Redesigning St. Louis
I was born in Germany, at Ramstein Air Force Base. My Dad was in the Air Force for 20 years. Both of my parents are from St. Louis. My whole family, immediate, anyway, is from St. Louis, Missouri. We moved around a bit before I officially got settled here with my siblings, but I'm essentially as good as born and raised here in St. Louis. This is a tricky city. It's a great place. There are several things to consider growing up here and navigating through this space.
In a lot of ways, my childhood itself, my family has always been really close and tight knit. We support each other. And, in that type of environment, I never really had too much to complain about myself. A challenge growing up here, which is coincidental with several other places, St. Louis has a pretty good sized overlay of kind of mischief, and misleading opportunities. I don't want to paint the place in a bad light, because, like most places, St. Louis is a complex entity, so I do want to communicate that for sure. But where I specifically grew up, it was kind of dicey. My family stays in, and heralds from north city and north county St. Louis, which has generally been the more neglected, unfortunately, part of town for quite some time. In fact, since my Mom was a kid.
To put it into perspective, both my parents were part of this program that started when they were kids called the Desegregation Program, which is basically where kids in the city, be it north or south city, are transported out to our county areas because the city schools have been left to waste. So both my parents went to school in the county, and I don't differ from that. Though I've moved around, with my Mama, several different times, because my parents divorced when I was, I think, maybe four or five, so I grew up with a single Mom household and all of that good stuff.
But back to the point, St. Louis is a pretty mixed bag. There's a lot of great stuff, there's also a lot of danger, depending on where you go. That's from some of these folks who look like me, some of these might not. St. Louis is in the Midwest, and the Midwest is home to, well, racism. It looks different in different parts of town, but these are the things that folks like me have concerned ourselves with. There's a lot to navigate. But, generally speaking, most folks here are good. The St. Louis weather is, there never really seems to be an in between, honestly. It either feels like it's hot as hell or really cold. Growing up, the winters for me, have always been fairly moderate to harsh, and the summers as well. St. Louis is also a humid place, so when it gets hot in the summertime, or in general, it's almost like when you sit in a hot tub or a Jacuzzi for too long, and you can really smell that air, that's what it feels like.
But, in the same vein, when it's nice out, people really get active around here. St. Louis is home to a lot of nationally recognized parks and botanical gardens and zoos, etc., so there's plenty of stuff to do. That's where a lot of us commune, is the zoo, or a place called Forest Park. One of the largest parks in the US. We all do really well with communing. We're a very socially-based city. Along the way, I've gotten to meet a ton of different folks, thankfully. It's just all complex. It's all been very complex, but I definitely love it.
I started a project called Loutopia, which is an envisioning, or a re-envisioning, perhaps, of the city of St. Louis. A lot of, St. Louis folk love their architecture, but we don't necessarily love to dress some buildings up as they should be, so activating those with creative moments or nature or anything like that. There's a running joke that apparently we really love red brick here because there's a clay deposit nearby, so you can come here, you'll see a whole bunch of red brick buildings.
I've been an artist my whole life. I have my bachelor's degree in graphic design and I'm pretty active here in the creative community, so I know for a fact that there's a lot of creative talent here in St. Louis, so much so that, unfortunately, folks leave. That's always been a challenge of mine to wrap my head around, because I don't think things should be that way, myself. I mentioned a moment ago things like, so we have Forest Park here, which is very popular. Huge park, I think fairly competitive, if you're familiar with Central Park in New York City, I think it's competitive. I still think Central Park is a tad bigger, but it's certainly, in this part of the US, it's a huge entity. So that combined with our botanical garden, which is nationally recognised, the Missouri Botanical Garden, we're host to these moments of great nature.
With all of that considered, these are things that we do all the time, myself included. So it only made sense to me to start to wonder what do these things look like when they are combined? Admittedly, this was also sort of a selfish thing. At the time, I was working at a standard, 40-hour a week job, and I was just looking to do something to have some fun with, outside of my main work time. So I just thought to myself, what if our cities throughout the world looked like greenery all over the place? What might it look like if the built environment that we've created thus far had more natural elements, and just nature in general, worked into it?
So in a lot of ways, what makes me happy about it is the process - and the initial thought as well - of considering what kind of world could we build together? This is not necessarily a thing I'm looking to take charge of, but I certainly have the capacity to paint the picture. So I honestly just think it's a fun exercise for me to have an excuse to get up and move around the city, especially throughout the last year, where we've had a lot of COVID restrictions, just to be able to look around and take photos of these spaces and reimagine what these things could and can serve us as residents, commuters, neighbors, choose your own word there. I just have fun thinking of the potential, because St. Louis is a microcosm of a lot of, I would argue, cities throughout the world, in that there's a ton of potential, but for whatever reason (and I'm sure the reasons are political and monetary) we just haven't done it.
There's countless benefits to incorporating murals and art in general, as well as nature, into these spaces, and that's something that I wanted to have fun with myself, just to see if I could do it. Once I saw that other people got into it, I realized this is great. I was really happy, and I've been really happy to see the reception that it's gotten, so far, anyway, from people in St. Louis because it's not... The ideas that I've been having fun with, thankfully, are not out of reach. Should it be something that's actually pursued, the amount of benefits are, this city, this country, and ultimately the world, if the influence spreads wide enough - things could change, seriously. I say that because I try to keep my head in the space of equity and sustainability at all times, and I realize that, when you hear words like "equity" and "sustainability," a lot of folks tend to think in this order: social and environmental, when, in fact, and while those are true, in my head those pertain to everything. Communal sustainability in addition to environmental, natural, financial, social, all types of stuff.
In a way, my work is really representative of just things that I think about, all types of societal challenges I pretend to fix through these different works, or consider fixing through these different works. Again, the fact that folks receive it pretty well, that just makes me get more into it, because it just tells me there's a chance.
I started this effort in the middle of 2019. Late July, in fact, and I just wanted to start fooling around to consider different things and how they might work together. So when I tell you I started this with no intent but to practice my own creative skills and build my own prowess, I genuinely mean that. When I started the project, there was no intent, and the reason I kept doing it is because people received it so well, very much so to my surprise.
Even now, folks still love it, and I've actually gained quite a bit of opportunity because of that, so people have received it really well. I've gotten proposals and projects that involve murals specifically, but none quite yet that are the full experience with not only the artwork, but also the natural elements and any form of sustainable energy sources. There's been a ton of folks who say, "We should do this for real" and "How can I fund this?" But none that are in the position, necessarily, to truly be able to initiate and follow through with implementing to provide the resources for that. A challenge of that is, I mentioned a moment ago, the political and financial influence that some things like this have. I think that's probably part of it. The big question, I can do these images all day long. A challenge with more city officials wanting to pursue that, is the question is always who's going to pay for it?
Unfortunately, no one really knows the answer to that. I knew that though. I started this not necessarily with the intent of building an actual project per se, at least not for some time, because I had that understanding. There have been folks, I believe that the now outgoing mayor of St. Louis actually followed the Twitter account for that project that I had, which was pretty cool. But that's about the most type of attention I get for this, is a following, more eyeballs. And that's great for me.
Generally my process with all of the spaces that I take photos of is, first and foremost, what could this space be that makes sense for the venue in which it is housed? In the case of the St. Louis Science Center, I thought, "Okay, so this is a place where people come to celebrate and interact with and immerse themselves in different forms of science.” They cover all types of things in this building, from physics to biology to, I don't know, biotech.. The point is, it's a very science-centric place, so I thought to myself, "How can this type of venue be expanded on?" My thought was, there's not very many opportunities where the nature of science, the science of nature, and biomimicry are shown off, so what might it look like if there was an opportunity where folks can do that? This building is already a landmark. What can we do to show that off more? What if we painted a mural in front of that street to make a photogenic building that much more Instagram-friendly, if you want to put it that way? And then how can this space function? What if people are able to get into different towers or spaces surrounding this building and study different disciplines or areas of nature, but also make it a really cool and novel thing? I feel like what I'm describing now is sort of vague, but my mind moves sometimes as my hands do, especially in this case, where I just sort of fuss around with the composition, and I'll just draw some stuff, like, "Oh, what if this was here? What if this tower was here and there was some sort of pathway that way?" So it's, admittedly, kind of a messy process.
