One way to do so is to keep Sumner High alive.
"There were considerations of closing Sumner High School and we stepped in saying we can't do this, it's too historic of an institution and we are willing to do a recovery plan to keep it open and restore it," Williams said.
That's where volunteers step in. They were cleaning out one classroom and taking it to the next to make room for what's to come.
Paving the way for a new program to settle in such as Sumner's Studio Lab with Washington University's Divided City Initiative.
In “Decolonizing Water: Native Histories and Futures in the Mississippi River Basin,” a research fellowship funded by WashU’s Divided City initiative, Stanfield investigated how levees, dams, pipelines and other systems of control have perpetuated centuries of environmental injustice.
Nathan Stanfield: "Through my summer 2021 project with the Divided City, I investigated the histories and futures of water-based crises experienced by Native communities throughout the Mississippi River Basin. The first application of my work and research comprised the design, prototyping + stress testing, budgeting + scheduling, and construction of a model of the Mississippi River basin, 800,000 times smaller than reality, which juxtaposes historical Native territories and present-day reservations with systems of power, control, and extraction."
STL Reentry Collective is helping formerly incarcerated people control their own narrative through its new documentary project, “Our Time.”
“The videos allow people that aren't necessarily familiar with formerly incarcerated folks see us in our own light — instead of the way that the media is portraying us,” said Harvey Galler, who co-founded the organization in 2020, less than a year after he was released from prison.
The documentary will highlight the experiences of formerly incarcerated people from the St. Louis region about their time in prison and reentering society. It’s funded by a $10,000 grant from the Divided City Initiative and will last throughout 2022.
4theVille, a project designed around the legacy of the historical African-American neighborhood the Ville, received a $140,000 grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation due to the project's revitalization and community education efforts. The project branches from the faculty collaborative grant Reclaiming Historic Assets to Transform Communities. Through tactical urbanism and community engagement, 4theVille has called attention to the neighborhood's many fundamental contributions to civil rights activism, the arts, healthcare, and education and aims to counteract the erasure of the neighborhood's past and present. The grant will permit the organization to hire an Executive Director, who will help preserve the Ville's history through heritage walks, streetscape improvement, a memorial park, and historical markers around the neighborhood.
In May 2021, Chancellor Andrew D. Martin announced Washington University in St. Louis' Faculty Achievement Awards. Among the recipients was Jean Allman, one of the Principal Investigators for the Divided City Initiative. She received the Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award for her research on 20th century African history and for her many academic and professional achievements. She has published widely and won many prestigious fellowships for her work on decolonization, knowledge production, and gender in 20th-century Ghana. In addition, she has served as a journal editor, board member of multiple academic associations, and principal investigator for another Mellon-funded initiative, "Faculty for the Next Generation." The article also shares details on the work of other Faculty and Chancellor Award winners: Lilianna Solnica-Krezel, Aaron DiAntonio, and Jeffrey Millbrandt.
In this piece, Tila Neguse, former Project Coordinator for the Divided City and now Assistant Director for WashU's Center of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity, interviewed Lois Conley, director of St. Louis' Griot Museum of Black History. They discussed the Museum's partnership with the Divided City Initiative, which began in 2016, and the ongoing benefits that have come out of said partnership, including the Griot's involvement with the Harvard University Commonwealth Project. The article also touches on the impact of Covid-19 on the museum, as well as the Griot's plans for its 25th anniversary.
In 2020, funding opportunities for non-profit organizations were cut due to Covid-19 in the same period as interest in social justice movements like Black Lives Matter increased following the police killing of George Floyd. In response, the Divided City created a new grant opportunity for local community-based projects in art and activism, ultimately awarding six grants of approximately $10,000 from a pool of 82 applicants. Overwhelmed by the creativity and quality of the proposals, the Divided City plans to launch a similar Community Grants cycle in 2021.
Meredith Kelling, a Divided City graduate student fellow from 2020, discusses the radical potential of recipe writing such as Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor's book "Vibration Cooking" (1970). Kelling, a Ph.D. candidate in English and American Studies, offers insight into how underexamined 20th women's writing and labor created gender and anti-racist solidarities. Smart-Grosvenor's text, Kelling argues, informed the "artistry, amateurism, collaboration and improvisation" of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and reveals the centrality of cooking and carework for solidifying networks of Black political consciousness.
In January 2021, the art collective Saint Louis Story Stitchers received an award of $500,000 as part of the Lewis Prize for Music Accelerator Award, which they will put towards establishing a youth music and technology center for the community. The collective, made up of professional African American and BIPOC artists, uses writing, art, and performance to promote community engagement and civic pride, create social change, and increase understanding about issues like gun violence. Their podcast StitchCast also received an award in 2020 from the Divided City Initiative, and will feature Special Edition episodes about St. Louis public health and safety issues, gun violence, and generational trauma. The Lewis Award will enable them to continue and expand this crucial work through music and the arts.
