From the Executive Director:

I’m writing this note at my kitchen counter, perched on a cream colored barstool that creaks just a bit when I move side to side. A ceramic mug of earl grey steams beside my keyboard while my baby babbles on the monitor, playing in her crib. Time is short before this little work window runs out. I order my brain to focus on this task, but the view out my window draws (distracts?) my eyes again and again.  It’s not so much a “view”  as a looking into a plethora of greens. Shiny wintercreeper vines carpet the Ozark limestone ledges below. Evergreen cedars and emerald pawpaws bounce with gray squirrel tails. Redbuds delicately punctuate with purple. Textured gray vertical lines accent the scene like staves on the most luscious score. This is a scene of life and serenity.  This is a scene of beauty and also a scene filled with some insidious characters.

Last Saturday amidst this verdant vegetation, I spent the afternoon in what I call the “honeysuckle hostilities.” In fact I’ve spent the last month of Saturdays–and months of Saturdays for the past three years–in this combat.  This beautiful shrub is the first to fill many a Missouri understory with a vibrant lime in early spring, flowers with the most delicious fragrant blooms, hang with heavy red berries in late summer and fall, and is often the last vestige of viridescence to fade before winter.  The honeysuckle is beautiful and bountiful. Too bountiful. Invasive.  This plant thrives so well in Missouri it crowds out biodiversity, often dominating the forest understory, making it more difficult or impossible for other species of plants and animals to survive. 

While we could make all sorts of parallels and metaphors for human and urban diversity and thriving, my musings aim in a different direction at the moment.  I’ve been pondering that this honeysuckle battle out my kitchen window happens to be on my neighbor’s property.  My neighbor neither lives on this parcel of woods nor is actively involved in its care. This is not a negative reflection on my neighbor’s stewardship; honeysuckle rules woods all over the country, even those with paid staff to manage them.  I found myself wondering why I would spend so many hours and so much back-aching labor and sweat and tick bites to tend a place I do not own. I suppose because caretaking is not necessarily about ownership, but about relationship.

It's a simple enough realization. I cared about this little patch of land because I looked at it every single day. I cared about it because the binoculars on the window ledge reveal the white tailed deer, gray squirrels, tiger swallowtails and speckled king snakes that spend their labors in search of food in the shrinking flora of the forest floor. I see the owl and nuthatch and pileated woodpecker and honeybee trying to make their homes alongside mine. The ants and spiders and worms nurturing the soil.  While I care about this flora and fauna for their own sake, they are inextricably linked to making my life possible; my air breathable, my food pollinated. We are in relationship. While this is something many of us know in our heads, until we have the relationship to a particular place with particular creatures to carry out caretaking of creation, we may not be able to act on that knowledge in meaningful ways.  

Intersect is blessed with a place to steward.  We are at the beginning of building deeper, more reciprocal relationships with the land upon which our community works, makes, and connects. Land upon which our neighbors (that are plants and animals) depend.  We want to cultivate relationships with those neighbors and the soil and the air and be a place for children, families, artists, and all our neighbors to increase knowledge about environmental stewardship, and find opportunities to translate that knowledge into actionable love. Over the past two years we have been researching, planning, consulting, questioning, and visioning how we can be part of transforming a 70,000 sq.ft. unused parking lot and unruly yard into a green haven of rest and play for the public. Incorporating art and artists into every aspect of the design will help us share the wonder of this place with depth and intentional invitation for connection.  Over the next 3-5 years we plan to develop the park to include:

1.Community garden beds

2.Native plantings and meadow

3.Pollinator favorite trees 

4. Sculpture walk and outdoor mural gallery 

5. Performing arts plaza

5. Splash Pad 

6. Picnic Area and community events plaza

7. Linden Treehouse and protective platform for historic trees. 

8. Natural Playscape

9. Landscaped mini-sports court 

10. Artist designed seating and meeting areas

 We are so excited to move forward with the first steps of this transformation! On Thursday May 8th we will be participating in GIVE STL DAY, a community effort of inspiring love and care for the St. Louis region. Please follow this link to find out more! We would love to care about this project together, with you, and would be grateful for the opportunity to nurture your relationship with this place. We can sit together and look out this window from the studio spaces at Intersect, and see a scene of beauty, and life, and love blooming.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me for a conversation and more details at intersectstl@gmail.com. 

In relationship,

Sarah Bernahardt 

Executive Director

In the Gallery:

Our winter show, The Mark, curated by Sarah Bernhardt and Megan Kenyon, featured work by Allison Luce, Anna Schenker, Carmen Ribaudo, Linnea Ryshke, Summer Zah and Andy Warhol, all exploring the power and poetry of mark making in a variety of art mediums.

Thousands of years ago, human beings went deep into a cave in Indonesia. Using earthy red pigments, they made expressive marks on the walls of the cave, carefully depicting three human-bird type characters surrounding a large pig. Using simple colors and marks that now seem distant , these humans told a story, recording something important  they wanted to mark, to remember, to celebrate, to see. A phenomenon not isolated to a singular Indonesian cave, this kind of mark-making appears in ancient spaces all over the world. In southern France a stampede of animals dance across rock walls. In Egypt figures swim through some prehistoric lake now only desert. We see realistically rendered buffalo in Spain, abstracted cattle in Somaliland, a multicolored rave in northern Australia. In Argentina a throng of stenciled human hands reaches out across 9,825 years; in those marks spray painted through bone pipes we see our own humanity, not so distant. 

