Photo by Michael Thomas, courtesy of The Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Artist Andres Luis Hernandez.
In March, Chicago artists Andres Luis Hernandez and Amanda Williams painted 3721 Washington gold. They had help from neighbors, students, Pulitzer Arts Foundation director Cara Starke, and Bruno David, whose eponymous gallery called the building home for 11 years.
Painting the building was the first phase of the pair’s PXSTL project, A Way, Away (Listen While I Say). Last fall, engineers discovered that the building’s back wall was crumbling and listed it for demolition. Before that happened, the artists decided to give the structure an ultravividness to spark conversations about urban environments—including how and why buildings get “unbuilt.”
“We wanted to figure out a way to stop and reflect on these phases that already exist in the life cycles of buildings and in the built environment,” Hernandez says, and slow down the process to make it more visible, in five phases that will unfold through the fall. “Marking” (painting) and “Subtracting” (demolition) took place in the spring. This summer, they’re in the midst of “Translating,” or processing the harvested bricks for reuse. For “Shaping,” they will plant grasses and sod on the site and transform the remaining concrete pad with a structure built from reused bricks. For the last phase, “Healing,” they will de-install art from the site, give the harvested bricks to three community partners, and ritually return the land to the community.
Hernandez says he and Williams always wanted this PXSTL project to be a hub that pushed energy out into the city, rather than a static landmark.
“From the very beginning, we wanted to have a call-and-response between this Washington corridor, the PXSTL site, and additional sites in the St. Louis area,” Hernandez says. “We wanted to make sure we honored that building and the history of it, and the energy and the labor that went into it, and energy that went into it [being demolished] in a way that could be powerful. We wanted those harvested bricks to become an energy that transferred to other parts of the city, through other projects. We’ve been talking recently about this almost being like an organ transplant—that in passing or moving these bricks on, their spirit brings life to a new project. They’re not just getting shipped to the south and being used in a high-end development, or a boutique or a store or a restaurant. They’re actually going back into the city for projects that are beneficial to the community.”
FYI For photos and more information, visit awayaway.site, or follow @awayawaystl on Instagram.
