• Art Organization: Anne T. Makeever, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

NAN Makes MoneyBags

Artist and former New Art in the Neighborhood (NAN) student Stan Chisholm recently led a NAN workshop. During the workshop, Stan introduced the students to a collaborative project he has been working on for the past year. Called MoneyBags, the project “reevaluates wealth, worth and currency.”

Joined by Stan’s fellow artist and collaborator Lisa Kim, NAN students were invited to think about art as currency and created actual money bags filled with objects of their own making. Students screenprinted designs, sewed their own bags, and created a wealth of drawings, art items, and secret messages to include in their bags. The money bags were designed to be placed in public spaces for unsuspecting passersby to discover and keep.

Some students gave their bags to Stan, asking him to place them around the city, while other students took them home to leave in their own neighborhoods.  Those taking their money bags home were asked to take photos of them in their new locations and send them to Stan. He plans to post the photos on his MoneyBags website.  You can visit the site to learn more about the project and see pictures of the money bags NAN students created: http://www.dropmoneybags.blogspot.com/

Keep an eye out for a Money Bag near you!

• Art Organization: Lynna Borden, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Look and listen: Stephen Prina’s Concerto

The world premiere of Stephen Prina’s Concerto for Modern, Movie, and Pop Music for Ten Instruments and Voice will take place this Thursday, March 18th, at the Contemporary.   Just a few days ago we had a nine-foot grand concert Steinway, which is truly stunning, installed in the performance space.  At the moment, a rehearsal for the event is taking place downstairs and, I assure you, this music is worth hearing.  

Prina is not only a talented visual artist, his photographs, drawings, and video work appear in our Main Galleries, but he’s also an extremely talented musician, having released albums both under his own name and as part of the band The Red Krayola.  His Concerto combines an amazing complexity of sounds from flutes, violins, clarinets, and more, with his soothing voice merging with and complementing the score.  Get ready for a night that will engage your senses both visually and aurally.  We hope to see you there.

Doors open at 7:00 pm and the concert begins at 8:00 pm.  Admission is free; seating is limited.

An Introduction: For the Blind Man…

Anthony Huberman, Chief Curator of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis introduces the new exhibition For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there. Click here for further information on the exhibition.

• Art Organization: Amy Broadway, The Pulitzer

A Neighbor’s Look into Open Studios

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:

• Art Organization: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

The Saint Louis Stop

Tuesday, March 31 was a busy day of programming for the Contemporary. Around noon, the Winnebago for Jeremy Deller’s project: It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq pulled up in front of the Vintage Vinyl record store in the Delmar Loop area—pulling behind it a wreckage of a car that was bombed in Baghdad in 2007. Visiting St. Louis were Artist Jeremy Deller who conceived of the project, Jonathan Harvey (an Iraq war veteran and recently demobilized Psychological Opera­tions platoon sergeant), and Esam Pasha (an Iraqi refugee, artist, and former translator for the Chief Advisor in the British Embassy of Baghdad). Also on the trip were Nato Thompson from Creative Time, Benjamin Brown (documentary extraordinaire) and Lonnie Cooper (road manager).  They provided a forum where they encouraged unrehearsed discussions about Iraq in a non partisan open atmosphere. It was great to see active soldiers currently serving our country engage in discussions about the present circumstance and the future of Iraq.  More can be read about on their excellent blog.

After being on the Loop at the Vintage Vinyl from 12–5 pm, the discussion continued at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis 6-8 pm. We also want to thank Matt Strauss of White Flag Projects who hosted the St. Louis style BBQ to feed our tired traveled visiting guests. We also owe much thanks to the unofficial mayor of the Loop Joe Edwards of Blueberry Hill for making this day go so smoothly.

• Art Organization: Laura Fried, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Tris Vonna-Michell: Live From The Front Room

Last night British artist Tris Vonna-Michell delivered a dizzying fifteen minute performance in the Contemporary’s Front Room. Some of our guests were still seated in our new lobby cum living room, engrossed in conversation with Jonathan Harvey and Esam Pasha, two guest experts on the road with Conversations About Iraq. Meanwhile, the rest of the crowd crammed in to The Front Room gallery to catch Tris. Clutching a stack of 500 A4 photocopies, blank side out, he began to fire off an improvised narrative, dropping single sheets on the ground as if turning pages in a book. The result was a kind of vertiginous autobiography, told through stream-of-consciousness fragments, anecdotes, mappings, and repeat descriptions. Moving from Japan to Berlin, Tris pulled us through an abstracted landscape and personal history, which ended, very simply, with a conclusion that the story, however labrynthian and interconnected, could never be complete.

In the space now sits those strewn papers on the floor, illuminated at intervals with the projection of clicking white slides. On the wall sits a pair of headphones from which, standing among the fragmented photocopies, one can listen to a recording of last night’s story.

• Art Organization: Jennifer Gaby, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Facebook post from William Gass to Marie Heilich

Re: Between Beach Ball and Rubber Raft
March 26 at 5:53pm

Hi Marie,

How’s Vienna? You have no idea how much I miss it! Thanks for the kind words about the exhibition. I’m really happy and excited about it and getting to do it.

Well to answer your questions, I was asked to curate a Front Room project by Laura Fried and Anthony Huberman. This is largely because I won the Frieze Writer’s Prize last year, but doing the internship there also had a lot to do with it. By interning, they got to see how I wrote about different artists and the kind of artists I was interested in, and I got a chance to prove myself to people who really do stuff in the art world (doing the intern grunt work with a smile on my face!).

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