Photograph courtesy of the Contempory Art Museum St. Louis
If you’ve never been inside an artist’s studio, it’s just as easy to imagine it housing a miniature black hole as canvas-stretchers and brushes soaking in turpentine.
Maybe that’s why, when the Contemporary Art Museum did its first City-Wide Open Studios tour in 2006, hundreds of people showed up, curious to see what an artist’s studio actually looks like. That initial one-day tour had 37 stops; in 2008, it expanded to 120, including Third Degree Glass Factory, Evil Prints, Chouteau’s Landing, a string of Washington Avenue lofts, and lots of individual studios, some even housed in basements and detached garages, stretching from Sutton to South Broadway.
This year, the Contemporary is dedicating a whole week to Open Studios events. It will all culminate in a two-day tour on July 25 and 26, with more than 100 stops throughout St. Louis city, U. City, and Maplewood. The museum is also partnering with Trek Bicycle Store of St. Louis for those who would like to pedal their way through the tour and is hosting a preview exhibit and party on Tuesday, July 21, where you can meet the artists and see examples of their work.
“It’s kind of unusual,” says painter Gary Passanise of his own studio, which has been on the tour since its first year. “It’s part of an old industrial complex on the bluffs, if you know where Broadway and 55 intersect. It’s kind of off the beaten path; it doesn’t really have an address that you can Google and find. So everyone gets lost coming there, but I had 150 visitors on the last tour, and [Contemporary director] Paul Ha brought a busload of people,” he laughs. “I think people are curious about seeing how artists work. I know for a fact that people like to come to the studio; in fact, that is where you are supposed to go to see the work, or work in progress, or to talk about the work.” He adds that people generally feel more at ease in a studio, versus a high-end gallery. “I also noticed that on the last studio tour, people were selling a lot of work under $200,” he says. “I think this year it will be the same thing.”
Painter Ron Flier and his wife, Vicki, a quilt-maker, have a 5,000-square-foot building on Utah Street in South City, where seven artists maintain studios. They’ve been on the tour for the last two years, and Ron says a good number of the 150 people who passed through last year were other artists. “They’re looking at studio space, how it’s organized, what you’re doing. They’re more interested in the process, how you’re doing it, what your setup is,” he says.
And the nonartists? “I think a lot of people like the stories about the work,” Vicki Flier says. “Ron has one customer who, whenever he comes in to look at the work, says, ‘Tell me the story behind it.’ And every work has its story. If it’s plein-air, maybe someone came up in Italy and said you’re not doing it right. Or a lot of Ron’s contemporary work is cerebral, so there’s a story behind the idea.” For her quilts, Vicki says she ends up in a lot of conversations about design. “They actually talk about the texture of the fabric, and I mean visual texture, not actual physical texture,” she says. “They want to know how you put colors together, or the designs. One person last year wanted to go through all of my green [fabric], because she was into green.”
Though the term “studio” conjures the image of Jan Vermeer in his checkerboard-floored atelier, the tour also includes nontraditional artists and spaces. Last year, performance artist Tom Brady’s multipurpose venue, Satori, was on the tour; so was Open Lot, a new Lafayette Square artists’ co-op housed in a rehabbed yeast factory. B.j. Vogt, one of Open Lot’s founders, says that the artists in the collective approached the tour not only as a way to show off their working space, but as an opportunity to test run a few installations they’d been working on.
“We all worked together to tidy up the space in general, plus made food on the grill and had beverages on hand for visitors,” he says. “I was currently in the middle of creating a site-specific installation for the Schmidt Art Center in Belleville, and was able to have it partially constructed for visitors to engage and ask questions about. We also asked [artists] Cameron Fuller and Sarah Paulsen to create a collaboration in a front part of our space that was, at the time, vacant. They installed a painted cardboard submarine in the space that you could sit inside and view an animation that Sarah created.”
Painter Cindy Tower, who is known for her industrial plein-air canvases, sees her tour stop as more of a performance piece, since she doesn’t maintain a traditional studio. Her stop will be outdoors (location TBD at press time), where she’ll curate a performance piece, “Crescendo,” where 11 local painters will be paired with the same number of local musicians; they’ll then paint them as they improvise music. “It’s hysterical, because it’s like meeting on the street corner,” she says of working outdoors. And though her open studio offering is nontraditional, she brings up something several of the other artists also made a point to mention: “I think it’s important,” she says, “for people to see, and to really realize, just how much work goes into making a piece of art.”
For more information on the Fourth Annual City-Wide Open Studios, or to download a map, go to openstudiosonline.org. Maps can also be picked up in person at the Contemporary (314-535-4660, contemporarystl.org) Wed to Sat 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sun 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
