Based at the Lewis Center, the Creative Research Institute (CRI) supports collaborative interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, providing visiting artists and scholars with space to pursue their projects in proximity to graduate art students and faculty. The CRI is not specifically "product" oriented; rather, it advances opportunities for conceptualization, experimentation, and conversation about art, ideas, and broader social concerns.
2012-13 CRI fellows
Since September of 2008, Jessica Baran has been the art writer for St. Louis' alt-weekly the Riverfront Times. Her art criticism has appeared in such journals as Art in America, Art Papers, BOMB Magazine, TAR Magazine, and the Village Voice, among others. Baran earned a BA in Visual Art from Columbia University and an MFA in Poetry Writing from Washington University. Her first book, Remains to be Used, is a collection of ekphrastic poetry published by Apostrophe Books in 2010. Her second book of poetry, EQUIVALENTS, won the 2012 Besmilr Brigham Women Writers Award and is forthcoming from Lost Roads Press. Between September 2008 and May 2012, Baran was the assistant director of White Flag Projects. She has curated solo and group exhibitions at White Flag Projects, the Front Room of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, COCA (Center of Creative Arts), and the St. Louis Artist Guild. With poet Jennifer Kronovet, she co-curates the Fort Gondo Poetry Series.
Sung Ho Kim earned a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he later served as a principal researcher for the Interrogative Design Group at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He is an associate professor of architecture at Washington University and founding director and owner of Axi:Ome, a design team that brings together diverse programmatic and experiential aspirations to create work at the scale of the environment, the building, and the individual. Members of the Axi:Ome design team creates beautiful spatial forms that capture the unique circumstances of each place and the potential social event spaces. Kim's background in both architecture and interactive public media play heavily in the belief that design of all scales principally derives from people and the social events they create. He aspires to create fluid environments that have the foresight and flexibility to encourage evolving public activity.
Kelly Shindler has worked in the field of contemporary art for over ten years. Since joining the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in September 2011, she has curated several exhibitions including Rosa Barba: Desert—Performed, Great Rivers Biennial, Robert Breer: 1957, and Sreshta Rit Premnath: Folding Rulers (all 2012). In 2013, she will present solo exhibitions with artists Mika Taanila and Lari Pittman. Prior to CAM, Shindler worked as an independent curator, organizing such exhibitions as Chicago-Scope: The Films of Tom Palazzolo 1967-1976 at the Art Institute of Chicago (November 2010–January 2011) and curating film and video programs for art spaces and festivals worldwide, including Australian Cinematheque, Brisbane; Sequences Festival, Reykjavik, Iceland; Scandinavia House, New York City; and the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago. From 2003-2011, Shindler worked at Art21, where she served variably as the director of public programs and director of special projects, and was founding editor-in-chief of the Art21 Blog. She earned dual MA degrees in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism and Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was a Trustee Merit Scholar, and a BA in English Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Julia A. Walker is associate professor of English and drama at Washington University. She earned her PhD from Duke University in 1995, and taught at The College of William & Mary and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before arriving in St. Louis in 2008. Walker is the author of Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Modernity & Performance: Enacting Change on the Modern Stage. In this second book, she examines the emergence of new styles of acting in light of the profound social, economic, and political changes associated with the historical period of modernity. Walker argues that, on a stage that was both literal and metaphorical, actors helped audiences adapt to their changing world by figuring new categories of thought, modeling new social relations, and enacting new habits of embodying a self. she has published several articles in scholarly journals and edited collections, and is currently serving as book review editor for Theatre Journal.
The inaugural CRI fellows for 2011-12 were: Jasmin Aber, a member of the "Shrinking Cities" research group at UC Berkeley's Center for Global Metropolitan Studies; Francesca Herndon-Consagra, senior curator of The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts; Lutz Koepnick, professor of German, film and media studies, and comparative literature at Washington University; and Bill Smart, associate professor of computer science and engineering at Washington University.