This desire to mark continues; across place and across time, artists everywhere still use simple lines, complex shapes, textured movement to create marks that draw our attention, marks that memorialize, marks that can connect us.

The six artists featured in the show mark time, they mark caretaking , they mark memory.  They mark with the strokes of a brush, rubbings of a crayon , moulding out of clay, and imprints from press and plate. Similar to scripts, fonts, and handwriting, these artists craft a kind of visceral vocabulary that helps them communicate ideas in new ways.  Interpreting these marks tells us something about what each artist sees,  what they care about, what they ask us to observe and reflect on, what they invite us to care about too.

The Mark Dovetail Recap:

The Mark closed with a Dovetail Event on April 5th that featured insightful dance performances in response to the work by Resilience Dance Co, interspersed with poetry readings by Bob Bernhardt, Christina Schempf, and original poetry read by artist Linnea Ryshke in front of her work. We also enjoyed a delicious 5 course small bites menu crafted by Alex Braden. Many thanks to everyone who came out to see the show, and especially to those who participated in the Dovetail event!

This spring/summer is a busy one for our gallery space! From April 11-May 13 Intersect is delighted to host Washington University in St. Louis’s Masters of Fine Arts in Illustration and Visual Culture thesis show. This show features work of the graduating class and their thesis research that takes the form of comics, video, painting, and a variety of other forms of illustration.

The MFA IVC Thesis show opened on Friday April 11th to an enthusiastic crowd! Studio artist Alex Braden crafted food for the event. 

While you can’t get more of Alex’s snacks, you can still see the show! The MFA IVC Thesis show is currently up in our gallery and open to the public Tuesday-Friday 10:30 am-4:30 pm and Saturdays 12-6pm. (Note: the gallery will be closed April 30-May 2 for a private event)

May 21-22, our Artventures students will create an immersive performance and visual art experience based on the book Kamau and Zuzu Find a Way! This event is open to student’s families and the general public from 5:30-7:30 and gallery installation on view from 10:30-4:30 on Thursday the 22nd.

Our summer exhibition We Are What opens to the public June 10th. We Are What explores our relationship with food from a number of perspectives, including our American farming system, food and health care, historic food cultures, food and spirituality, and how food is integral to community. It will feature artists in a variety of mediums from across the country. The show runs from June 10 - August 16, 2025,

for We Are What will be Tuesday, July 29th from 6-8pm so save the date and stay tuned for more info!

In the Artrooms:

This spring, our afterschool students and teachers have been working together on a powerful project inspired by Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way, a beautifully illustrated story that explores resilience, displacement, and intergenerational love. Drawing connections between the book’s themes and their own lives in South City, St. Louis, our students have created paintings, sculptures, performances, and stories that reflect their creativity, courage, and dreams for their communities. We are excited to invite you to our Creative Showcase to witness the ways our young artists are reimagining their world through story, art, and collective imagination.

A special highlight this season has been welcoming back a former TAP (Teen Apprentice Program) student, who returned to help guide our current students through the showcase process. Reflecting on her journey, she shared:

Her words capture what we hope every student experiences here: access to resources, encouragement to dream big, and the confidence to express themselves freely. We are so proud of the work our students (and former students!) are doing and can't wait to share it with you at our Creative Showcase.

In the Studios:

Intersect added six new artists to our studio spaces this winter/spring, and we are very grateful to welcome Cecilia Prandi, Austin Roberts Toledo, Sebastian Llovera , Christine Gruenwald, Taylor Winters, and Lauren Seigler! Take a look at their work! 

In Collaboration with Holy Cross: 

IN THE BRIDGE HOUSE:

The Bridge House, a literal third space between Holy Cross and Intersect, provides a cozy venue for meeting and for exploring art and faith. 

The Spring/Summer show Tend opens the first week of May, and will feature works by 15 artists (both local and from around the country). Tend asks the question: in tending to growing things, might we also care for ourselves and others? In observing things that shoot up, bloom, and then wither and die, only to resurrect again, can we craft a vision of hope? Can gardens do more than make space for beauty? Can they make space for sorrow, for anger, for love, for forgiveness, for second chances? 

Tend seeks to explore the power of gardens as agents of beauty, hope, and resilience through artistic observations/interpretations of such spaces. 

Tend will be up in the Bridge House from May 4 - July 18, 2025, and is available by appointment only. To make an appointment to see the show, email Megan at hclcstl@gmail.com. The Bridge House is located at 3617 Texas Avenue.

UPCOMING FEAST SERVICES AT HOLY CROSS LUTHERAN CHURCH:

The Last Feast Service at Holy Cross for the 2024-2025 season is one you won’t want to miss! 

Featuring The American Kantorei performing choral works by Bach, Holy Cross will observe Trinity Sunday on June 1st. Service is at 3pm with dinner to follow at Intersect in the dance studio. Anyone is welcome to attend!

You can learn more about this art-enriched service at holycrossstl.org/feast