Here’s a look at the TOKY work that’s being recognized this year:

1. “Texts in the City” Invitation, St. Louis Public Library Foundation (related blog post)

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2. Contemporary Fund Mailer, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

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3. “Share the Season” Packaging, Panera Bread (related blog post)

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4. stylus box/catalogue, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

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5. Grab grassy this moment your I’s catalogue, Laumeier Sculpture Park (related blog post)

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6. 2011 Season Poster, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis

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7. Dreamscapes website, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

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Click here to view the embedded video.

8. “Design Legends of St. Louis“ Video Series, AIGA St. Louis (one of five videos is shown above)

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9. “Return to Summer” In-Store, Panera Bread (related gallery at Facebook)

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10. “Share the Season” In-Store, Panera Bread (related blog post)

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11. “A Tasteful Affair” Invitation, Food Outreach

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Our thanks to the ADDY judges who have recognized this work! We’re looking forward to celebrating St. Louis creativity with our colleagues at the February ceremony.

We wrote recently about the highly regarded photography collection of TOKY Director of New Business John Foster — it’s been covered in Art & Antiques and Newsweek, among other publications. Today, the fine folks at Phaidon — they make gorgeous books about subjects we love — wrote about John’s collection in their Agenda publication. Click through for the interview and 15-image slideshow of photographs. Congrats, John!

TOKY’s Adam Fischer, setting up for a shoot inside Grand Center’s Spring Church.

TOKY’s begun 2012 with a brand new conference table, around which new ideas are daily hatched or sharpened. Who’s responsible for the design and build? Our Midtown neighbor, Mirato, a client we teamed up with last fall for a rebrand (including name change) and fresh new website. We’re fans of their work — beautiful designs, eco-friendly materials and process — and love what they’ve made.

Mirato’s Rob Grimm told me yesterday that their team’s goal was to create a piece with “clean, simple style — something that felt very TOKY and was unique to TOKY.” The “vertebra” that runs through the center is an element used in some of Mirato’s other work, but its implementation here is totally new. Rob admitted that getting each of the various pieces lined up perfectly and the surfaces level “took an enormous amount of tweaking,” but the finished product is worth it.

“We stayed true to our core materials for this project,” Rob added, “using only bamboo, steel, and glass” — materials that are rapid-renewable, recycled, or recyclable. He added that the bamboo is in its natural color — it’s been clear-coated but not stained, which means no off-gassing.

Like most creative projects, this one began with a series of sketches. We asked Rob if we could post a few related to this project, and he obliged.

Cheers to the team at Mirato on this project. We’ve have a great time hosting clients around the new table, and look forward to many beautifully productive meetings to come!

“What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?” — Jack Kerouac

#29.942566, New Orleans, LA. 2008, 2009 (More photos below)

Doug Rickard, the son of a retired preacher, grew up learning about America from a decidedly slanted point of view. His father, a Christian conservative who led a mega-church in the 80’s, was highly patriotic and proudly part of the “Moral Majority.” He taught his children that America was “the exception to the rest of the world” — that God had anointed our country as “special and unique.” This patriotic but misleading Reagan-era dogma may have been inspiring to most in the congregation, but young Doug, very much a rebel in his youth, had nagging doubts.

In spite of his troubled youth, Doug would graduate from high school. He then took a break of five years before attending college. In retrospect he sees the break as “one of the best things to occur,” as he could not have been “ready to learn” until that older age. It was through his studies in history and sociology at the University of California, San Diego (History major, graduating in 1994) that Rickard began to compare the greatness of our country with an unsettling truth: that America had a very dark past — a key being the enslavement of Africans to be a workforce for the American South. Deeper studies into the periods of segregation, “Jim Crow” laws, and the Civil Rights movement would impact him greatly.

Rickard, an artist as a child (his teachers would exclaim to his parents that he would surely “do something special” with his artistic talent), discovered photography in adulthood — a discovery that would become an obsession. He began to codify this obsession in early 2008, when he created the now highly popular websites American Suburb X and These Americans (parts of both sites could be considered NSFW, depending). These sites, largely extensions of his personal journey, obsessions, and self-education, are now highly regarded by photography aficionados, educators, and historians for their high quality of writing and massive visual archives. ASX receives approximately 80,000 unique visitors a month and is “Liked” by 38,000 Facebook fans. These Americans is known in part for being a view into Rickard’s personal found-image archive.

