In our November issue, as part of our Innovators package, we profiled Pruitt-Igoe Now, an international design competition asking for proposals for the 33-acre site where the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex once stood. Artist Juan William Chavez has been working on his own project, The Pruitt-Igoe Bee Sanctuary, which he began working on after closing his Cherokee Street gallery, Boots Contemporary Art Space. We spoke to him this fall, soon after he had returned from a research trip from Europe.
St. Louis Magazine: So, explain Pruitt-Igoe Bee Sanctuary.
JC: The project has been done in different stages. Going into the spring of 2010, I went in there and just documented and filmed a lot of the inside of Pruitt-Igoe. Then through that process, I started to develop the concept for the bee sanctuary. Then from there, I started thinking more about taking the content I generated through the studio to put together a proposal for the city of turning it into a memorial park-slash-bee sanctuary. Once that idea came up, I wanted to start doing research on this kind of model. I was awarded a grant from the Art Matter Foundation, and it supports international research for artists, or international collaboration. I decided to apply for international research and proposed to go to Paris, where they have a well-known public garden called Luxembourg Garden and inside that garden is the oldest beekeeping school…it was founded [in 1856], so it’s been around for a while. This school has been teaching Parisians beekeeping for a very long time. Whenever you think beekeeping school, you think of a building, but it’s actually a gazebo that has the beehives, and is a shelter for the supplies and stuff like that. There’s a small, white picket fence, and trees and bushes so there’s a little bit of privacy for the bees. But it’s very much out in the open. You have Parisians laying all over that park, and there’s over a million bees in the school. One reason I wanted to go there and observe and analyze this model is because of the Vinita Park controversy here in St. Louis, where the aldermen made that lady remove one beehive from the community garden because he thought it was dangerous. This notion of bees being dangerous—as long as you don’t mess with them, they’re not going to mess with you. So I wanted to go over there to prove that that this has been an existing model, and no one is getting hurt. I went there and took photographs and shot film, documenting it. The second part of the travel was to show, to emphasize the relationship between humans and bees. The Sanctuary, the bees are a metaphor. They’ve always been a metaphor for community and society. But I’m also using bees as a metaphor for St. Louisans, too; our city is shrinking, our population, and the bees are experiencing Colony Collapse Disorder. We need to invest in creative strategies for the city, and invest in creative strategies for ourselves as a community. This is not just poetics, but it’s something that’s very concrete, our relationship with bees. The next place I went to was a place called Bicorp, and it’s in the Southern part of Spain. It’s a town of 600 people. It’s at the foothill of a national forest. And in the forest, there’s a cave drawing of what’s called the Man of Bicorp. Some people think it’s a woman—the people in the town refer to it as female, but on the Internet, it says that it’s a man. But I think it looks like a female, too. In this national forest there is an 8,000-year-old cave drawing of a figure crawling up a tree, toward a beehive, and there are bees all around, flying around this figure. It’s not quite a cave, it’s a tall mountain and there’s a cove that dips—
SLM: So, like a grotto, or an alcove?
JC: Exactly. And the other drawings that are around this one are images of hunting, tools of hunting, domestic animals…so my interpretation, it’s 8,000 years ago, and they are putting things on the wall that are helping them to survive. Back then, that’s all we thought about, just surviving. So this figure was just as important as hunting. And it was so important that it was written on the wall. I went there, and I photographed the cave drawing, and I filmed it. I’m going to use the footage to complete my Pruitt-Igoe film, which is in Super-8, and will end on these cave drawings, to show there is a hardcore relationship between [bees and] humans and how we live.
SLM: It’s almost like there’s something coming up from the collective unconscious with Pruitt-Igoe—it was forgotten, and now there is this will to reexamine and reconsider that site, from all different quarters. How did you first start to engage with it?
