Champaign, Illinois-based artist Ann Coddington Rast employs fiber techniques from the traditional craft of basketry to create contemporary sculptural expressions and installations that explore how life experiences are sensed, evinced, accumulated and stored in the body. Her evocative work investigates corporeality, spirituality and the ephemeral, as well as the cycle of life: birth, aging and death. Using the tactile and intimate qualities of fibers as well as the expressive potential of sculpture, she explores the dichotomies: strength and fragility, ephemeral and eternal, masculine and feminine, alive and dead.

This exhibition is made possible by Kenneth and Nancy Kranzberg.

Opening Reception: Friday, June 12, 5 – 7 p.m.

The three rooms of the History of Jazz Gallery are the setting for a collection of historical and modern instruments that trace the history of jazz from its roots in Africa to the present day. Today’s melodic and rhythmic jazz structures have been shown to have roots in the practices of Africans brought to America as slaves. One room of the exhibition features a selection of African drums, bells and rattles, as well as gongs, harps, flutes, "lutes" and mbira (thumb pianos) from different regions. The other two rooms focus on modern jazz instruments, including some that were once owned by national and local jazz musicians like Clark Terry, Oliver Lake, Artie Shaw, Eddie Daniels, Hamiet Blueitt, Jeremy Davenport, Red Lehr, and Frank D'Annolfo. Another feature of the jazz rooms will be some of the 20th-century instruments created for jazz, such as the jazzophone, the saxotrumpet, and the slide sax. A listening station provides sound clips from a variety of these instruments.

Opening Reception: Friday, June 12, 5 – 7 p.m.

Beautiful and often unsettling, Frank Noelker's photographs of animals have enthralled viewers for over 20 years. Presented in this exhibition is a retrospective of images from his Captive Beauty and Portraits series. For Captive Beauty, Noelker traveled to zoos in many parts of the world to capture images of the animals that are housed there. His Portraits series frames the noble faces of chimpanzees that are retired from biomedical research, the entertainment industry and the pet trade. They now live out their lives at the Fauna Foundation sanctuary in Montreal, Canada and the Center for Great Apes, Wauchula, Florida, where these photographs were made. Noelker's large scale, closely framed, formal portraits of these creatures show us their humanity and the independent spirit still within them.

FREE Gallery Talk:
Saturday, June 13, 11 a.m., Frank Noelker.

This exhibition is made possible by Barbara and Arthur McDonnell.

Opening Reception: Friday, June 12, 5 – 7 p.m.

Photographer Amy Metzger explores the visible traces of 20th-century German history in the city's architectural landscape in this exhibition of photographs of some of Berlin's most important buildings. In these photographs, Metzger uses architecture as a lens through which to view German society at distinct points in history. The buildings she has photographed act as witnesses to history and reveal the vision and ideals of the political systems under which they were built. Accompanying the photographs are texts that describe the historical and architectural significance of each building.

Opening Reception: Friday, June 12, 5 – 7 p.m.

Each year, the Saint Louis Symphony Volunteer Association sponsors Picture the Music, an art contest open to area children from kindergarten through 6th grade. In their art classes, participants are asked to respond to classical music selections in visual terms. Colorful and vibrant, the individual interpretations of musical pieces as by composers as diverse as Mozart, Beethoven, and Glinka, among others, are each a poignant and unique reminder that speaks eloquently to the ability of music to stir the soul and raise the spirit. This year, the children listened and responded to Maurice Ravel's Boléro. In Director's Choice III, a biennial collaboration between the Sheldon Art Galleries and the St. Louis Symphony, Sheldon Art Galleries director Olivia Lahs-Gonzales chose 50 works from 657 entries received by the Symphony for their Picture the Music exhibition this year.

This exhibition is made possible by Peggy Symes.

Opening Reception: Friday, June 12, 5 – 7 p.m.

This exhibition features a sampling of photographs taken on November 7, 2008 by local and regional photographers in support of the American Diabetes Association. Inspired by the well-known "A Day in the Life of..." photography project, photographers from St. Louis and beyond spent the day photographing their environment, families, neighborhoods and people for this unique snapshot of our vibrant region. All the photographs from this project have been donated by the photographers and proceeds from their sale benefit the American Diabetes Association. Images can be purchased online at: http://www.24hrcure.com/c/24hrcure/about. Materials and services for the exhibition were donated by Allied Photocolor, ASMP-St. Louis, Photoshelter and Bullivant Gallery.

Opening Reception: Friday, June 12, 5 – 7 p.m.

Jim Dine Sculpture

The Ann Lee and Wilfred Konneker Gallery at the Sheldon Art Galleries is the site for the Jim Dine sculpture, The Heart Called Orchid, 2003. The sculpture is dedicated to the life and accomplishments of Dr. Leigh Gerdine, a founding trustee of the Sheldon Arts Foundation who devoted himself to the saving and renovation of the historic Sheldon Concert Hall and the creation of the Sheldon Art Galleries.

A beautiful bronze work on long-term loan from the Gateway Foundation St. Louis, the sculpture is a glowing golden heart that balances on its point on a trompe d'oeil "wooden" pallet, which on further examination is seen also to be made of bronze. A recurring theme in Dine's work since 1966, the heart emerges in prints, drawings, paintings and sculptures.

Jim Dine was born in 1935 in Cincinnati, Ohio and rose to prominence in the 1960s with his performance and assemblage works. From the 1960s, Dine also began to incorporate representations of simple everyday objects into his works. His object-based imagery seen in paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures include tools, men's suits, bathrobes, hearts, and household objects among others and are metaphors for childhood memories, personal psychological states and self-portraits. Like Dine's suit and bathrobe images make reference to the artist's body and persona, his hearts contain layered metaphors about the body, sensuality, love, and as the artist describes them, he sees the heart as "the agent and the organ of my emotions."

Iain Fraser ~ Drop City: Déjà Vu

New sculptures by architect and theorist Iain Fraser are featured in this special installation in the Lucy and Stanley Lopata Sculpture Garden. Since 2001, Fraser's sculptures have translated abstract architectural theories into new conceptual ideas about the experience of space, place and form. The architectonic works play on the suggestion of multiple "realms" within a single space and the creation of "places of mind," which viewers are encouraged to explore. Fraser's new works, designed especially for the soaring atrium space of the Lucy and Stanley Lopata Sculpture Garden, are inspired by precarious situations for settlement and habitation and the challenges those conditions might impose on placemaking. In these works, Fraser tests material properties and explores scale, interrogating the physical and psychological circumstances of the object in the context of the human capacity to adapt to the new and our need for connection to the familiar.

Fraser's sculptures have always played on the relationship between the unfamiliarity of the constructed object and the familiarity of the spatial forms that they suggest. "Each piece suggests possibilities of place and form while representing nothing precisely. I depend on the viewer's imagination to complete the connection," Fraser explains. "With over 35 years of experience building my reservoir of ideas, I want to make things that are surprising, yet vaguely familiar." The sculptures that he makes have allowed the artist's imagination free reign, without the constrictions of building codes, client wishes, and to some degree even the laws of physics. Scale has also been important in Fraser's work and past works have been both intimate and as tall as a human being. Their inherent forms, which are reminders of Italian Futurist and Russian Constructivist imaginings, rise upward in Cubist planes and angles. Fraser's leap from practical architectural concepts to conceptual ones has resulted in surprising forms that are at once playful and thought-provoking. Fraser, originally from Ottawa, Canada, has taught at Washington University for 33 years and is Director of the Undergraduate Program and Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis.