our public outreach, which encompasses publicity, tours, educational programming, and much more. A stimulating, and often fun, consequence of this aspect of my job is collaborating with my counterparts at other venues and institutions.

This collaboration takes many forms. Some of it is geographically based. Just this morning, in fact, I attended a meeting of the PR representatives of the arts organizations and other entities in the Grand Center district. We have been meeting regularly for at least six years now, an outgrowth of some ad hoc meetings among the galleries and museums of the district to plan a gallery walk. (That collaboration was in turn preceded by joint efforts surrounding the 2001 meeting of the American Association of Museums in St. Louis.) It was apparent that if Grand Center were to establish itself as the “Intersection of Art and Life” in St. Louis, we needed to pull together and coordinate our efforts  and pool our resources. It’s an ongoing effort to be sure, but with a number of notable successes.

Sometimes the collaboration is based on common interests. Taking a cue from the Grand Center model, several of the not-for-profit galleries and museums in St. Louis began meeting to discuss a challenge common to us all: how to promote awareness of, and draw visitors to, our venues, when it seemed like all of our accustomed media outlets were disappearing, and a bewildering array of alternative channels were taking their place. The blog you are reading now is a product of this collaboration, which came to be known as Saint Louis Art Map.

The visual arts community in St. Louis, like those in many other markets, has been affected by the seismic shifts in the media terrain over the past five or so years. The accustomed ecosystem, in which reviews not only stimulate public interest in an exhibition (and hopefully contribute to the public discourse about art), but also lend credibility to a venue and help attract artists and lenders–this ecosystem has been disrupted, and as happens in the natural world, the viability and adaptability of the art community are not entirely certain, yet are certainly not entirely without hope.

On the downside, the sole remaining major daily newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, no longer has a full-time visual arts critic, although it does still periodically publish exhibition previews and reviews. (This observation is not an indictment of the talented staff members from other disciplines and stringers who contribute these previews and reviews when they are given the opportunity. Indeed, MOCRA’s James Rosen exhibition was recently reviewed in the Post-Dispatch.) Notably, its weekend events supplement rarely includes mention of any but the biggest of blockbuster exhibitions.

The weekly Riverfront Times, which once allotted space for full-length reviews, now limits itself to “capsule” reviews which don’t allow for much more than a quick summary of what is on display. This is a shame, since reviewer Jessica Baran is a perceptive and eloquent critic.

On the upside, there are still quarters of the St. Louis media committed to in-depth consideration of the visual arts, including independent radio station KDHX-FM’s “Arts Interview” program; St. Louis Public Radio (KWMU-FM)’s weekly “Cityscape” program, and periodic features on PBS affiliate KETC’s “Living St. Louis.” The West End Word still publishes regular exhibition reviews.

We’ve also seen some new outlets and initiatives in recent years, some from institutions and others from grassroots origins. The online-only St. Louis Beacon posts regular visual art reviews from Ivy Cooper. Two collaborative ventures include the Saint Louis Art Map blog you are reading now, and the experiment (ever to be repeated?) of bringing in a visiting art critic to produce long-form reviews of several exhibitions at various venues, sponsored jointly by the Beacon, KETC, and KWMU. Boots Contemporary Art Space has given us five issues of the biannual Boot Print (here’s hoping that we’ll see more). Art St. Louis sponsors a blog that gives special attention to local and regional artists, while Art-Patrol St. Louis keeps current on exhibition openings and events.

While it’s an “older” format by social media standards, special mention must be made of the Critical Mass listserv, which has been going strong since February 2000. It’s an outgrowth of an earlier collaborative effort that produced a print gallery guide for several years. Beyond being a place to announce exhibitions and events, Critical Mass has seen some thoughtful, sometimes heated discussion about the state of the visual arts in the St. Louis region.

Other sources, while not focused exclusively on the visual arts, have been consistent in bringing attention to the gallery and museum scene. Where Magazine – St. Louis regularly highlights exhibitions in the area for the benefit of out-of-town visitors. Sauce Magazine makes room in each monthly issue to feature at least one or two current exhibitions, while St. Louis Magazine‘s Look/Listen blog keeps tabs on the visual arts. Culture Surfer has established a niche by presenting video content, including artist interviews. A number of arts calendar sites help get the word out about exhibition openings, notably the Regional Arts Commission’s Arts Zipper.

St. Louis has a toehold in the blogosphere* as well. There are institutional blogs, such as the shared blog of Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, Kemper Art Museum News, White Flag Projects blog, and MOCRA’s own blog. On the (all-too-neglected) Illinois side of the river, the Schmidt Art Center launched a blog this past March. There are a number of individual bloggers covering the St. Louis art scene as well.

