Flower of the East Side

Granite City, Illinois, gets a bum rap. It's a blue-collar town famous for Corral Liquors and the rapidly fading steel industry — and what's wrong with that? I know three people from Granite, as it's colloquially known: One's an artist, one's a musician and one's a writer, and all three are bad-asses. Tennyson noted the beauty of flowers that sprout from cranny'd walls, not from well-manicured suburban lawns, for a reason: You appreciate beauty more if it sprouts from rough surroundings. The cranny'd beauty of Granite City was captured in photographs by the students of the Alternative Education Program for the exhibit Point-of-View: Granite City, Illinois. Look beyond the frayed edges and broken corners, and see the potential for beauty in this tough old town. The photographs are on display on the third floor of the Social Sciences and Business Building on the University of Missouri-St. Louis campus (1 University Drive at Natural Bridge Road; 314-516-5273 or pprc.umsl.edu). The gallery is open daily, and the work remains up through Monday, March 30.
Feb. 3-March 30, 2009