Students and Partners Reflect on CityStudioSTL Fellowships

Each summer, the Sam Fox School’s Office for Socially Engaged Practice works to place students in 12-week fellowship roles with community partners through the CityStudioSTL program. The fellows and firms intentionally focus on community-driven projects in the St. Louis area, often partnering with area nonprofits to strengthen the region while providing students the opportunity to experience the city beyond WashU’s campus.

Two fellows and two firm representatives shared insight into the fellowship program — MFA candidate Roy Uptain; MLA candidate Kaitlin Sampson; public art triennial Counterpublic’s James McAnally, AB ’05; and architecture firm Trivers’ Joel Fuoss, MArch ’02, shared insight on their experiences.

Sampson’s path to landscape architecture included an undergraduate degree in business management and leadership and a professional role making commercials with an advertising agency. She discovered landscape architecture when looking for something both creative and grounded in community.

For her summer 2023 fellowship, Sampson worked with Arbolope Studio, headed by Visiting Assistant Professor Irene Compadre, AB ’08/MLA ’12. Sampson participated in a variety of projects at different stages of design, including the East St. Louis Transit Center, Peace Park, and Love Bank Park. The latter park, Sampson said, “was really awesome, because I got to engage some of the community members who were walking by,” who had an interest in the park and would eventually use it. “One neighbor was concerned about flooding, and we actually ended up moving a pipe in the park because she was so worried about it. We wanted to make sure that this park was going to be great for the community and wasn’t going to cause any issues in the future,” she said.

Originally from the East Coast, Sampson shared that the fellowship helped her see the unique conditions in St. Louis, like rising vacancy and climate abandonment. “Some people might think that these are things we need to deal with,” she said. “But as designers, I think they’re unique conditions to design with.”

Fuoss, principal at Trivers, noted how helping students go beyond campus to understand and engage the city were foundational desires when the firm got involved with the fellowship program as an inaugural partner in 2017. Since then, they’ve worked with eight fellows and ten nonprofits, including Epworth Children and Family Services, Doorways, the American Cancer Society, and the Clinton-Peabody housing redevelopment.

Many of the projects through Trivers have offered nonprofits “the first key to unlock their potential,” Fuoss said. “Renderings, planning exercises… things to get them going and create an idea. A lot of times, funders can’t give money to something they don’t see or don’t understand.” Many of the projects have flourished and grown, forging new community connections — such as Trivers’ partnership with Arbolope Studio on the St. Louis Art Place Initiative, which summer 2024 fellows Jesse Price, BS ’24, and Quinn Adam, MArch/MLA ’27 collaborated on.

Uptain worked with Counterpublic for his fellowship, using art to explore hidden histories and imagine collective futures. An Army National Guard veteran with experience in mass communications, Uptain said that he “was always hyper-aware of the way that art and visual culture are driving forces for public perception, for consensus reality, and that overlap between politics and aesthetics.”

McAnally, co-founder and director of Counterpublic, found the fellowship to be particularly meaningful for him as an alumnus. As a student, he found a similar opportunity that was “that initial crack into seeing St. Louis outside of the university… and really what led to the rest of my work here.” He went on to describe how placing graduate students into context and enabling them to learn from leaders in the field will encourage an understanding of themselves as part of a larger ecosystem of change.

Uptain, along with last year’s fellow — Micah Mickles, MFA ’24 — “shaped our organization in daily rhythms on everything from programs to public communications,” McAnally said. “Having artists embedded in our team is a huge gift… and we want to offer the fellows an invitation to something more, an invitation to lead from within this community, to reimagine the place we’re situated in, and to collectively build models for other organizations, other schools, other cities.”

Two lessons stood out from Uptain’s fellowship. The first, that “art is always a discourse and a dialogue,” and an artist’s personal concerns always overlap, becoming part of wider narratives. The second, that “art is always a richly collaborative project.”

“I really attribute my work with Counterpublic to expanding my thinking of how art can engage with these histories and create a richer dialogue that we’re all part of,” Uptain said.

Students interested in 2025 CityStudioSTL Fellowships can find more information here.

The Sam Fox School’s Office for Socially Engaged Practice is a hub and a resource for collaborative, engaged practices in art, architecture, and design. OSEP brings faculty and students together to work with communities in St. Louis and around the world. From long-standing programs, like the University City Public Art Series and the Alberti Program, to newer initiatives like CityStudioSTL, OSEP facilitates collaborative partnerships to support education, outreach, and innovation in community-based art and design. 

CityStudioSTL supports a series of engagement and outreach projects that bring together students in architecture, art, and design with partners in the city of St. Louis. It is generously supported by Gina and Bill Wischmeyer, BA ’69 / MArch ’71. CityStudioSTL allows students and faculty — working in collaboration with local community groups and residents — to conceive, plan, design, and construct projects.