"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
Every now and then, a piece of visual art strikes a writerly chord in me—speaks, in other words, to my practice or my concerns as a person interested in telling stories and sparking collective imagination. I experienced such a confluence of sensibility several months ago when three messages appeared in large letters affixed to a wire marquee on the Midtown exterior of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. I watched the concrete facade and its messages change alongside the shift from spring to the sweltering heat of a St. Louis summer, as the days lengthened toward the solstice and a year spent making up for lost time quietly tipped past its halfway mark.
In March the wall read, In deep darkness we become invisible. Somehow, we find each other and feel our way through. Written by artist Jen Everett, the text probed what life means in “this time,” particularly our present moment, when all of us, as a fragmented collective, are learning at uneven rates to restore ourselves and our loved ones, or still (forever) wading through loss and mourning and the daily tasks of survival, and examined the gnarly epistemological issues dredged up from solitude (hers, ours).
In May the message changed, and the wall now read, We are made to see beyond this ocean around us - Stvoreni smo da vidimo dalje od okeana što naš okružuje. This aphorism’s author, artist Aïda Hasanović, uses the idea, expressed in both English and Bosnian, of seeing beyond an ocean of solitude and insularity as a metaphor for overcoming our current political and social environment. As a refugee of the Bosnian Genocide, Hasanović, like many others from her country, emigrated to St. Louis, which has the largest Bosnian population outside of Bosnia itself, and this aphorism offers the metaphor through which she negotiates her own crossing of physical borders and what she has now identified as a need to deconstruct the notions of difference put forth by the gatekeepers of language and belonging.
In June, the previous message was again replaced. I close my eyes and take a deep breath — I am filled with the wisdom of my ancestors: these words come from the artist and wellness practitioner Simiya Sudduth, who made the piece as both an affirmation and invitation, and as a welcome break from the disempowering structures of daily life. This is a reminder that, entrenched as we are in the sediments of oppression and neglect, the act of self-care and a connection to ancestral knowledge is not only essential to individuals’ physical, mental, and spiritual health but also to collective liberation.
The three text installations were part of the museum's group exhibition Stories of Resistance and organized by PSA:—a St. Louis-based artist duo consisting of the multimedia installation artist Marina Peng and the designer and illustrator Shannon Levin. Originating in 2019, PSA: has presented the majority of its projects on the side of a brick building at 2222 Chippewa Street, in the Marine Villa neighborhood, one of several in St. Louis to have been shaped by disinvestment and the departure of many of its residents. Peng and Levin's project is interdisciplinary in nature, and local writers with robust practices who have added their words to the 2222 Chippewa building include the poets Jacqui Germaine, Joss Barton, and El Williams III. The rotating text installations PSA:—which have also included a billboard in North St. Louis—use the familiar framework of a public service announcement to call attention to themselves in order to warn of threats to physical safety, to address the emotionally urgent questions of what it means to serve a public and to facilitate collective healing—in short, to create public announcements that engender, in place of fear and vigilance, feelings of safety and refuge. In initiating this project, Peng and Levin ask, “What is it that the people need to hear?” Moreover, they ask how to make art that is sustainable and gives a platform specifically to amplify underrepresented voices rather than the artist-organizers themselves.
Ideas about collective healing and restoration are not new to St. Louis. In the early 2000s, an urban renewal effort known as the Grand Center Project endeavored to create a “cultural renaissance” in Midtown by restoring historic buildings and filling the empty space left behind by white flight and dispossessive reconstruction dating back to the 1950s. But PSA: takes a community-centered approach by commissioning local artists to speak to the needs of underrepresented groups here and now. PSA: is oriented toward the local and the specific, not only in who they choose to engage, and in their aesthetic choice to occupy the traditional imagery of St. Louis’s visual vernacular (the faded ghost signs, the red brick, the hand-painted street murals), but also where in the city they situate their installations and, by extension, who they are identifying as their “public.” Geographically, CAM and Grand Center sit just south of what is known as the Delmar Divide, a single long-running thoroughfare that splits the city into two distinct wealth and racial sectors. PSA: directs its messages—written predominantly by artists of color—toward the Northside, such that they are visible to a historically Black neighborhood otherwise estranged from the Grand Center development, which does not extend above Delmar Boulevard.
It also occurs to me that vision is central to all three of the public service announcements quoted above. These aphorisms about vision range from metaphors of visionary seeing to metaphors of unseeing. Closing one’s eyes, as in Sudduth’s case, is a metaphor for a healing retreat into one’s intuition. In Everett’s case, becoming invisible or losing the sensation of sight actually opens up other senses, such as tactility, as a means of knowing one another. In Hasanović’s piece, there is even a play on the word “made” (made as in created, which is what the Bosnian word stvoreni translates to, but also in English made as in implored to, necessitated to), such that vision—specifically far-sighted vision—is interlaced with a religious or metaphysical imperative. The double-edged power of vision is evident at PSA:’s other locations as well. For example, the artist Jessie Donovan’s billboard on McCausland Avenue also takes up the theme of sight, pointing out the gaps in which vision fails to produce intersubjective understanding: