Landscape architect Nelson Byrd Woltz successfully created an environmentally friendly space to display sculpture, preserve nature, and incorporate the city’s rich, geographical history.  A unique aspect to the design of Citygarden is the reference to elements of St. Louis’s natural history.  The landscape is divided into three bands, each representing geographic features of the area: the River Bluffs, the Floodplain, and the River Terrace.  The extraordinary sculpture garden consists of 23 modern and contemporary sculptures in all, including works by George Rickey, Aristide Maillol, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Mark di Suvero.  Visitors can explore the works as they walk along the terrace, wander down the tortuous path, or as some young enthusiasts prefer, climb over the sculptures.  On the Eastern end of the park is another magnificent sight, the classic view of the Old Court House framed by the Arch.  

West of the park, Richard Serra’s long standing sculpture, Twain, presents an interesting contrast.  Until my visit to Citygarden, I had only seen the venerated Serra sculpture from the street.  However, as I walked through the dwarfing interior, I was confronted with graffiti messages reading “get rid of this,” written across the large slabs of steel.  Twain, among many of Serra’s other works, is controversial, but walking through this sculpture offers a unique experience with St. Louis’s landscape.

The 75s at the Kemper Art Museum, from Flickr

A lot has been written lately about museums and their presence on Twitter and Facebook and other social media venues; in St. Louis, there is a great variety of levels of social media engagement among the arts institutions. On the one hand there’s the Saint Louis Art Museum, with nary a Facebook page to speak of – and yet, as one of my colleagues there has noted, setting up a simple Google Alert reveals that people are absolutely engaged with them online, whether it be from YouTube videos or blog posts about a class visit or public program – clearly the Saint Louis Art Museum has a social media presence even if it is “unofficial.” At Laumeier Sculpture Park, they now regularly review Flickr to find pictures of visitors illegally climbing all over the artworks-a mildly funny, if troubling, instance of social media exposing visitor behavior. On the other end of things, 2buildings1blog.org, featuring posts from both the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, was an early foray into museum blogging and remains a unique format and viable platform for both institutions. Almost every space associated with this blog now has a Facebook presence of some sort, and a few spots, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum included, now started using a Twitter account.

There reason why every art space in town is taking a slightly different approach to these things, at least in part, is because social media is not just something to do because it exists, but should be used as a tool to help connect existing or new audiences with the art-related experiences and education that we offer both virtually and in real life. When it comes to social media and museums/galleries, the real question to ask is – how do these online activities relate back to the mission, and audience, for each? At the core of the mission of the Kemper Art Museum is the idea of “connecting art to contemporary life,” and I’m sure there are innovative ways to achieve this through social media that we haven’t arrived at yet-while this is something that am constantly trying to refine and improve at the Kemper, I don’t want to claim that I am any kind of expert.

How do you see museums and other art spaces fitting into your life online? Do you have any suggestions for things that we could do to strengthen those interactions? How could this blog even be a hub for arts and social media in St. Louis? What social media applications do you use, and why?…