Granite City Art and Design District planned to open Exhibition #24 on March 14. Right. That weekend. They postponed the show, set up a Zoom call, and curator Marianne Laury walked the empty campus, weaving in and out of the gardens and galleries. “I was walking around with my phone and talking to people about the work,” she says.
This Saturday, G-CADD unveils a slightly different version of #24, and you can come see it in person—wearing a mask and standing at least 6 feet away from other people, of course.
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Although as founder Galen Gondolfi points out, G-CADD has been socially distant and COVID-friendly for five years. Its first venue was a humble vacant parcel, dubbed Cloud Lot, where they set up pews and staged outdoor performances. The campus now runs the length of the 1800 block of State Street in downtown Granite City, including rehabbed artist-run indoor spaces, native plant gardens designed by landscape-architect-in-residence Chris Carl, plus hybrid spaces like IN/OUT, a roofless building where you can hang art on the walls and feel the rain on your head. Even G-CADD’s most traditional indoor gallery, INSURANCE, isn’t immune to breaches from nature. “We had a tree of heaven sprout, which started at one centimeter, and I thought Chris and Marianne had put something fake in this hole in the floor,” Gondolfi says. “It’s like 5 feet now! The root system may get to the point where it will ruin the floors, so we’re going to have to remove it.”
Over the summer, the G-CADD crew—Laury, Gondolfi, Carl, and Josh Howell, the director of installation—celebrated their fifth anniversary by busily updating the campus to be even more outdoor-facing. The pandemic, Gondolfi says, pushed them to realize some of their earlier design notions out of necessity, including adding a deck space to IN/OUT. The invading tree foreshadowed INSURANCE’s transition to more outdoorsy space: It now has French doors leading to IN/OUT. “Which has special significance because it actually opens up an original doorway between the two spaces from when that property was built—so it’s historically congruent,” Gondolfi says. “It’s also, from a contemporary perspective, almost a necessity because it allows for airflow.
A few doors down at 1818 State, you can see an even more spectacular manifestation of trees growing out of floors. What was once a vacant auto parts store is now “a mind-blowing odyssey of another building without a roof, this time planting trees in the basement,” Gondolfi says. “It’s like Bath in Southeastern England within an American Steel Town context… a basement of trees, and a subterranean verdant oasis. In Granite City!”
Though how, pray, does one grow trees 18 feet deep in a basement? “It’s just like a raised bed, with a constructed soil mix in there, and then we irrigate stuff to make sure it stays wet,” Carl explains. “We’ve been experimenting for a couple of years. We tortured some things, and lost some. We’re doing pretty well now. We’ve gotten to a spot where we can keep things green and growing.” Now they move on to construction, phase two: building a rooftop deck and a bridge that leads to G-CADD’s backyard.
That backyard, by the by, functions as a sort of unofficial city park. The 10-person swing (a permanent installation by Brian Depauli titled “A Swing For All My Friends”), is a magnet for little kids. So is the giant clown head, which was rehomed at G-CADD by artist Bill Christman. Actually, the adults like the swing and the clown head, too. “The clown actually made the Illinois Tourism Bureau’s list of places to check out,” Gondolfi says.
“And it’s on Roadside America, too!” Laury adds.
Saturday’s opening is ticketed, but if you don’t make it, don’t despair. “We’re accessible because we’re of the earth,” Gondolfi says. “We don’t need to be open for you to experience us. You can walk around, and peer into the gallery spaces…I want to invite people over to experience the seasonality of G-CADD, both with the plants, and the visual art…not to mention our kinetic and almost manic rehab process.”
INSURANCE & GREASE
Sara Ghazi Asadollahi, Concrete Poetry
Asadollahi is an Iranian artist who was, until recently, a local. (She got her MFA at Wash. U.) Her paintings depict not only abandoned places and ruins, but landscapes inspired by dystopian sci-fi films. “She was supposed to show back in March, but then all this stuff happened,” Laury says. “Her paintings are so reflective of what’s going on right now. They’re very post-apocalyptic.” The crazy thing, Gondolfi adds, “was how ominous her work was—it foreshadowed COVID, yet had nothing to do with COVID.” (Find her paintings in INSURANCE and a sculpture in GREASE.)
IN/OUT
Tiffany Sutton, Black Body Radiation
Sutton is a St. Louis–based photographer who shoots digitally and on film; she often shoots portraits of women. “She’s going on walks three times a week with her mom, and taking photos on these walks,” Laury says. “So she’s doing a lot of portraiture work of Black women, because she’s doing lots of walks and hosting Black women meetups in parks. The photos are all film photography, and she’s doing double and triple exposures, so there’s lots of movement, so you can still see beautiful plants and the scenes behind the subject. I think it will really reflect the venue where she’s showing.”
SLOT LOT
Kelly Jimenez, DesMotivaciones
Usually, Jiminez works with her partner, Alejandro Franco, making stained-glass windows out of single-use plastics. “But she’s also doing her own stuff,” Laury says. “She just finished this stop-motion video. You can tell she spent forever on it—it’s insane and it’s beautiful. There’s a woman at her kitchen table with her head down. And then she pops up, and it’s psychedelic, and there are these butterflies all over the place. She eats the butterflies, and once they hit her stomach, she starts dancing. The projection will face Slot Lot—where all the butterflies congregate anyway.”
PLAQUE STOREFRONT
Visuals by Kevin Harris
“We’ve never approached curation from a storefront perspective,” Gondolfi says. “But COVID pushed us to truly have a window display, not unlike an orthodox traditional storefront. I grew up in a small town, and there was a store called Fegnolio Electric on Main Street. He had a big console television in that window. And he’d have it on during Christmastime. He had a gorgeous white artificial tree with red balls. As a kid, sometimes I remember seeing Monday Night Football—it would come on at 7 o’clock in that storefront window.” Harris’ video work is often abstract, and a far shout from Monday Night Football, but often incorporates vintage and analog equipment that would be right in line with a 1970s small-town storefront.
STNDRD
RL Tillman, Union Down
STNDRD, curated by local artist Sage Dawson, is the simplest of outdoor venues: it’s a flagpole. Flying through October 31 is a pair of star-spangled pants “once seen covering the hide of a President’s golfing companion. Hung from a flagpole, they present a signal of dire distress, a lament for a country allowed to fall free, a living thing destroyed in an undignified way.”
PILOT PLOT
Permanent native plant installation
Carl says the native plants in this garden are constantly changing—the “fourth flush” of fall blooms will have lots of purple, yellow, and white. Located on the same site as STNDRD, it’s a rainwater garden built with collaboration between G-CADD, Madison County Transit, Madison County, Granite City, and the U.S. Steel Foundation.
Re-opening G-CADD: Exhibition #24 opens 4–10 p.m. Saturday, October 17 and runs through Saturday, December 4. Masks are required. To ensure social distancing and occupancy limits, you must reserve a ticket (available at gcadd.org) for a 30-minute slot inside the galleries, with a 10-person limit. The campus is also open Saturday from 1–4 p.m., and by appointment (email [email protected]).
