Last week the amazing venue we were having donated for our use hit an electrical snag in their construction, and it was possible their air conditioning might not be up and running in time for the Quarterly.  Rather than risking a miserably hot show, we’ve spent the last several days tracking down an alternative space somewhere in St. Louis to hold the Quarterly.  We found it.

It’s incredible.  3141 Locust (Unit 2B on the floorplan, map here).  With 5,300 square feet in one room, it was the location of this year’s “Pins and Needles Alternative Fashion Show” May 17th, 2010.  It’s less than a block away from The Fountain on Locust and Anatomy of Style.   The developer, Jassen Johnson of Renaissance Development Associates (RDA), has almost single handedly transformed the Midtown Alley neighborhood from the dilapidated skeleton of St. Louis’s automotive industry into one of the fastest growing destinations for creative and design professionals and entrepreneurs.  We participated in their annual Midtown Alley Streetfest last year, and will do so again on August 20th this year.

Working in “alternative spaces” like this can be a real challenge sometimes, but it is unlike anything else in St. Louis.  Everything else will remain unchanged, and we will once again showcase some of the most exciting fine art work that St. Louis’s creative culture has to offer!

On July 31st at 6:30 PM, we’ll be showcasing 11 new artists at a brand new, never-before-seen space.  Sound exciting? It gets better…

UPDATE: The location for the 2010 Summer Quarterly has changed.  Please go here for more info and the address.

We will be hosted by The Collective, a new business on opening on Meremac Avenue (same block as Urban Eats Cafe) with a mission to create:

The Collective: collaboration,  professionalism, inspiration.

The Collective is a new space for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and freelancers who want a professional space but don’t want to pay rent for a full office. It is an historic building with restored original tin ceilings, hardwood floors, 2 conference rooms, and 3200 sqft of workable private and public space.  Located at 3309 Meramec, our hope is provide small business owners and creative professionals with a natural home to collaborate, exude professionalism while hosting and working with their clients, and be inspired each time they step into their work place.  Ultimately, we hope our growth facilitates and contributes a stronger St. Louis City.

The 2010 Summer Quarterly will be the very first time their doors are opened, and we will serve as an open house to launch this exciting new opportunity!

Also, having 11 artists on the bill is almost 3 times as many as we have tried in the past!  But don’t worry, we will never sacrifice quality for quantity! This time around we have a solid mix of veteran and emerging artists, combining to make an exhibition of extremely good art and passionate excitement.  Fashion, Paint, Photography, LIVE Art, Mixed Media Sculpture… there is definitely something for everyone in this show!  Combine this with the incredible space and the hospitality you can expect at the Quarterly, and there are few events more necessary for the year!

FEATURED ARTISTS
Arlene Ligori (Mixed Media Painting)
Arushi Kumar (Fashion)
Brandon Barnes (Mixed Media Sculpture)
Hal Moran (Photography)
Jeff Kapfer (Painting)
Jennifer Roberts (Photography)
Kim Wardenburg (Printmaking)
Mark Taylor (Painting)
Mary Richards (Drawing)
Rachel Kornhardt (Photography)
Tim Wagner (Mixed Media, LIVE ART)

You can check out samples of the work that will be displayed in the gallery below.

Please RSVP on the Facebook Page here to help us get a handle on food and drinks for the evening.

2010 Summer Quarterly Details
When: July 31, 6:30 PM
Where: 3309 Meremac Avenue, 63118
Cost: Always FREE!

CALL FOR ENTRY, All Mediums, AU(STL) Summer Quarterly Submissions Due by 11:59PM on June 26th.

Attention artists and creative catalysts. It’s that time again and AU(STL) is looking for local talent to feature in our 2010 Summer Quarterly July 31st!  In addition to participating in this AU event, being a Featured Artist qualifies you to be sponsored by Art Underground on events you do in the St. Louis area.  This includes assistance with advertising and PR, networking and professional development, and the invitation to join a community of people seeking to “create a St. Louis that ought to be.”

For this Quarterly, we are especially looking for larger pieces in any visual medium.  We will have lots of space and would love to take advantage of every inch! Jump on this one fast, as we already have a few artists lined up…

If you are an artist, or know one who would be interested in this opportunity, please send the following submission requirements to AU Submissions (submissions@artundergroundstl.org) no later than Saturday, June 26th. Upon receipt of your application, we will send you further details on the event.

[SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS]
If we do not receive complete information for the following categories, your submission will not be considered. Feel free to simply copy/paste this format and replace the descriptions with your information.