St. Louis-based podcast BlackTea, hosted by Alisha Sonnier and Jami Cox, earned a community grant from the Divided City Initiative in 2020. Each of their episodes explores important contemporary issues, with segments on political subjects, spotlights of community representatives, and humorous takes on current pop culture. They look to empower their listeners, especially young people, with pertinent information about issues that matter to them by adding fun and engaging twists.
The 28th Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival (SLIFF) — held Nov. 7-17 — provides St. Louis filmgoers with the opportunity to view the finest in world cinema: international films, documentaries, American indies, and shorts that can only be seen on the big screen at the festival. SLIFF offers a fourth edition of the program "Mean Streets: Viewing the Divided City Through the Lens of Film and Television," which addresses one of the most persistent and vexing issues in urban studies: segregation.
On Friday’s St. Louis on the Air, St. Louis Public Radio’s Jeremy D. Goodwin led a discussion reflecting on the Stonewall uprising of 50 years ago and what was happening among the local LGBTQ community at that time. Joining the conversation were Steven Louis Brawley, Paul Thiel and Miranda Rectenwald.
A tool shed, a prison, a sex club and a photography studio can all suggest dark spaces, some more literally than others, in three separate installations.
The first two, “Tool Shed” by Eric Ellingsen and “Earwitness Theatre” by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, also use audio elements as part of their political commentary on public issues. Ellingsen’s pink shed seems playful on the outside, but also references St. Louis’ racial divides and how residents are heard.
Curators of contemporary art museums face a competing set of challenges, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis responds to them all with dazzling creativity in the set of shows that opened on Friday, May 17 and closes August 18.
For two decades, Lois Conley, founder of St. Louis’ Griot Museum of Black History, has struggled just to pay the bills, hoping the roof, heating, and air conditioning will last another season. But a recent donation is giving Conley some breathing room. The money is from a longtime supporter who died last year and remembered the Griot in his will.
Back in 2014, Catalina Freixas and Mark Abbott each wanted to reach a better understanding of the different ways that segregation happens in cities, including St. Louis. But in order to get there, the two local professors knew they needed to draw on the expertise and experiences of others in the region.
Over the past four years, The Divided City, an urban humanities initiative at Washington University in St. Louis, has supported dozens of classes, seminars and research projects investigating the history, mechanisms and contemporary effects of spatial segregation.
This fall, the university will launch a second phase, The Divided City 2022, thanks to a $1 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Organizers of Dwell in Other Futures: art/ urbanism/ midwest say the event will expose attendees to the ways urban development constructs and reinforces how people engage, or don’t, with public spaces and the people around them.
The Fair Housing Act turned 50 this month, and lots of local organizations are using that milestone as an opportunity to look back and take stock of how far we've actually progressed since 1968.
On Friday and Saturday, Dwell in Other Futures, "a two-day festival of art and ideas that explores the collisions of race, urbanism and futurism" will grapple with many of the same topics, but in a more nonlinear, speculative way. Organized by Rebecca Wanzo, Tim Portlock, and Gavin Kroeber with support from Wash U's Divided City Initiative, it's been in planning for more than a year.
For multidisciplinary artist and curator Gavin Kroeber, scholar and Washington University in St. Louis faculty member Dr. Rebecca Wanzo, and artist and Washington University faculty member Tim Portlock, exploring St. Louis’ many possible futures also doubles as an opportunity to dig deeper into more complicated questions. Driven by a desire to facilitate a more imaginative and accessible dialogue open to the St. Louis public, the trio organized “Dwell in Other Futures: Art / Urbanism / Midwest.”
The two-day festival, scheduled for the weekend of April 27-28, features panels, performances and art installations all meditating on the intersections of race, urbanism, and futurism through multiple artistic practices and interpretations.
The Dwell in Other Futures Art Fest will feature some major -isms: futurism, urbanism, activism and even, in the words of the organizers, "artivism." After its opening night at .ZACK (3224 Locust) on April 27, the festival will take place at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (3716 Washington Boulevard) throughout the afternoon and evening of April 28. Organized by Gavin Kroeber, Rebecca Wanzo and Tim Portlock, it will feature poetry, visual art, sound and other creative mixes, all with a particular focus on the Midwest.
An Article in Art in America magazine on the "Charting the American Bottom" digital humanities project. The American Bottom region is the focus of a multi-year initiative led by artist Jesse Vogler and artist and researcher Matthew Fluharty. The project's primary manifestation is "Charting the American Bottom," a website featuring an interactive map of the region, photographs, texts describing key geographical features, and essays examining the poetics of the landscape as well as the histories of conflict and growth that have left physical traces on the terrain.
