On a sunny day in May, Forest Park is bustling with energy. Cyclists and rollerbladers glide along winding trails, passing dog walkers out for a leisurely stroll. Couples on first dates sprawl on picnic blankets as the Saint Louis Art Museum towers over them like a chaperone. Like SLAM, many of the park’s beloved institutions went to great lengths to welcome masked visitors over the past year, while others, such as The Muny, have only recently reopened their doors. It takes a village to get it all done—here are some of the St. Louisans working behind the scenes to make it possible.
Photography by Joe Martinez
Courtney Books
SAINT LOUIS ART MUSEUM, ASSISTANT PAINTINGS CONSERVATOR
Every time someone enters the Saint Louis Art Museum, they leave a bit of themselves on the artwork. Cleaning that dust or dander off masterpieces is the first step of many projects for Courtney Books, who started her job just nine months before the pandemic’s lockdown orders. Now she spends most of her time in SLAM’s lower-level lab—free from damaging natural light—surrounded by large easels, heated tables, and vials of pigment. She ensures each masterpiece appears exactly as the original artist intended and fixes physical deterioration, such as flaking paints and cracks. On any given day, she might start by cleaning a painting’s yellowed varnish so not to obscure the original work’s colors. This summer, she will work on scaffolding while helping restore, study, and preserve 1912-era murals at the entrance of the museum’s library. Sometimes this entails just cleaning the pieces, but in certain cases, the damage requires the team to test samples to determine the work’s material. In her work as a conservator, she applies microscopic dabs of paint point by point while carefully matching the original work’s color. A job well done means the new brushstrokes are invisible to an onlooker’s eye. “We’re keeping these objects for posterity for future generations to appreciate,” she says. “The goal is that it looks like we were never here. We’re not signing the work after.”
Photography by Joe Martinez
Maddie Earnest
SAINT LOUIS SCIENCE CENTER, MANAGER OF THE GROW AND LIFE SCIENCE GALLERIES
The pandemic has sparked new questions about food sustainability, ones that have prompted thought and discussion at the Saint Louis Science Center. “So many of us take food for granted,” says Maddie Earnest, who’s also a co-owner of Local Harvest Grocery. “During the pandemic, there were so many scares about food shortages, and there were all these food distribution issues.” She hopes a visit to the Science Center might inspire a career in agriculture or life sciences. At a minimum, she hopes each guest feels a connection. Since the attraction reopened in June 2020, she has worked to help keep visitors safe by ensuring masks remain above noses as groups rotate through galleries. But she worried that she had lost meaningful interactions. A recent exchange reminded her of the respite and lessons that the institution provides: A woman quietly sitting near the GROW Pavillion and Gallery’s baby chicks explained that she wanted a Mother’s Day to herself but found that she was enamored of these chickens, realizing how much they resembled Tyrannosaurus rexes. It led to a lively conversation between the two. “It’s small,” Earnest says, “but it makes you feel good that you can once again have this experience together.”
Photography by Joe Martinez
Tali Allen
THE MUNY, DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION
As an educator in the arts, Tali Allen watches for the classroom’s shrinking violets. These are the children who perhaps have never auditioned for a play or performed on a stage and seem intimidated by the other young superstars. As the children learn a dance number or speak up in an acting class, Allen sees them shed their shyness. At the end of the day, they sing in front of one another and receive feedback. It’s often a breakthrough. “It’s, like, ‘Yes, you can do this, even if you haven’t done it before,’” Allen says of some of The Muny’s youth programs. As the director of education—the institution’s first—Allen implemented a master class in 2019 (her first year), added new initiatives to the theater’s education programs, and virtually led classes such as Muny Kids and Teens and Muny U during the pandemic’s stay-at-home orders. Even during virtual learning, Allen has seen young students blossom. Some kids join the classes from their beds, and during a recent presentation from a New York City sound engineer, one student had his head down the entire time, presumably asleep. When the sound engineer explained her position’s salary range, his head shot up: “Wait, you can make money from this?” For the rest of the class, he was hooked, Allen says. “Those moments are always fun. I like to encourage them to set their own bar for success, shoot for that, and we will do whatever we can to help you get to it.”
