This Saturday: Transformation Project Walk

Trinity and Sheridan reiterate their demands for "We Demand"; Holy Trinity Catholic School students map their neighborhood in Hyde Park; Theaster Gates explains what "the Master plan" is about. This Saturday, 2010 Whitney Biennial winner Theaster Gates' exhibition will open as part of the "Transformation Project Walk," and Holy Trinity Catholic School will showcase related works by its students.

Over the past few weeks, I've notified all you activists of panel discussions at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. These discussions sprung from the Transformation series and largely focused on how art can encourage social change. While all this discussing has been going on within the Ando building, the Pulitzer has been putting the panelists' ideas to the test by doing a lot of doing within the community.

This Saturday, the Pulitzer will host the Transformation Project Walk, a chain of exhibits, which represent the achievements of this spring's programs. Delights include refurbished furniture by Employment Connection clients, a display on sustainable design from Construction Careers Center, an exhibition of salvaged urban relics and blueprints for Hyde Park by children who live there. There will be a free shuttle service and a closing reception in the Pulitzer's courtyard. For a full description of the May 15 event, visit this page.

You may be wondering how these programs fit with the Pulitzer, which is essentially an art institution. In which case, listen to Director Matthias Waschek talk about the Pulitzer's mission as a "laboratory" in this video. In this video, Community Engagement Coordinator Lisa Harper Chang describes some of the rationale behind Transformation.

The Transformation Project Walk is an open event, but feel free to RSVP on Facebook.

This Thursday: Food, Art, and Community

Panelist Gwenne Stewart-Hayes, Executive Director of Gateway Greening, describes City Seeds, an urban farm located in downtown St. Louis.

For those of you who didn't make Sunday's Earth Day celebration, there's still a chance this week to mingle with the green at heart. This Thursday evening, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts will host "Food, Art, and Community," its final panel discussion in a series fired by its current exhibition Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark. Gordon Matta-Clark and fellow artists ran a restaurant called "Food" in 1970s SoHo, which turned cooking into performance art and provided a common space for the neighborhood to cultivate creative ventures. This week's panelists will talk about how art can work together with sustainable produce, urban farming and farmers' markets to foster community and urban renewal. You can RSVP to this event on Facebook.