How do images of the future shape the city in the present? What competing futures are emerging in the urban fabric?
Dwell in Other Futures: Art / Urbanism / Midwest (2018) was a two-day festival of art and ideas exploring the collisions of urbanism, futurism, and race in St. Louis.
Co-organized with Tim Portlock and Rebecca Wanzo, Dwell was anchored by a night with the legendary science fiction author Samuel R. Delany, and featured performances, presentations, screenings, and installations by an array of artists, architects, poets, and scholars working both locally and nationally.
Highlights included the exhibition Revisions to Tomorrow, four new art commissions by St. Louis-based artists—Damon Davis, Addoley Dzegede, Basil Kincaid & Reuben Reuel, and Katherine Simóne Reynolds—and a series of performative “Manifestos for a Future St. Louis” from the collective ARTC, urbanist Michael R. Allen, performer Maxi Glamour, musician ICE, designer De Nichols, and poet Alison C. Rollins.
Contributions from visiting participants included Autumn Knight’s performance The La–a Consortium, a talk by Mendi + Keith Obadike, and a screening of videos by Sophia Al-Maria. Architects V. Mitch McEwen (McEwen Studio) and Jae Shin (HECTOR) joined Amanda Cólon-Smith, Executive Director of St. Louis’s Dutchtown South Community Corporation, in an exchange about urban practices and civic futures in Detroit, Newark, and St. Louis.
The festival featured interactive workshops and installations from Eric Ellingsen and Amber Johnson’s Justice Fleet project, contributions from Terrance Wooten and Treasure Shields Redmond, and artworks by Alix Gerber, Jonathan Hanahan, ICE, #NEWPALMYRA, and Tim Portlock. Read more at The Architect's Newspaper, Sixty Inches from Center, and Temporary Art Review.
Dwell in Other Futures was held at the Kranzberg Art Foundations .ZACK art space and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Dwell was a project of The Divided City, an Urban Humanities Initiative at Washington University in St. Louis, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and presented in partnership with the Center for the Humanities, the Distinguished Visiting Scholars Program at WUSTL, Fabricatorz Foundation, Kranzberg Arts Foundation, Law, Identity & Culture, projects+gallery, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Saint Louis Fashion Fund, Saint Louis University, and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Dwell was made possible by the generous support of Adrienne Davis, Ken and Nancy Kranzberg, and Susan Sherman.