Interview with featured artist and co-curator Matt Rahner about the origins of the "Eminent Domain/Displaced" exhibit, the long-term impacts of eminent domain, and the ways in which art and activism intersect. “Eminent Domain/Displaced” will be on display through Nov. 20, 2017.
On a map of the city, researchers at Washington University have placed 800 dots. They represent pieces of gay history, stitching together a story arc that has been told only in snippets. There on the interactive map are the nightclubs, the bookstores, the places of worship where those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer came together, safe harbors in a Midwest city resisting what was not considered normal.
The project is a collaboration of Washington University, the Missouri History Museum, the State Historical Society of Missouri and the St. Louis LGBT History Project.
“Eminent Domain/Displaced,” a collaborative installation by Matt Rahner and Lois Conley, which opens October 6 at the Griot Museum, is a new exhibit that explores neighborhoods victimized by eminent domain. Visitors will view scenes from Kansas City’s Wendell Phillips neighborhood to Mill Creek Valley and St. Louis Place (home to the upcoming NGA West Campus), scenes of life before and after the headache ball.
Historian Margaret Garb, of Arts & Sciences, writes on the Center for the Humanities site about St. Louis’ use of eminent domain. An exhibit opening and panel discussion took place on October 6-7, 2017.
In March of this year, WU Libraries received funding for three collaborative projects through “The Divided City: An Urban Humanities Initiative." Check out page 10 of "Off The Shelf" magazine to learn more about the collaboration between The Divided City Initiative and Washington University Libraries!
How to prevent the erasure of displaced communities? The Divided City, Washington University in St. Louis co-organized a workshop to explore the question, gathering local and global experts to tell their stories.
The St. Louis International Film Festival and the Divided City Initiative have collaborated to present “Mean Streets: Viewing the Divided City Through the Lens of Film and Television.” This six-day program shows how film and television reflect — both consciously and unconsciously — problems within U.S. society, including the overt and covert racism that has long segregated our cities.
On Monday July 18, 2016, as part of its annual Whitaker St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase, Cinema St. Louis presented a film created in a class funded by the Divided City. “Bob’s Tour – Understanding What We See” is a film by Jun Bae, a 2016 graduate of the Sam Fox School. “Bob’s Tour” began last fall as a class project in “Tale of Two Cities: Documenting Our Divides,” a seminar funded by The Divided City initiative and led by Professor Denise Ward-Brown. The film explores the community activism of associate professor Bob Hansman.
“Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis” is a Divided City Initiative project that focuses on the LGBTQ experience within the divided city of St. Louis. The final product will be an interactive map available to the public that showcases the way space was utilized by LGBTQ populations, while also bringing to life the experience of “living in a city divided by sexual identity and practice, gender, race, and socioeconomic status” .
“The American Bottom” project works to bring cohesion to the fragmented region known as the American Bottom. Jesse Vogler, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at Washington University, and his research team recently launched an in-progress website, theamericanbottom.org, that will allow visitors to explore the relationship between humans and the natural environment.
Eve Blau, adjunct professor of the history of urban form, has received a collaborative research grant with Heather Woofter, professor and chair of graduate architecture at Washington University, and Michael Allen, director of St. Louis’s Preservation Research Office, from Washington University’s The Divided City: An Urban Humanities Initiative. Their research project, entitled Citizen Space in North St. Louis, will examine the role of government influence on the formation and division of public spaces in St. Louis.
In March of 2016, The Divided City sponsored several Washington University faculty to attend and present at the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s conference, “Voices & Visions of St. Louis: Past, Present, Future” The conference examined the urban planning and design decisions that have excluded and dispossessed St. Louis’s African-American community during the past two centuries, and what today’s planners and designers can do repair the damage.
Jeffrey McCune is an associate professor in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program and in the Performing Arts Department, both in Arts & Sciences. Professor McCune is one of the project leads on the Divided City’s faculty collaborative grant, “Oral Histories of Ferguson.” Professor McCune, in partnership with professor Clarissa Hayward, has been collecting narratives from activists involved with the Ferguson movement and speaks at length in this interview about the relationship between academia and activism.
Established by the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences and the Sam Fox School’s College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, The Divided City examines both the historical forms of urban separation and its present-day reality in cities around the world. It is funded in part by a four-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In each of those years, organizers will host a Faculty Collaborative Grants competition, with selected projects receiving awards of up to $20,000 each.
Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, has embarked on a four-year study that will examine racial segregation from a variety of perspectives. The project, entitled “The Divided City: An Urban Humanities Initiative,” is funded in part by a $650,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In 2014, Washington University in St. Louis launched “The Divided City: An Urban Humanities Initiative.” The $1.6 million project — funded in part by a four-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — examines both the history and present-day reality of segregation from a variety of perspectives. Hear from principal investigators, Jean Allman, director of the Center for the Humanities and Bruce Lindsey, dean of Architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.
