PANEL DISCUSSIONS:
A Visual Dialogue About St. Louis
LEFT BOOK BANKS EXHIBIT
October 29 - December 5, 1999

 

"Panel Discussions" is an interactive dialogue based on a standard 4"x12" panel format. Artists and therapists were asked  to describe their feelings and experiences of living in St. Louis. Through a series of workshops and independent small group dialogues, a collection of 50 panels was developed.
The panels were installed over time at the Left Bank Books gallery, where viewers could create their own panels in response.

The panels were mounted on magnets, and the gallery walls covered by 4' x 5' red metal backing boards. This way, the panels could be moved around by viewers to change the direction or flow of meaning in the visual dialogue.

So as not to overwhelm the viewer and/or the gallery space, the initial installation included only 14 of the original panels, curated by Ann Haubrich of Regional Arts Commission and Jonathon Smith, poet, musician and educator at Washington University.  After the show opened, the remaining panels were added at intervals to create a sense of on-going dialogue. Panel kits were made available at the gallery so that the public could join the show.

"Panel Discussions" was an evolution of the original "Mother Tongue" concept developed in Holyoke, MA by Mary Bernstein and Terry Rumble. Mother Tongue used a much larger format (1'x4') for the panels and has travelled throughout Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts. In Fall, 1998, Visual Dialogues Project brought a section of Mother Tongue to St. Louis. Out of this project, a small "Core Dialogue Group" was begun. This group meets once a month and experiments with art as a form of social and psychological dialogue. Members of this group experimented with the smaller scale panels and with methods to make installation and rearrangement more "user  friendly", resulting in the format ultimately used in the Left Bank Books exhibit.

As the artists worked in small groups and individually on the preliminary dialogue panels, some of this work was posted on this website for stimulus value. You can view some of the preliminary discussion panels by clicking on Preliminary Discussions below. This will lead you through a series of pages with the initial images.

You can view the Left Bank  exhibit by clicking on the LEFT BANK PANELS link below. This will show you the initial 14 images selected by the curators. Over time, the rest of the images will be posted to this site.