Cut and Paste

After years of twists and turns, the twentysomething St. Louis band sit on the eve of its major label debut.

One idea behind it is to create an upbeat and safe activity for people who’ve been getting most of their entertainment via computer or TV screens during the coronavirus pandemic. Audiences can’t gather in a theater for a stage adaptation of the story this December, but they can stroll down the streets of the Central West End. Another is to showcase artists of color, particularly Black artists, who have historically been underrepresented in the vision of Christmas presented by mass media.

From raising $160 million to shipping a lonely Monet, Brent R. Benjamin has seen a lot in 21 years as director of St. Louis Art Museum. He reflects on his tenure and looks ahead to how museums can adapt to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Upstairs Headroom” explores similar territory as “A Thousand Shades,” with deeper drinks of jazz fusion, electronic elements and ear-friendly pop poured into the style. The pair describe it as “future soul.”

D.B. Dowd has spent a lot of time collecting and studying the history of illustration, a category of artwork that art historians and art museums have sometimes overlooked.

Monument Lab rethinks the memorials and historic places of St. Louis

St. Louis trio CaveofswordS address the anxiety of contemporary American life by looking straight at it.

Carl Phillips was teaching Latin to high school students when a poet changed his life. Phillips had long been an avid reader and wrote poems casually, but he never conceived of poetry as a career path. The poet Martin Espada visited the school where he worked and led a workshop for faculty. He saw what Phillips wrote in an exercise and suggested he apply for a state grant. He got the grant. Then he won a poetry contest that led to publication of his first collection, “In The Blood,” in 1992. The next year he secured a position on the faculty at Washington University, where he remains a professor of English and leads a workshop in the graduate creative writing program. Many awards and honors later, Phillips published his 15th poetry collection in March this year.

Artist Mee Jey started a collaboration with husband Jey Sushil at the beginning of January. She pledged to create a portrait of Sushil every day for a year. Each day, she shows him the finished piece without comment, and he writes a short note in response. But befitting Jey’s multidisciplinary, eclectic approach, these are not simple depictions of her husband’s physical presence. They are her impressions of his mental state, rendered impressionistically — sometimes from objects Jey finds around the house. As January turned into February and February turned into March, the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic gradually grew over this evolving body of work.

Jane Birdsall-Lander talks about her "Dictionary Poem Project."

As a pediatrician who is also an accomplished cabaret artist, Ken Haller says he may play several roles over the course of a day: teacher, doctor, friend, singer. He says those roles are all different aspects of his chief pursuit: being a healer. He explores the link between arts and healing in an improvisational acting course he leads at St. Louis University School of Medicine and in his latest cabaret show, “The Medicine Show,” which he’ll perform at Blue Strawberry in St. Louis on March 14. It’s also the subject of a five-year effort recently launched by the Arts & Education Council with help from an $825,000 grant from the Missouri Foundation for Health, called the Arts and Healing Initiative.

Examining the legacy of the late, great St. Louis multi-purpose venue Foam.

When some music lovers cue up the oldies, they go way back —sometimes 1,000 years or so. Definitions vary as to what exactly counts as early music, but the wide-ranging category goes back at least to the beginning of European music notation, around the 10th century. Early music ensembles may perform music from the medieval era, the Renaissance, the Baroque period and even some music written as late as the 19th century. In this episode of Cut & Paste, we talk with two early-music experts who help keep early music alive in and around St. Louis.

The Black Tulip Chorale is notable as an "all-identity" choir, in an artistic world where people presenting as male are often sent to one creative corner and people presenting as female are sent to another.

When Stéphane Denève was a 10-year-old child growing up in a small town in the north of France, he heard something he liked. A nun liked to play the pipe organ in the chapel at his Catholic school, and Deneve would hide there to listen. “I thought the sound of the organ was extraordinary,” he said in an interview at his new office in Powell Hall. “I was enchanted.” Fortunately for classical music lovers in St. Louis, the nun found little Denève hiding there and suggested he take piano lessons.

Visual artist Yingxue Zuo grew up amid persecution by the Chinese government during Mao's Cultural Revolution, and discovered art as a way to propel himself from a potential life of manual labor. His latest work incorporates figures from contemporary American politics.

Thiel sought his literary fortunes in San Francisco in 1963, where he moved into the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and discovered the burgeoning scene of Beat poets centered around Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore. Allen Ginsberg was a familiar face in the neighborhood, and, for a time, an unknown singer named Janis Joplin rehearsed beneath his poet’s loft. He later relocated to New York City, where he sold poems on the streets of Greenwich Village for a quarter apiece; saw W. H. Auden hanging out in the back at poetry readings; and encountered Andy Wharhol as a “white ghost” always hovering silently around the literary and artistic scene. He also witnessed the Stonewall Uprising, the acts of protest and civil disobedience that launched the Gay Liberation movement

St. Louis Youth Poet Laureate Camryn Howe and UrbArts founder MK Stallings reveal the electrifying power of the spoken word.

Palestinian-American artists Saj ISsa and Kiki Salem talk about their collaborative exhibition "Back Home In Your New Home" at Kranzberg Arts Center in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

Authors Amanda E. Doyle and Steve Pick discuss their book "St. Louis Sound: An Illustrated Timeline." They talk about key figures from St. Louis music history, from Chuck Berry to Nelly. They also explain the legendary origins of songs "St. Louis Blues" and "Stagger Lee."