Friday was a jam packed day. With so much inspiration, I am ready for a studio day.

I began my day with CAT institute as a model for cross sector training. Afterwards was the Handmade community action classs that I typed about yesterday…

& I was able to catch the tail end of another wonderful workshop. Photography’s Role in Representation. The photographs the participants created were wonderful and added personality to the convening’s space and RAC walls.

Here are a couple. Enjoy!

I attended this workshop assuming that I would be detached enough to float to more than one presentation during a concurrent session, as there are so many exciting topics that are well worth being touched … I was definitely mistaken. Once I entered the presentation, I could not leave.

As a practicing studio artist/ activist/ employee of a non profit, it is a struggle to streamline all of my efforts into one simplified mission. One of the greatest benefits of the workshop are the examples of community based movements that the presenter Janis gave. Yet, nothing compares to the hands on experience that we participated in. This workshop effectively reminded me to keep it simple!

As we created our own upcycled armbands made of found buttons, repurposed t-shirts and stitchings, we learned the historical & contemporary stories of other cities and spaces that are already forming or have formed people’s studios. Quickly, she deconstructed ideas of how local and global socio-political issues relate directly with the people of our lives and ourselves.

What was most exciting was the fact that while we are searching for grant funding and donations, many of our resources are right before us. By using goods that are on their way out of our communities, how can we rejuvenute their potential? Resale is the perfect place to start, as most artists know… Janis Timm Botto’s facilitated a wonderful presentation on how we can get started, the many women, children and communities that practice and work in people’s art studio and the historical contexts that will help us navigate our endeavors. I truly enjoyed it!

-Dail C.

I serve as the Community Outreach Manager at Craft Alliance in St. Louis, MO.

The on-going engagement with our St. Louis communities has broadened my understanding of the arts and their social applications, while sharpening the focus of my own personal studio practice – the overlap has been invaluable.

Craft Alliance has consistently defined itself as an environment for artists, collectors, students, and the art-viewing public to begin new conversations.  The mixing of ideas, perspectives, and skills allows us as individuals to connect ourselves to a larger context outside of our own subculture; to become a community.

As a director of programming, I believe it is vital to create space and opportunity for the varied St. Louis communities to come together.  Our programming is built to stimulate the creative potential of our students.  They come from all over the city, from different schools, from different neighborhoods; their family lives are all very different.  The nature of our programs engages our students, together in the culture of craft.

Our Community Outreach programming has been illustrative of the fact that a student doesn’t just do something else; he or she becomes something else.  As an organization we have witnessed what our students become through their studio work.  Our students are applying their experiences at Craft Alliance to a larger context.  Even if they don’t pursue careers in art, they have developed something new that is central to who they are as people, and that is going to lead to a more enriching and successful life.

Robert Longyear

Studio Artist

Craft Alliance Community Outreach Manager

CAT Fellow 2003

St. Louis

I have found that I am not solely a studio artist. I know how to work in a studio and I’ve got lots of conventional studio skills, but it really doesn’t engage me week in week out. I realize that what I am really interested in is the tourism outside my front door.

My research is about working with entropy. I’m drawn to buildings as metaphor for system breakdowns – and as opportunities to learn more about how humans interface with the world through architecture. I use neglected structures as my raw material. In this way, I am able to reveal their hidden construction, provide new ways of perceiving space, and create metaphors for the human condition.

St. Louis is truly in a state of entropy. My work helps me to address critically the fate of our neighborhoods, which are presently filled with unoccupied structures, abandoned warehouses, idle factories, and empty lots. My experiences have been open-ended, complex, and suggest that fate is malleable. Through allocations of time and circumstance I become another layer on top of the dynamics at play in the places I work, taking advantage of a great opportunity to talk. My engagements are on-going and constantly in flux, much like the built environment itself.

In architecture, you focus on the box; this box can be understood as a social weapon – are we protected, have we become isolated? We have preconceived ideas about a structure protecting us, and when choruses of unoccupied structures no longer protect us, it raises all sorts of issues that we don’t normally associate with a neighborhood.

We all leave a layer of skin on our buildings, and as an artist I am sharing skin with the idiosyncrasies of those who have built, painted walls, and hammered nails. In my current work I intend to represent and reinterpret this relationship. I hope to offer audiences new ways to think about architecture while inciting questions concerning the social, political, and geographical circumstances that give architecture its meaning.

Brick by brick, that’s just the way the game go…

Robert Longyear

Studio Artist

Craft Alliance Community Outreach Manager

CAT Fellow 2003

St. Louis