Once all of these questions are proposed to myself, I then end up at, "Okay, how can this image communicate everything that I am looking to communicate without me having to do a really long Instagram caption under this to explain the whole thing?" With my background in graphic design, generally speaking, we are taught how to turn complex ideas or thoughts or conversations into something fairly minimal and simple for folks to digest. I see this as a similar exercise, and thankfully, that's generally been communicated. The level of thinking I put into these things is a lot more vast than what's shown. What's important to me that I visualize is the gist of what happens in this space, and then, if there are city officials or whatever patron chooses to come along who wants to talk more about it, then I have more information pertaining to that, and we can explain that more. But again, the first thing that I want to do is sell this idea, essentially. Sell this image. Inspire folks, excite folks. How does this pull someone in?
I want them, at this moment, I just want folks to think about the potential of these spaces and, in turn, this city. I want them to simply imagine what life could look and be like, and not only how they can fit into these spaces, but how these spaces can serve them. I often have very, very lofty ideas and processes go through my mind about things like this, and I've done this before with a few projects in that, you know, I think I have a good idea, and I put all of this effort into trying to make it an official effort, and it just hasn't worked out. Mostly because I think I probably put in too much effort on that regard, without seeing wholly what the community thinks as a whole, or at least the good majority.
In this case, I deliberately just wanted to simplify it down to alright, let's see how folks react first, and if it's good, then we can start to talk in more detail. But that's all I want, you don't have to be inspired, but I do want you to think about it, if nothing else. This is an assumption, and it's a calculated risk I suppose, but in addition to what I just said, I also want to get folks thinking a little bit more in depth about, well, if he's doing all of this stuff featuring nature as sustainable tech and art, there must be something to it. I want people to look at things with hope.
Thankfully, we are home to a lot of these things I'm already showing, so I know for a fact there's demand. In fact, it could be considered as a rhetorical process for me just to verify that what I'm showing is actually of interest and of intrigue and seems beneficial.
The main intent with my approach is to get folks thinking in areas and eager to see these familiar spaces. There's a lot to say in that regard, but I will say there are spaces that are really obvious, so in downtown St. Louis, the downtown of most metropolitan areas is supposed to be this bustling center. I've only been to London once, but you go there, you go to New York City, and it's this bustling hub of all of this business and creativity. This cultural hub. And we do not have that here. That said, I started this effort with showing downtown areas, because it's one of those things that's just unanimous. All types of folks have to go to downtown St. Louis for work, so a lot of us have to look at these empty spaces. It could use some love, I'll put it that way.
It would be remiss if I did not also mention that a big part of why I started this work is because of climate change, and perhaps that's what I should have mentioned from the beginning. I, as an individual, struggled and still do quite a bit with the notion of climate change. I have to believe that that's not different for anyone. It's literally a planet-sized problem. We are trained, be it deliberately or not, a lot of us are just sort of inadvertently trained to look at this as can this company fix this, or how can this government fix this, and that's only part of it, unfortunately.
I have done all types of reading and so on and so forth, and it turned out that it wasn't really that complicated of an issue. Unfortunately, it just grew to the size that it's at now, but a finding of mine is that the root of this challenge, no pun intended, is deforestation and the loss of our natural habitats. It's not, pardon my language, but it's not shit to plant a tree. It's easy to do that and to maintain our natural grounds. When I learned that, I realized that, wait a second. What if this is something that needs to be, or what if part of this, rather, needs to be a localized effort?
Democratizing that and informing folks that it's not a problem that can't be chipped away at, is important to me. It might not necessarily be fixed in one sitting, it takes a while for trees and other natural elements to grow, but if we introduce this into our spaces that we live in everyday, and the community informs what that looks like, not only is that democratized. We are then starting to chip away at real issues that we are having both locally and globally by democratizing these elements and really informing folks that, hey, while we do have the issues of X amount of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, you can have control over how this ends up.
Knowledge is power, truly, and it starts with folks having access to that information. At this point, it's just become a really visceral and subconscious and subliminal thing for me. It just seems like the obvious thing, but I just don't talk about it enough to actually verbalize it, but that is definitely, that's definitely the goal, is democratising all of these elements.
Jayvn Solomon