The somewhat forbidding, sign-less façade of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
I hadn’t kept up with the Pulitzer.
When I arrived two weeks ago in the gritty part of St. Louis where the Tadao Ando-designed Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts is situated, on a street that, on that weekday morning, had few pedestrian or vehicular passersby, I had expected to find something resembling what the late John Russell had described in his NY Times review of the 2001 opening—an architecturally distinguished space stocked with Emily Rauh Pulitzer‘s superb modern and contemporary masterpieces.
The architectural flair was still there, but only a few key Pulitzer works remained, including this perfectly placed Kelly commission, “Blue Black”…
…and this site-specific Serra, “Joe,” named for Joseph Pulitzer:
But the mission of the institution has significantly shifted: It now installs temporary shows of borrowed art that serve as springboards for providing social services to the disadvantaged. The Pulitzer has on its staff a social worker, Lisa Harper Chang (whose title is, “Manager of Community Engagement”), but no educator.
Ando’s austerely elegant spaces are perfectly suited to the temporary Gordon Matta-Clark exhibition, recently installed by senior curator Francesca Herndon-Consagra (to June 5). The show opens with the same Museum of Modern Art-owned piece that had been stationed at the entrance to MoMA’s new contemporary galleries during the inaugural installation in its new Taniguchi building:
Gordon Matta-Clark, “Bingo,” 1974, Museum of Modern Art, installed at the Pulitzer
Another highlight of the show is “Splitting: Four Corners,” owned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which I had last seen at the Whitney Museum’s 2007 retrospective.
But wait a minute! This was supposed to be an irreverent VIDEO essay! No more stationary images. Let’s get moving: