As Web Communications Assistant for the Pulitzer, yes, I’m on Facebook a lot, and for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been getting daily updates, invites, and reminders from artists and spaces on one of the most anticipated art events in St. Louis, Open Studios. Even electronically, the excitement is palpable.
When Mad Art founder Ron Buechele wrote in his Facebook status “getting ready for open studio,” I messaged him to find out what getting ready entailed as well as what he thinks the artists’ weekend show-and-tell does for St. Louis.
He replied, “The greatest effect is that the event has the potential to expose an underexposed artist. That, and it humanizes the artists to the general public and takes a little of the mystery out of what we do. I completely revamped my studio from top to bottom, so it has a whole new look and feel, although I am the only one that will know that. I hope that the event draws a large and eager crowd, and personally, that it brings some people to Mad Art who have never been here before.”
To learn more about Open Studios, on Wednesday afternoon, I actually got off the computer and walked next door to our neighbor/the presenter of City-Wide Open Studios, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and spoke with its Assistant Curator, Laura Fried, and curatorial intern Brittni Zotos. Fried plays a major role in organizing the event, including communicating with the hundred-plus artists involved. She explains some details behind Open Studios in this video I took that afternoon:
Zotos talks about her important role in Open Studios:
As Laura Fried mentioned, Open Studios gives people the opportunity to glimpse artists in their natural habitats, and it also can take people to parts of St. Louis they might not have seen otherwise. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it to all the studios this weekend, but I have a few mapped out. Currently, I have a soft spot for a St. Louis art sub-community off of Broadway on Ohio, where you can find a cluster of artists participating in Open Studios–Arcadia studios (Sarah Paulsen, Emily Hemeyer), Gary Passanise, and Floating Laboratories, near a vegetable factory on the Mississippi River.
Wednesday night, I went to the the recently founded Floating Laboratories, the studio of Kevin Harris, to see what was happening there in preparation for the big event. Harris said he might sweep the floor, but really what people will be getting is what his studio would look like with or without a tour of people coming through–just like the Discovery Channel. None of Harris’ work is sampled in CAMSTL’s preview show, because it’s all too big. If you’d like an idea of what you might find there, watch this video of Harris working on his “Snuffleupagus,” with a base of wood and bubble wrap:
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