Photography by Joe Martinez
B.j. Vogt
MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, EXHIBITION PREPARATOR
B.j. Vogt sometimes gets in trouble at other museums for examining exhibits too closely. He does it because he wants to know how a display was put together and what materials were used to prop up an artifact. He’s constantly looking for ways to improve upon his own exhibits at the Missouri History Museum. As one of the museum’s exhibit preparators, Vogt oversees the in-house fabrication, installation, and maintenance of the museum’s exhibits. He touches almost every aspect of an exhibit, from the mounts to the cases, trying to make it all work without distracting from the experience. Right now, he’s constructing the “St. Louis Sound” exhibition, which explores the region’s music history, by overseeing the fabrication of metals ranging from small objects, such as CDs or tapes, to larger ones, like lampposts or pianos. Although months of planning are involved, exhibit installation is still stressful and demands strenuous physical and mental work. “Any time an artifact is not in a case, we’re on high alert,” he says. During the pandemic, he also planned and helped create barriers for different entrances to maintain social distancing. Now, while walking through galleries for cleanings once or twice a day, he looks forward to interacting with guests and answering questions. “We do get to see how the exhibits are interacted with,” he says, adding with a laugh, “especially when things get broken.”
Photography by Joe Martinez
Catherine Hu
FOREST PARK FOREVER, NATURE RESERVE STEWARD
Every once in a while, Forest Park visitors will stop Catherine Hu and ask what she’s doing digging up plants or cutting down a tree. As a nature reserve steward with Forest Park Forever, she takes on poison ivy and chiggers, sprays or digs up invasive species, and plants native botanicals. The goal is to promote healthy vegetation, introducing enough natives to make the park an educational experience that reflects how a Missouri woodland, historically, should look. Rain or shine, she goes in the park with her tools (pruners, soil knives, hand saws, loppers), walking the grounds with a backpack herbicide sprayer, or sitting at the wheel of a tractor. As the park has gotten more foot traffic during the pandemic—and with the recent opening of the Anne O’C. Albrecht Nature Playscape—Hu says park-goers are seeing more of the day-to-day maintenance. One frequent visitor recently told Hu that she didn’t realize all the work that went into the park until walking in it every day. “It’s cool to see the public become aware of how much maintenance goes into our restoration,” says Hu. She also relishes watching hard work pay off in areas like the Kennedy Forest Boardwalks: “It’s encouraging to see so many species that we planted, such as baby oaks and hickories, coming back and doing well.”
Photography by Joe Martinez
Dr. Sathya Chinnadurai
SAINT LOUIS ZOO, DIRECTOR OF ANIMAL HEALTH
Every morning, Sathya Chinnadurai meets with his team of veterinarians and technicians to run through summaries of the previous day’s animal visits. Chinnadurai oversees all aspects of animal health and veterinary medicine at the institution. Coming from Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo, he joined the Saint Louis Zoo just before the pandemic hit and has had the opportunity to care for his favorite species (“The okapi are such a unique, very charismatic, very large animal,” he gushes) and some of the zoo’s most fascinating residents—like this little guy. “I find it amazing that different penguin species are adapted to vastly different habitats and climates. At first glance, penguin species look fairly similar, and many people assume that they are all cold-weather species,” he says. “And no species of penguin overlaps in range with polar bears,” he adds, “despite popular advertising.” There’s a lot in the works at the Saint Louis Zoo, including the forthcoming Primate Canopy Trails, which will add a 35,000-square-foot outdoor area to the primate house. For now, though, Chinnadurai is finding joy in watching more guests return to the zoo. “One of the best surprises was when I heard the train,” he recalls. “I remember riding the train as a kid. After we reopened the park, it just totally made my day. I couldn’t stop smiling through my mask and waving at them.”
