The St. Claire Opens New Avenues for Art Communication

A group of recent college graduates, including Tyler’s Matt Kalasky (Sculpture MFA ’11), have joined together to create The St. Claire, a Philadelphia-based arts organization that works to create new avenues of art communication in order to analyze the interactions of a community.

In their press release, The St. Claire states, “Our primary goal is to get our art community excited to read and write about art. Artists use creativity everyday to communicate in their work. We want to harness that same creative communication and apply it to journalistic inquiry within Philadelphia. Our long-term goal is to foster an environment where art journalism and art production exchange freely and productively grow in tandem.”

To promote this communication, The St. Claire has been working on projects in the Philadelphia area.

Their project Local Instruction allows visitors to become a part of the art. They are encouraged to perform and record a lesson to teach other viewers, or they can just watch the collection of tutorials others have recorded. In doing so, the visitors become both teachers and pupils in the community.

The group is also hosting the Show and Share Lecture Series, where Philadelphia artists, curators, writers, and other cultural producers share their knowledge of the practice of art with the community.

Having a strong sense community is important to Kalasky. The time he spent as a part of Tyler’s community has greatly benefited him in the development of The St. Claire.

“My time at Tyler taught me a lot about initiative and self-reliance. As a grad student I developed the skills needed to complete projects from start to finish, independent of infrastructure or availability of resources,” Kalasky said. “As an alumni, I have relied heavily on my Tyler peers and friends in order to make a ground-up enterprise such as The St. Claire a reality.”

Local Instruction is open every Wednesday through Saturday from 2-5 p.m. in The Moore Galleries’ Window on Race Project Space. The Show and Share Lecture Series takes place every Thursday at 6p.m. in The Moore Galleries’ Hub Space.

To learn more about The St. Claire and to view some of their tutorials, visit http://the-st-claire.com/