Gazelle 14 Spring 25-48_Gazelle Magazine 4/17/14 8:16 PM Page 32
MALL
ORY
NEZAM
PG32
SPECIAL FEATURE
Women Who Inspire Mallory Nezam PG1
2PG SPREAD
Interconnection
photo courtesy of
Jarred Gastreich
ART – IN ALL ITS FORMS – BRINGS PEOPLE & CITIES TOGETHER
By ERIN WILLIAMS
i
f there is one thing that Mallory Nezam has never sought in doing her
work, it’s permission.
“I remember when I was a kid, and people in school would ask who
inspires you, who’s your hero, who do you look up to - I really never
had an answer for that,” she said of motivating and inspiring other people to do creative things. “This has been in my blood since I was a kid!”
The twenty-seven-year-old is committed to bringing new and innovative
ways of looking, doing, feeling, and even being art to St. Louis. In three
years’ time, she has spearheaded the pop-up group STL Improv Anywhere,
which gave birth to the No-Pants Bike Ride (“It’s not really art, but you could argue
that it’s part of my social practice of challenging people in public space to do
things differently,” she said.) She called on the entire city to send in poems in
order to have them “harvested,” read in public as co-founder of “The Poetree
Project,” and has been instrumental in bringing new energy to the streets of
the city.
“I feel potential in St. Louis in a way that I don’t feel it in a lot of
other places,” she said of St. Louis being the sweet spot for her. “People are
really invested in ‘place’ here. People want to build things together, and
they actually want to build it because they love St. Louis. That’s really
rare to find.”
Born and raised in St. Louis, Mallory graduated from Occidental
College in California and lived in Spain and New York City before returning to her hometown three years ago. Her modern-day focus of
changing cities through art first took hold in 2008 while she was
researching how art served as a catalyst for citizens of El Salvador
to work through post-civil war trauma.
photo
courtesy
of Pablo
Tsukayama
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