JC: I’ll give you the nuts and bolts answer, and then I’ll give my art answer [laughs]. I’ll start with my art answer. Boots closed in 2010. I was in the situation of being burnt out on white wall art programing. I was already interested in community engagement and working outside on the street with people. My background in grad school, I studied a lot about public art that. So they way I just picture it, is that the day Boots ended, and walking outside of the gallery, and started exploring St. Louis again with new eyes. I started working on some public projects in Old North, and that got me connected to the Pulitzer, where I was brought in to help teach and curate the Theaster Gates show, Dry Bones and Other Parables of the North. It was part of the Urban Expressions program. That took me to a neighborhood that I’d never been to; I’d been to Hyde Park, but I didn’t have a reason to go there, because it was an off-the-beaten-path kind of a place, and so every Saturday for several months, I drove on Jefferson to Hyde Park. I would pass this forest. Right away, I was like, what’s that? The northside is so messed up that there is a huge abandoned forest? I couldn’t get over that. It was just sitting there, and no one is really talking about it. At first I thought it was like some kind of lumberyard; the curiosity just started moving around. I know about Pruitt-Igoe. I know about the history. I learned about it in art school, and from Koyaanisqatsi, the art film. These are my interactions with it. Also, going to school in Chicago, the Cabrini-Green projects were on my bus route. I knew about that whole era. And then at Boots, artists would call me and want to do projects with Pruitt-Igoe. But this is where my … well, I got mixed up. When I was growing up, I would visit my uncle in Soulard. And I would see the Peabody projects. And I always thought that was Pruitt-Igoe. Then they tore those down, so I would always tell these artists, well, they tore it down. You missed it. So fast-forward: It wasn’t until I was driving back and forth to Hyde Park that someone said, oh, yeah, that’s the old Pruitt-Igoe projects. Needle off the record—“Whoa! Are you serious?” And this kind of overwhelming feeling, like why didn’t I know that? I got mad at myself. But it was good that I didn’t know what it was, because it gave me a hunger to learn as much as possible, and correct that. In some ways it was a blessing, because working with Pruitt-Igoe several years ago maybe wouldn’t have the impact it does right now, because of all the attention. So that’s how I began to engage with it. The first thing that really amazed me was that it was 33 buildings—the size of it. If you just look at images of it out there, the most popular image is the building imploding. So you only see one or two buildings. You never see the whole aerial shot of it. I thought it was the same size of Cabrini-Green, that it was part of that same scale. When I found out it was the granddad of all these things that really got my juices flowing. Part of that research, I’m big into studio research, that is what triggered me to go in there and start taking photographs, just so I could digest and process it, and see what it has turned into. A lot of times when I was in there, shooting, I shoot film so you have to pay attention to the light and timing is a thing, you have to slow down--the technology I was using forced me to slow down and think about what was in there and what was going on. So that’s what triggered the project. Right when I was done shooting some footage, they announced the documentary [The Pruitt-Igoe Myth], and I was like, “Great!” A lot of the inspiration for the Super 8 was the stock footage you see of Pruitt-Igoe, that grainy film. The documentary worked with that stuff. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m going to be seeing it soon, at a screening at Wash U.
SLM: Yeah, it’s a stunning film.
JC: Yeah, they showed some pretty lengthy clips at Open/Closed and I got a little taste of the aesthetic. It looks really amazing.
SLM: How was Open/Closed? What aspect did you focus on, what was the feedback?
JC: It was an amazing opportunity, because it meant the first time I was going to talk about this project was in North St. Louis, which I thought was very important. The second thing was that it really forced me to get a website going, and to take all my research and images and lay them out and start connecting the dots and present this idea. It also started to trigger another side of the project, which is the presentation/lecture, where I go out and give a slideshow and talk about urban abandonment, and having the creative culture in St. Louis be part of this conversation about this development of the city. The response was really, really good. I was able to show parts of the film, some photographs, and also talk about the connection between bees and the population of St. Louis, connecting the dots this way. I think a lot of people were, when I started talking they probably had no idea what I was talking about. They were like, “Bee sanctuary?” But at the end of the lecture, people were like, “Huh. That sounds like not a bad idea.” As I gathered more information, I added to the presentation. It started with, OK, that’s a good idea, now I need to show them that it’s an existing model, that this is not just a conceptual proposal, but is something that exists and functions. So the research in Luxembourg Gardens will end up in the presentation. So, yeah, it was great.
SLM: So that was the presentation you gave at Los Caminos, just recently?
