Art under the Arch - revitalized art scene in St. Louis, Missouri

Art in America, July, 2001 by Ann Wilson Lloyd

Artists in Town

The Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Fellowship has been instrumental in bringing nationally recognized artists to St. Louis to exhibit and teach. Catherine Opie was a Freund fellow at W.U. this season. The painter Michael Byron was a Freund fellow who arrived in 1994 and stayed on to become head of the university's painting department. Byron's stylistically varied paintings--linked by what Holland Cotter called the "theatrical pull of a dream," they range from collaged images, text or figuration to diligently reproduced photographs--are regularly shown in New York, Chicago and Boston, as well as in Europe. He describes the St. Louis art scene as slowly improving. "My zip code is employment-determined," he says. "But in terms of having the time and space to work, St. Louis can certainly accommodate you. There's a general interest in renovating the downtown for lofts and studios, which is at least a tacit acknowledgment that there are interesting artists around." Dawn Marie Guernsey is a W.U. professor of painting and drawing who, like Byron, is a transplant (she arrived in 1985). Her intricate figurative paintings reference personal and age-old narratives such as the Tower of Babel and Grimm's fairy tales.

With three major fine-arts programs in the area (in addition to W.U. and S.L.U., Webster University also has a program), plus several programs at area community colleges, a substantial number of young artists graduate each year. Tom Friedman and Laylah Ali were both Guernsey's students, and she vicariously enjoys their national visibility. There's a push to keep young graduates in town. One clever scheme involved a property swap with developers that gained the university studio lofts in formerly vacant buildings to be allotted to qualified artist alumni, plus a new downtown exhibition space, the Des Lee Gallery.

The nonprofit gallery is directed by Philip Slein, who ran the gallery at St. Louis Community College before coming to W.U. Slein's own paintings are loose, transparent, richly colorful oil-on-panel abstractions. He features the work of St. Louis artists such as Tom Huck, Lisa Bulawsky and Lisa Allen, all of whom teach at W.U. Huck's large-scale, highly detailed woodcuts, printed in black and white, have wildly comic, often crude subjects. He also shows in Boston, Chicago, New York and elsewhere. The gallery first showed Allen in 1998. She works with bars of colored soap combined with things like rubber tubing to make quirky, modish-design-inspired objects. Bulawsky, working in the public realm, has pasted her large-scale prints, which feature manipulated advertising images, onto boarded-up downtown buildings. Her bright and busy montages juxtapose painterly passages and random patterns.

Huck and Bulawsky are two of the many St. Louis artists who work with W.U.'s Island Press, founded in 1977 as the Collaborative Print Work Shop. An etching press with a 5-by-10-foot bed draws international artists. Master printer Maryanne Ellison Simmons says the press invites only two artists per year because the projects tend to be ambitious and time-consuming. Prints have been produced by Juan Sanchez, Hung Liu, Yizhak Elyashiv and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, among others. Simmons set up her offshoot Wildwood Press to accommodate artists who want to return. During a recent 11-day visit, painter Michael Berkhemer, from Amsterdam, produced 50 collograph/ monoprints, 23 of which measured 5 by 7 feet.