• Full Name
• Contact Information
  • Email Address
  • Physical Address
  • Daytime Phone Number
• Bio and Work Description – 50 words or less. This may describe the artist’s background, materials, and stylistic distinctions. This will be included in the slides for display at the event.
• Digital Samples - This depends significantly on the type of work, but some kind of example needs to be submitted for application and (if accepted) marketing.  Pictures, videos, writing samples, etc. must be submitted with Bio and Work Descriptions. Also include the following information with each sample. This information will be plugged into AU(STL) labels for exhibiting your work:
  • Title
  • Size/dimension
  • Value/cost (optional)
• Acknowledgement of Fees – To curb frivolous applications and drop-outs, a very modest $25 fee will be charged to accepted artists and go towards defraying the cost of food and drinks. This will be the only fee, and we will never charge a commission on anything exhibited at an Art Underground Quarterly.  Simply include the statement, “I acknowledge the $25 Participation Fee” in your submission and that will suffice.

By AU(STL) Director, Brad Edwards

On May 15th, Art Underground will be co-hosting Art After Dark: a concert featuring St. Louis soul/pop-rock sensation Fundamental Elements, a silent art auction featuring new work from our Quarterly Artists, and a social fund-raising event for one of St. Louis’s most passionate and effective non-profit organizations directly addressing the education problems in St. Louis City: Succeeding with Reading.

Succeeding With Reading, founded in 2004, inspires a love of reading and writing and builds hard skills in low-income youth that struggle with literacy. We implement classrooms which have a 3:1 student to teacher ratio, so that students are almost always next to a strong lead teacher, reading specialist, creative writing instructor, or trained volunteer tutor.  Our curriculum is termed “Balanced Literacy”, a best practice method used in the best schools across the country. This year we will give away 5000 books for students to practice their new skills.

Our goal is to raise $25,000 to buy books, train tutors, and otherwise empower hundreds of grade school kids in the city.

This event is connected to and will follow Urban Expression (event description here, details here), a comprehensive arts program for inner city students, inspiring them to tell the stories of their lives and neighborhoods through digital photography, creative writing, and visual art.  The project is a collaboration of The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, 3 renowned local artist-educators (Stewart Halperin, Janie Ibur, Juan William Chavez) and Chicago-based visiting artist Theaster Gates. Student art and artist work will be exhibited in Grand Center, with the opening occurring on May 15.  Art After Dark is the after-party to this landmark event.

Representing Art Underground are a variety of mediums, including photography, paint, mixed media, and live painting.  We welcome back Featured Quarterly Artists Mike Bolton, Angie Griffith, Jennifer Everett, Kim Wardenburg, Maria Boehm, Mark Grapengater, Seth Caplan and Brad Edwards.  Their work will be up for silent auction, with 50% of the proceeds going to benefit Succeeding with Reading.

Purchase tickets in advance here, and RSVP via Facebook here!

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the 2010 Spring Quarterly: Unseamly Talkis canceled.  Having almost 250 people come through for our last Quarterly and the probability that this trend will continue brings a lot of wear-and-tear to the common space in a condo building, and the last thing we want to do is have our presence cause financial burdens for the community hosting us.  Part of being “underground” means that we function without the stability of an established space or gallery, and it’s no minor miracle that we have not had a major setback thus far! Stay tuned for details on a monumental event May 15th sponsored by Art Underground and featuring Quarterly artists.  And of course, the Quarterly will be coming back in a new space this July!

Our hallmark event, the Quarterly, is coming back Saturday, April  24 at 6:30 PM. Every three months we showcase local artists in the lofts, condos and homes of St. Louis.  The combination of a gallery’s professional approach and home’s warm social atmosphere make for an incredibly unique evening.

This season features an incredibly diverse array of cutting edge fashion (never-before-seen pieces worn by live models mingling in the crowd throughout the evening!), photography, 2 and 3-dimensional ink drawings, 2 video art works, and printmaking .  You can find out many more details about these artists and their work here.

This Quarterly’s venue is one of the most unique in the Midwest region, much less the city of St. Louis.  Hosts Phil and Becca Woods are opening up their home in a completely renovated 19th century gothic-style church called The Abbey on the Park at 1505 Missouri Ave. in Lafayette Square.  Soaring 50-foot ceilings, the original organ pipes, gorgeous stained-glass windows, and a professional gallery hanging and lighting system make this loft a work of art in it’s own right! Check out some of the photos of this incredible space from our 2009 Fall Quarterly…

Join Art Underground Saturday, April 24th at 6:30 pm, 1505 Missouri Ave. unit #2E for some of our city’s best creative culture!

By AU Director, Brad Edwards

It’s that time again, and the Spring Quarterly is quickly approaching this month.  On April 24th, we will once again host a one-night-only gallery exhibition in the home of a St. Louis City resident.  While the details are still coming together, we officially have our artist lineup!