With such a strong interest in history, Rickard was used to looking at the past. But for these new web projects he turned his attention to the present, exploring the statistics, demographics, and socio-economics of contemporary America’s neglected communities. While doing this he began to experiment with ordinary static images resulting from keyword searches on Google. But by the next year — in mid-2009 — he discovered Google Street View.

In a telephone interview that lasted well over an hour, the 43-year-old-old Rickard told me that the idea for his recent photographic work emerged as a sort of “epiphany” within 24 hours of using Street View. The project was, he explained, the result of a sort of “perfect storm,” in that it combined his love of photography and its history with his background in American history and sociology. Also, practicality was a component in the form of his inability to travel America, a restriction of the scenarios in real life — a demanding day job and a young family.  According to Rickard, this epiphany fused immediately into a crystal-clear idea: He would use Street View as his camera and, working from a room in his home, travel the roads of neglected American cities and neighborhoods in a 21st-century “road trip.” This single idea would utterly consume his life for close to two years, resulting in the important body of work “A New American Picture,” a selection of which hangs today in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

When Google launched Street View in 2007, it was the company’s intent to map and document every street in the United States. Cars were dispatched into every city to drive every street and back road, using nine directional cameras mounted on the roofs of special cars. These cameras give us 360° movable views at a height of about 8.2 feet. There are also GPS units for positioning and three laser-range scanners designed for measuring up to 50 meters 180° in the front of the vehicle. Rickard analyzed tens or hundreds of thousands of Street Views in his search for perfect pictures, something he describes as containing an “apocalyptic-like brokenness.” Indeed, the height of the camera at 8.2 feet, while creating an aesthetic cohesion and uniformity of vision, adds a distinct feeling of “alienation” that Rickard employs. Unlike the making of street photos in the traditional sense, with Street View there is an obliviousness to the camera as it goes about its job with no feeling or emotion. In spite of this anonymity of machine, his images are layered with empathy.

Rickard has amassed several terabytes of Street View images — nearly 15,000 shots captured, labeled, and stored. From that massive stash, he selected only about 80 images for “A New American Picture.” To give you an idea of the voracity of Rickard’s Street View search, he has virtually explored almost every neighborhood in the “broken” portions of Atlanta, New Orleans, Jersey City, Durham, Houston, Watts (in Los Angeles), and Camden. He has also explored, inch by inch, the smaller towns of America with names like Lovington, Waco, Artesia, Dothan, and Macon. What he looks for are images that carry what he calls a certain “poetry” of subject matter, color, and story — a story described in part by him as “the inverse of the American Dream.” And if the image isn’t “perfect” according to the elements of Rickard’s demands, it’s a no-go. Everything has to be composed, via the camera motion of Street View, to his very subjective, personal, and exacting standards.

Rickard’s exhibition at MoMA opened last September and closes on January 16, 2012. The show is aptly entitled “New Photography 2011,” and includes the work of five other photographers: Moyra Davey, George Georgiou, Deana Lawson, Viviane Sassen, and Zhang Dali.

Doug Rickard is a modern-day photographer not unlike those who went before him. His imagery can be compared to the banal and mysterious cityscapes of painter Edward Hopper, or the great documentary photographers like Ben Shahn, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans, all of whom shone a light on the shadows and made known the “invisible” — the disenfranchised and forgotten communities of America. Just as WPA photographers like Dorothea Lange combed America to document the great American Depression, so has Doug Rickard with his new camera: Google Street View.

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Note: The titles of the pictures below were carefully considered and contain three pieces of information. The first number is a Google code that contains geographical (possibly GPS) coordinates, but has been modified by Rickard so as to not disclose the exact Street View location. Second is the name of the city and state. Third are two dates, the first referring to the year the photograph was taken by Google Street View, the second referring to the year that Rickard made his picture. The overall title is meant to resemble an American street address and tie into location without specificity.

#34.546147, Helena-West Helena, AR. 2008, 2010

#39.259736, Baltimore, MD. 2008, 2011

#39.777110, Camden, NJ. 2009, 2010

#40.805716, Bronx, NY. 2009, 2011

#41.779976, Chicago, IL. 2007, 2011

#82.948842, Detroit, MI. 2009, 2010

#83.016417, Detroit, MI. 2009, 2010

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning
Oil on canvas, 1930
Collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase, with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney
Photography by Stephen Sloman

Walker Evans
Group Outside Movie Theater, From Moving Automobile
Macon, Georgia
Silver gelatin print
c. 1935

Walker Evans, A Street Scene
61st Street Between 1st and 3rd Avenues
New York, New York
Silver gelatin print
1938

This article was published simultaneously at Design Observer, where TOKY’s John Foster is a regular columnist.