This roll call is not an exhaustive survey of the current terrain–I haven’t even tried to explore the role of Facebook, Twitter, and other entrants in the field of social media. Feel free to mention additional resources in the comments section to this post.

At present, though, I find it encouraging that many people from varied points of origin on the visual arts spectrum are venturing into the void left by the Post-Dispatch and other media heavyweights. Institutions like those who established Saint Louis Art Map wonder what will emerge as the new “measuring sticks” of (professional) critical appraisal, and whether they will help to stabilize the arts ecosystem. At the same time, the atomization of arts criticism and discussion has opened the floor to previously unheard voices and given those voices much wider reach than they ever could have had previously. Hopefully that bodes well for renewed interest and engagement in, and moral and financial support for, the visual arts in the St. Louis region.

* The term “blogosphere” is credited to a much loved and much missed member of the St. Louis arts community, the late Brad Graham. It’s a shame his other suggestion, “blogmos,” didn’t catch on instead.

(This essay was adapted from a post previously published on the MOCRA blog.)

From the Great Rivers Biennial trifecta, Cameron Fuller’s exhibition is comparable to a musical composition based upon familiar tunes. Combining basic melodies of recollection, wanderlust and adventure, the exhibition rekindles the juvenescent enchantment of the natural world. Creating a museum within a museum, Fuller’s exhibition – video, diorama, photography, and installation – brings the viewer into a world beyond the Contemporary and into the fantasias of imagination.

The Institute for the Perpetuation of Imaginal Processes is assembled from Fuller’s virtuosity of set design, taking cues from theater production to create moments of static cinema. Entering into Fuller’s Institute, the exhibition begins with a contemporary, sci-fi slab of the natural world. Titled As it is, this full-scale diorama displays taxidermy forest animals inhabiting their portion of an astro-turfed earth, roaming at ease under the cover of a starry and geodesic sky. What, at first, may seem akin to the tradition of a natural history museum, is Fuller re-appropriating the conventions of historicizing presentation. Creating this fantastical version of the natural world, Fuller causes the audience to conjure up a story of their own. As it is revives the notion of the frontier, claiming its existence within our own imaginations.

Through the templates of diorama and performance, Fuller aims to preserve the storytelling apparatus, creating a platform for its preservation and transformation. His technique facilitates a self-analytical, self-historicizing reaction – where we can see ourselves more readily from the outside, to realize the ways in which we define our world, the interconnectedness of our ideas, and ways we relate to one another. The Institute for the Perpetuation of Imaginal Processes is on view at the Contemporary until its closing date August 8, 2010. Come by and visit The Institute.

Kathryn Adamchick, an Art/Food organizer, talks about how Art/Food relates to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark and a 1971 pig roast under the Brooklyn Bridge.

As part of the Contemporary’s “Homegrown Summer,” and to celebrate the closing of the Pulitzer’s Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark, the two institutions will together host Art/Food tomorrow, June 5, from 1-4pm. For full event details, please visit our event page.

To get an idea of how this multi-layered event came together, I interviewed one of the key organizers, Anna Poss, Administrative Assistant to the Departments of Curatorial and Community Engagement at the Pulitzer.

AB: What has your role been for Art/Food?

AP: I have been working with Kathryn Adamchick, an independent art education consultant, and Alex Elmestad, from Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, in developing and planning this event. We wanted to create a collaborative event that represented the themes of our respective shows. For the Contemporary and their Great Rivers Biennial, the goal is to feature local and sustainable food. For the Pulitzer, the aim of the event is to incorporate the ideals of Gordon Matta-Clark from his restaurant Food and his performance pieces that incorporated food, like the pig roast he had under the Brooklyn Bridge. Food and art both have this amazing capability of bringing people together from diverse backgrounds and uniting them. Art/Food really highlights this connection and celebrates it in a way that is rarely done. Read the rest of this entry »

Greg Stimac is a Chicago-based artist who currently whose solo exhibition of work is currently on view at White Flag Projects. Below is an interview I did with Greg, where he discusses his artistic process, the White Flag show, and some of the themes that recur in his work.

Lynna Borden: I’m interested in the idea of the photographs depicting dead bugs accumulated on small Plexiglas sheets attached to your car. Can you discuss the origins of this project and where these works fit into your oeuvre?

Greg Stimac: Three years ago, I was with my friend Billy Joyce in Portland, Oregon. We had just driven up from Oakland, California and the front of my car was covered with bugs and dirt from the drive. We taped some pieces of mat board to my bumper and drove to Chicago. Most of the debris just flaked off by the time we arrived and we forgot about it. After some time I started thinking about how to bring that idea into photography. I settled on using Plexiglas sheets fastened to the grill with bailing wire.

