This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 30, 2012 - Juan William Chávez has done something remarkable at Laumeier Sculpture Park. With his outdoor sculpture and indoor gallery exhibition, Living Proposal Pruitt-Igoe Bee Sanctuary, Chávez has managed to connect north St. Louis to the County, reference our region’s Cahokia ancestors and link us to our French colonial heritage all in one fell swoop.
The centerpiece of the Laumeier exhibition is a series of 14 wooden posts that form a 1:1 scale representation of the architectural footprint left by a typical tower block building from the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project. The failed housing development (1954-1976), which was at Cass and Jefferson, is the subject throughout Chávez’s most recent work.
The splintered wooden posts used to create this sculptural installation, Untitled (sacred real estate), come from an Ameren program for the repurposing of old streetlight posts. Laumeier curator Dana Turkovic notes the irony of using the lampposts as a building material for the piece, as the only current tenant on the Pruitt-Igoe site is Ameren.
The installation placement is bold. Turkovic speaks of the interruption in view sacred real estate creates between Alexander Liberman’s massive steel construction, The Way, which has become emblematic of the park, and the main park building. Cahokia Mound enthusiasts may see the Mississippian sun calendar, Woodhenge, reflected in the piece.
The change that Chávez’s outdoor installation brings to the Laumeier landscape is comparable to the change this young recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship is bringing to local conversations about how our city can and should work to address the needs of our abandoned communities.
Inside the Laumeier gallery space, Chávez presents photographs and artifacts that trace his on-going efforts to replace the long-demolished hive-like Pruitt-Igoe with productive and usable green space. While building a bee sanctuary in that now wild lot, Chávez began to see our sharply diminished St. Louis population as analogous to the alarming collapse of the world’s bee colonies.
In Laumeier director Marilu Knode’s introductory remarks regarding the new work by Chávez, she commented on the value of taking the conversation regarding old north St. Louis out to the suburbs. Chávez’s work, both at Laumeier and in Old North St. Louis --where his Northside Workshop functions as an art space dedicated to addressing cultural and community issues in north St. Louis -- does more than just comment on city/suburb truisms. His work takes action.
Chávez’s efforts to make meaningful, fruitful connections are, while intensely local, also international. Within the Laumeier gallery building Chávez has placed a video of a conversation on beekeeping that he filmed in Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. There, he discovered a beekeeping school that has thrived in the storied Paris park since 1856, three years after that French city began a total make-over known as Haussmann’s renovation.
Chávez’s ability to envision possible futures for St. Louis and the creative energy he devotes toward making it happen allow even a dour St. Louis skeptic (and we have one or two) to see the bees for the trees.
For more about Chavez and his work, see a Post-Dispatch article by Diane Toroian Keaggy.