Multiple reports confirm: It was a really great day. In the nearly 10 hours spent at FK Studios in Midtown, more than 100 people were photographed, with everyone enjoying delicious food and treats generously donated by Baileys’ Restaurants, The Cup, and Wanderlust Pizza. Great cause, great camaraderie with others in the St. Louis design community.

Thanks to Jason Stoff for photographs three and four.

Over the past decade, John has earned wide recognition for his photography collection, with inclusion in Harper’s, Newsweek Online, and Art & Antiques itself, which named him one of the “Top 100 Collectors” in the U.S. His collection has toured U.S. museums, and his blog posts — both on his own Accidental Mysteries site and on Design Observer, where he’s a weekly contributor — have an international readership. All that to say: We know why John’s phone rang on that fall afternoon.

The nine-page finished article, Edward M. Gómez’s ”Snapshot Poetics,” includes interviews not only with John but also William Hunt, Robert Flynn Johnson, Robert Jackson, and Christian Schneeburger, all of whom are recognized as some of the most important collectors of this material in the world.

The photograph in the opening spread is owned by Christian Schneeberger. The three photos in the above spread are part of Foster’s collection.

A few of our favorite quotes from the piece:

The St. Louis-based vernacular photography collector John Foster, whose background is in graphic design, says of his habitual visits to flea markets: “I look for photos that are exceptional in their subject matter, point of view, conception and composition, and even with regard to technical aspects like tonality and focus. Maybe one out of every 500 images I see is worthy of a second, longer look, and it might take looking through that many before spotting a gem.”

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The thrill of finding a fantastic anonymous photo has given rise to a lively, growing market, whose sources lie outside the established gallery world. Foster says, “To look for photos, I’ve always visited flea markets and antique shops, but today there’s eBay. I’ve spent countless hours and thousands of dollars on that website. There are others, too, where serious collectors will compete fiercely for a prized photo.”

Read the piece online, or — better yet — pick up a copy of the magazine at your local bookstore. The photos look terrific.

St. Louis Help-Portrait Volunteers

One of TOKY’s Creative Directors, Katy Fischer (rocking the orange pants above), and TOKY friend and collaborator Hilary Skirboll (to the left of Katy) have received a meaningful and delightfully named Kick Ass Award for the year 2011. Billed as ”an annual celebration of kick ass individuals and organizations making positive contributions to our communities,” this award series started in Austin in 2004 and made its way to St. Louis via the late culture and literature magazine 52nd City. (TOKY’s happily familiar with the award, as Director of Business Development John Foster kicked ass last year.)

Katy and Hilary were honored for putting on a St. Louis iteration of Help-Portrait, a global program that provides a way for the less fortunate to have professional portraits taken of themselves and their families.

More than 40 local photographers, stylists, volunteers, and non-profit agencies have contributed to the effort these past two years, and Hilary and Katy take their respective hats off to them. Another TOKY Creative Director and resident photography genius, Geoff Story, shot portraits for the last two years (he’s three people to the left of Katy in the grey shirt). Photographer Mark Katzman, who has generously hosted the shoot at his studio, deserves a special note of thanks.

Help-Portrat 2011 is scheduled for Saturday, December 10. Interested in learning more? Drop Katy a line, and she’ll be back in touch. In the mean time, you can watch these brief and lovely recap videos from 2010 and 2009 to see how special the program really is:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Without question, this exhibition was the perfect storm of the late McQueen’s visionary fashions paired with the brilliance of his own production designers Sam Gainsbury and Joseph Bennett. Curated by Andrew Bolton, the installation for these works of art was masterful, from mirrored rooms, over the top ornate cases of the highest order, perfect lighting, sound and ending with a swirling hologram of Kate Moss that literally brought me to my knees.

Certainly this exhibition will become a benchmark of inspiration for artists to come. Years from now, as an artist takes his or her own front and center stage, you will read or hear the following statement: “Seeing the Alexander McQueen “Savage Beauty” exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum was the defining moment when I knew I wanted to be an artist.”

And it won’t only be the future fashion designer who will be inspired. The exhibition is so good it may well be the catalyst for the next great designer, poet, art historian, writer, painter or sculptor. My private tour guide for the show was none other than Met curator of photography Jeff Rosenheim, who hails from St. Louis. His insight was wonderful and helpful—for I had little idea just what to expect as I walked inside the exhibition.