Untitled (Chicago to Memphis to Little Rock) was the first one made in the series. Arriving in Little Rock at night I pulled over, removed the Plexi, connected a flatbed scanner to my cigarette lighter and made a scan at roadside with the lid of the scanner removed making the background of the image black. It worked out that the black of the image was actually the dark of the night sky.

I enjoyed making photographs that were composed by driving and the road itself, and not really knowing what imagery would emerge. All I could control was the time of night/day, season and rate of speed. I imagined the process to be somewhat akin to the collodion process of old, where the photographer coated their glass plates, photographed and developed in the field.

LB: Travel and cars, specifically, are featured directly or indirectly in many of your artworks, including most of the work in the White Flag show. Would you discuss how the automobile figures into your process as both a means of production and as a motif?

GS: To me the car is just as important an instrument as the camera. I often make work that features automobiles and the road because it is something very present and close to me, it has become part of my lifestyle.

LB: Do you think being a first-generation American has much to do with your perspective on American culture?

GS: Not so much. I was born and raised in Ohio (the heart if it all).

LB: Do you consider your work to be documentary or autobiographical in any way?

GS: I think about documentary photography and the work may have some documentary attributes, but often in more of a ridiculous, mundane, and playful way such as in the series’ Bottle of Piss and Mowing the Lawn.

LB: Do you think road photography and other road narratives as an inherently masculine subject? Do you ever consider your work as being gendered in any meaningful way?

GS: History shows us many woman photographers who engage in this mode of photography. Dorothea Lange for one.

LB: Is your work dependent upon being American and in America?

GS: It’s where I live and work right now. I can’t tell what I’d be making if I lived elsewhere, but why would I? America is a fascinating place.

LB: Do you see your work as any kind of critical commentary on American culture?

GS: I suppose at times certain works carry those layers more than others, such as Bison Silhouette, which is represented in the White Flag show. I had been thinking about the vast herds of bison that had once roamed the Great Plains and the West, now absent except places such as Yellowstone National Park and the occasional meat ranch. I came across this black rusting metal cutout of a bison positioned in the landscape along Hwy 20 in the Methow Valley in north central Washington state, and to me it sadly represented that negative space.

LB: The work in the White Flag exhibition was made over the last several years. Is there anything you’re working on currently that you can discuss?

GS: I’d like to do some aerial video work this summer.

Greg Stimac is on view through May 22, 2010. For more information on this exhibition and upcoming events, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also the curator of Newtonland, the current exhibition at White Flag Projects. I had the pleasure of interviewing Michelle on the morning of the show’s opening; this is the final of installment of that interview.

Lynna Borden (White Flag Intern): Did you and Brad make your piece specifically for the show and did you do it before or after you found the other artists?

Michelle Grabner: We’ve been making mobiles for some time and they always include some of my static silverpoint drawings. We like the contradiction between drawings comprised of silverpoint on panel and something vernacular, in this case, aluminum sections of bleacher seating, which implies a kind of spectatorship. So they’re formal, there’s mathematical proportion being played out and so forth, but there’s always this collision between something vernacular and recognizable in terms of material, and then degrees of abstraction.

So we’ve been working with those collisons for a long time. For the piece here, we were drawn to the structural space and the I-beams articulating the physical space and volume of White Flag Projects. Again, this work is more of a hanging screen than a mobile. What I really like about this piece and how it echoes the main space of White Flag is that you have these secessions of I-beams that horizontally dissect the volume of the space, and then you have the suspensions of these horizontal bleacher sections that echo the I-beams. I like to see it as a metaphorical gesture of flattening out the space that is White Flag Projects.

LB: It’s interesting that you talk about spectatorship because the piece really does change the way you view the rest of the show. You can only enter from the left side of the gallery and if you’re standing on the right, you’re forced to look through this kind of screen.

MG: Yep, it was funny because my concern was that it was going to be much more obtrusive or opaque. That the viewer wasn’t going to be able to penetrate it, but you’re right, to get a clear view of the work you do have to be in one space or the other. You can see work through the horizontal stretches of the bleachers, but not clearly, so you start playing with strikingly horizontals frames.

LB: Do you think that doing this show and working in this space will inform or influence what you do next?

MG: Well, I can tell you that it already has influenced my new work. In the past, the mobiles were true mobiles, where things were moving in multi-directions, balanced out and so forth. We’re working on a piece for New York, a show that will open in April that elaborates on the piece here though, it’s more suspended sculpture than mobile. There are also some architectural elements and references involved in the new works that come directly from working through Newtonland.

LB: Thank you so much for your time!