This Quarterly will be a new direction for Art Underground.  Our Quarterly Call for Art continues to attract some of St. Louis’ most talented emerging artists.  Our 2010 Winter Quarterly: Positive Obsession, had a very strong aesthetic focus and was visually just stunning.  While our Spring Quarterly will as well, this one is strongly content or message-driven.  Each of these pieces intend to say something, and they say it through a variety of different means, styles and volumes!

Brandon Barnes

Brandon Barnes is a senior at Webster University, graduating in May.  His workcombines sculpture and drawing by taking the linear qualities of ink on paper, and creating sculptures that reflect these qualities and physically branch off of the work.

Seth Caplan

Seth Caplan is a senior photography major at Washington University in St. Louis, originally from New York.  His work explores the idea of performance in identities and relationships, and how cultural norms affect these performances, personally and in our interactions with others.

Jeremiah Clark is a senior at Greenville College.  Something that he has become particularly interested in recently is process.  Jeremiah uses video as his chosen avenue to show the process that an artist can go through to produce a work of art, both literally and metaphorically (due to the nature of his medium, you will just have to wait until the Quarterly to see a sample of his work).

Arushi Kumar

Arushi Kumar is our first every fashion designer and artist!  She is a recent graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Fashion Design. The focus of her work is the realm of conceptual fashion and specifically, deconstruction of common stylistic elements found  in contemporary clothing.  The picture shown here is an example from her last line.  She will be unveiling her new work, worn by models mingling with the crowd throughout the evening, at the Spring Quarterly!

Mary Richards

For Mary Richards, Buddhism, psychotherapy, and neuroscience are the basis ofher current body of work.  She is interested in how the process of drawing (the behavior itself) can link to neuroscience and the recent research contending that humans can re-wire, de-clutter, re-route and modify our synapses – our brain chemistry. Her drawings are repetitive, include mark-making sounds, are relative to the natural curve of wrist/hand/arm, involve time, are obsessive and thus extremely meditative.

Kim Wardenburg

Kim Wardenburg will complete her BFA in printmaking at Washington University in St. Louis in May 2010. I use traditional and experimental printmaking techniques to investigate covenants (specifically, their significance to the United States’ involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) and explore connections between disparate people and places, struggling against imminent disaster and brokenness.

Art Underground began as an initiative to help friends in the “starving artist” category find opportunities to make some kind of living off their labor of love (you can read more about how this happened here).  After the economy tanked in October of 2008, many of these friends went from “starving” to a category just below that, for which I’ve not yet discovered a label.  Art is a luxury for most, but an absolute necessity for artists.

Our 2010 Winter Quarterly was our 1st anniversary show, and a lot has changed since that first “wine and art party” a year ago.  We have literally stumbled upon success: St. Louisans love the Quarterly, and amazingly talented and gifted artists are coming out of the woodwork to connect with them.  The most unexpected and exciting aspect of this success is that people who would normally be intimidated by galleries or exhibitions are coming out in droves.  In other words, art is gaining new fans rather than recycling an existing audience. Everyone wins when both art and her appreciators grow.

Due to this success, Art Underground has grown from something truly underground and unknown into something with no small amount of buzz.  We’ve had to introduce structure and policies to intentionally but slowly grow and protect the potency of the opportunity.  For example, because we have over a dozen artists submit work for every Quarterly and we have limited space, we have to jury the submissions.  Also, with hundreds of “fans” on our Facebook Page, we have to limit posts and advertisements for art to those who have already shown in a Quarterly.  Otherwise, no posts from either AU(STL) or our featured artists would ever be seen.

I recently received an email from someone who took issue with our use of the word “underground” to describe our organization, especially considering the “exclusive” rules we’ve put into place to focus and harness that success.

True “underground” is diametrically opposed to “exclusive.” Underground art doesn’t require “submission” to be what it is. Maybe you should change your name, since you seem to employ it either improperly or as a gimmick. The whole notion of underground is about non-conformist, anti-establishment, anti-elite brutes and rejects… You use it to connote an “exclusive group” and worry about crowding your site with “well intentioned” artists….

I hope you realize that people you reject are the true “underground” artists, and not your hand-picked selection, and that if you ever were underground, rejected, a brute of an artist, you’d laugh at yourself.

Now, there are several aspects of this that I truly grieve over.  I hate to think that we “reject” anyone, and exclusivity being positive or negative depends greatly on why it is there.  However, the most important aspect of this email is the very legitimate need for clarifying how and why we consider ourselves “underground.”