JC: So yeah, right when I got back from my trip, my talk was like two days later. And I basically talked about the project and how it came to be, the proposal, and then whereas at Open/Closed I talked about the relationships with bees, at Los Caminos I talked about more of that relationship, so there was a slide of the Post-Dispatch article on Vinita Park, and then I showed the images from Luxembourg Gardens, which actually has a section of orchards where they grown pears and apples, and the bees pollinate all of that stuff. At the end of the summer, they have a big market where they sell preserves made from the preserves, and the honey. So it’s such a cool thing. Then I talked about that, those different aspects of the program, and then I talked about the cave drawings and the deep connection between humans and bees. There is also another component of it. There was a volunteer that worked at the Contemporary Art Museum. He was a black Frenchman who taught at Soldan High School for two years. When we went to France, we visited him, and did an interview asking questions about his experience in working on the northside, and the public aesthetic of French people, that is, what does public space mean to French people? And the importance of it. And then questions aimed at his point of view as an educator. So I talked about that too, about this interview we did in the park. Some of the things he said, he found working at Soldan really rewarding, but very exhausting as a teacher because school, from his observation, school was the outlet for his students for everything. They didn’t have any other outlets for playing or expressing frustration or releasing energy. So all that stuff happened at school. He talked about the lack of outlets and connecting that to public space. He talked about seeing the French influence in St. Louis. It’s funny; when you’re in Paris you can totally see the French influence here, in our little mini-parks. And I pulled up in my slideshow and old photograph of Benton Park. It looks like a park in France. So it’s playing on the connection between parks and St. Louis, and talking to a teacher who works in St. Louis, and hearing his thoughts and experiences from an outside perspective.
SLM: Do you have any ideas about what might be the best and highest use for the site? I know there have been all kinds of ideas, from golf courses to shopping centers to housing.
JC: That question was brought up in the talk. What is your vision for Pruitt-Igoe? If anything, this project, I hope it redirects the conversation. Art has the potential of doing that, just by bringing it up and throwing it out there into the public space. It’s like whoa—golf course, hotel….bee sanctuary? Where’d that come from? And it really makes you think. But this of course requires a much larger conversation, not just one person offering their ideas. So it’s just about redirecting the conversation. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. We live in this capitalist society where progress is measured by growth—museums expand, projects get bigger. If they’re not getting bigger, they’re in decline and it’s a bad thing. One thing that I learned while running Boots, which was a traditional nonprofit format—you want to a bigger board, you want a bigger space, you want to expand prgram. Now, I was never really interested in getting bigger. I was interested in deepening. And I think I look at Pruitt-Igoe like that. Instead of building more stuff, how about deepening what we have, and seeing the potential there. We don’t need to put millions and millions of dollars of into things. With more reasonable funding, you could get a lot done that could even have a bigger impact. And it also gives time to grow, so you can have time to run it and prove it, and add to it, instead of saying, here it is, like it’s perfect. Things evolve, the city’s involving. That’s how I look at Pruitt-Igoe. It’s already a forest, and that’s what the bee sanctuary is all about. I’m not doing anything to the site, except looking at it as a bee sanctuary. I’m not building anything. Even the hives we are going to put in there, they’re made so they will attract a natural colony. So we’re not going to purchase bees and put them in there. We’ll just go ahead and attrack them. They are already there, buzzing around. I see them all the time. Pruitt-Igoe, for me, was this kind of unnatural system that was supposed to house nature, and it didn’t work. Now Pruitt-Igoe is nature, so what naturally can exist in that space that can still represent some of the things that Pruitt-Igoe wanted to stand for? Which was community, and all the good things about people living together. Bees were that community. This is a St. Louis thing that I talk about in the slideshow—with art, we have the power to transform anything. It sounds poetic, but it’s totally true. Right now, Pruitt-Igoe is known as the worst public houseing in history. So we’re known as the worst thing. How awesome would it be to change that, and say, no, we’re known for the best comeback? We are not going to sit down and accept that we are known for being the worst. If anything, we can be an example of being the best at taking something that has this cloud over it, and turn it into a positive thing that could stimulate the city far more. It’s such a taboo subject, and obviously the people who lived there have a right to feel the negativity about it. But as a collective, if we keep looking at this thing as a negative thing—it’s not going to go away. The only way it’s going away is if something awful is built on top of it. There’s something about confronting history, and being responsible for it and transforming it. That can be done. There is potential in failure. The way I interpret the trees is the city’s way of sweeping it under the carpet. But the coolest thing they did was planting these seeds, because now we have this cool, potential park.
SLM: Anything else you want to add about the project, or things that are important for people to know?
JC: After my talk, some people said, “Man, do you think it’s a good idea to express that you didn’t know where Pruitt-Igoe was?” And I said, no, it’s good to admit that my history was distorted, because so many people’s history in St. Louis is distorted. But you can change that.