The exhibition was broken into various rooms, each different and reflective of the period this brilliant designer experienced in his brief productive life. The first room, called “The Romantic Mind,” was an exact recreation of the atelier he worked in when he first began—complete with fluorescent tube lighting and concrete walls. (1) Oddly, fluorescent lighting never looked so good.

One of my favorite rooms was entitled “Highland Rape,” (2) which had nothing to do with what one might first call to mind—but the generational “genocide” of the land and culture by the British Empire. The royal and highly decorated blood-red dresses were set against a backdrop of violent, broken wood, actual holes in the walls that looked as if they were made by cannon shot or axe.

Another room, entitled “Romantic Gothic and Cabinet of Curiosities,” (3) was highlighted by multi-leveled shelving of deeply burned and scorched wood, with haunting music mixed with sound recordings of howling wolves. Dark and mysterious, this exhibit touched on fetish-like accessories, bodices of mollusk shells (4) and almost armor-like leather tops (5) for the female form.

Not comfortable with drawing as a way to plan his designs—McQueen instead preferred to simply cut directly into fabric with scissors, a personal style that involved extreme confidence and improvisation.

The exhibit consisted of over 100 ensembles and 70+ accessories from his brief nineteen-year career. The son of a taxi driver, McQueen started as an apprentice in Savile Row at the tender age of 16 and was later hailed and promoted by legendary style icon Isabella Blow. His brief career ended last year with his suicide, which occurred only months after the death of his mother.

The exhibition, which has been extended to August 7, 2011, is a must-see if you are in New York.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Kate Moss performs an ethereal dance captured with hologram technology. (You HAD to see it in person.)

All images courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Alexander McQueen.

Two St. Louis women around 1900 take a snooze in one of our city parks.

Some months ago, a friend of mine in Chicago gave me two large boxes of century old glass plate negatives for no other reason than she thought I would appreciate them. She told me that she had them for 25 years and “hadn’t yet done anything with them,” so she wanted me to have them. I was obviously very appreciative and thanked her for the treasure. She knew the images were of St. Louis, but also had the foresight to know that with each passing year deterioration of the emulsion was taking its toll.

Indeed, most of the glass plates have severe losses to the emulsion edges and other areas, but thankfully most of the important parts of the images are in fine shape. Some images show impressive detail, so sharp that even street signs can be read from a distance.

Not only was the gift incredibly generous, it was a significant trove of never before seen glimpses of our city by an anonymous photographer—most of the images from around 1895 to 1910. Standout images include several believed to be of Forest Park as they began clearing trees for the construction of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the international event we call the Saint Louis World’s Fair. In fact, many images show the construction of well-known city landmarks, including parts of the World’s Fair grand exposition halls. Neighborhood views, like an immensely rare shot of the actual construction of the Compton Hill Water Tower in 1899, a 179-foot French Romanesque structure that proudly stands today. Other images appear to be shot in and around nearby Tower Grove Park, of Washington University, and the Missouri Botanical Garden. Many shots were of busy city intersections and dozens of images of everyday life. It seems our anonymous photographer was intent on capturing a city undergoing a Renaissance of change, and construction scaffolding is visible in the majority of the 100+ images I received.

The fashions of the day, big hats and long skirts, give away that the time period was that of the early part of the Edwardian era (1901 – 1919), featuring parades and other outdoor activities, from foot races to picnicking, to just napping in the great outdoors.

While not all of the images are scanned and ready to share, here are some views of our city that haven’t seen the light of day for over a century.

All images © John Foster, and may not be reproduced in any manner without permission.

A father and his two little girls observe the massive clearing that was taking place for the upcoming World's Fair. This would have been about 1899. Washington University is to the right.

A woman takes in a view of Forest Park during early construction set-up for the World's Fair, c. 1898.

Looking a lot like the launchpad of the NASA Space Shuttle 100 years later, this image from 1899 may be the only existing photograph of the construction of the Compton Hill Water Tower off Grand Avenue.

The old City Art Museum on the corner of 19th Street and Locust.

From the steps of the old City Art Museum was this restaurant, which stands yet today as Jim Edmond's "15 Restaurant."

A rare view of our Missouri Botanical Garden c. 1900.

Two girls in long white dresses, who look as if they could be extra's in the film "Meet Me in St. Louis" run a footrace in a city park.