The latest issue of Paste Magazine’s cover story is entitled, “Is Indie Dead?” (Side note: to add to the ironic gall for even asking their hipster readership this question, they patterned the cover after the famous [infamous?] cover of the 1966 issue of Time Magazine asking, “Is God Dead?”) Assistant Editor Rachael Maddux perceptively poses the question due to a growing epidemic use of “indie” to describe “a genre (of music first, and then of film, books, video games and anything else with a perceived arty sensibility, regardless of its relationship to a corporation), an ethos, a business model, a demographic and a marketing tool. It can signify everything, and it can signify nothing.”

There is a danger for AU(STL) to face the same challenge (if we haven’t already).  As we grow, success simultaneously undermines our uniqueness and better equips us to serve artists.  Maddux notes this paradox in her article, using the example of indie bands licensing their songs for commercial use:

For those unsure even now of the practical worth of musicians licensing their songs for commercial use, the finest bit of apologetics on the subject is probably John Leland’s 2001 New York Times Magazine piece about The Apples in Stereo licensing their song “Strawberryfire” for a Sony television commercial, which made it possible for the band’s husband-and-wife frontman and drummer to buy furniture for their new baby. ‘‘You imagine that it’s a crass process,’’ Apples lead singer Robert Schneider told Leland at the time. ‘‘But it’s not like Sony used our song in the commercial, which is how it looks to the indie kid. It’s just one guy who liked our music.’’

We’re not corporate.  We’re not commercial.  We’re certainly not here to make a profit.  In fact, talk to any artist that has worked with us and you’ll find out that it actually costs quite a bit of money and time donated by volunteers to pull off a single Quarterly.  Art Underground (STL) is indebted to the radical generosity of both individuals and communities who have taken ownership of the vision to create a St. Louis that “ought to be” through creative expression.  When you boil down to it, we’re just trying to provide the St. Louis artist community with the equivalent of baby furniture.  Surely there is legitimate value, and not dishonor, in this goal…?

Michael Azerrad, author of Our Band Could Be Your Life, described the underground ethos in music as we at AU(STL) interpret and own it.

“Underground music stands against and apart from mainstream culture in order to offer an antidote to it. In eras past, mainstream culture was blandly, blindly complacent, so underground music was angry and dissatisfied. [...] But now, mainstream culture isn’t complacent, it’s stupid and angry; underground culture reacts by becoming smarter, more serene. That’s not wimpy—it’s powerful and productive.”

For us, being underground is a relentless pursuit at offering an “antidote” to St. Louis mainstream culture.  For artists, that culture is often fractured, ingrown and unhealthily competitive.  Very few new patrons of art are cultivated.  We certainly do not have all, or even very many, answers.

Thus, what we hope to bring to the table is a habit of gestures that cultivate a different posture among both the artist community and her patrons.  We hope that this posture is gracious and unified (but still diverse) under a vision of a St. Louis that “ought to be.” We welcome anyone and everyone seeking to partner with this local initiative of a global movement!

CALL FOR ENTRY, All Mediums, AU(STL) Spring Quarterly Submissions Due March 6th.

Attention artists and creative catalysts. It’s that time again and AU(STL) is looking for local talent to feature in our 2010 Spring Quarterly April 24th!  In addition to participating in this AU event, being a Featured Artist qualifies you to be sponsored by Art Underground on events you do in the St. Louis area.  This includes assistance with advertising and PR, networking and professional development, and the invitation to join a community of people seeking to “create a St. Louis that ought to be.”

If you are an artist, or know one who would be interested in this opportunity, please send the following submission requirements to AU Submissions (submissions@artundergroundstl.org) no later than Saturday, March 6th. Upon receipt of your application, we will send you further details on the event.

Submission Requirements

• Full Name- Please format the subject line of your email as follows: “Full Name (Submission)”
• Bio and Short Artist Statement – 50 words or less. This may describe the artistʼs background, materials, medium, and stylistic distinctions. This will be included in the slides for display at the event and used for marketing.
• Digital Samples (with brief descriptions if necessary)- This depends significantly on the type of work, but some kind of example needs to be submitted for application and (if accepted) marketing. The artist must submit pictures or samples of all works they intend to display.  Video clips should be 5min or less.
• Acknowledgement of Fees – To curb frivolous applications and drop-outs, a very modest $25 fee will be charged to accepted artists and go towards defraying the cost of food and drinks.  This will be the only fee, and we will never charge a commission on any sales made at an Art Underground Quarterly.

If you are unfamiliar with the Quarterly, you can find out all about the concept here, the description of our 2010 Winter Quarterly here, and some great pictures from that evening here.