The inaugural exhibition featured a selection of works from the Pulitzers’ private collections, including artwork by Roy Lichtenstein, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Kiki Smith, and Andy Warhol.

Completed in October 2001 after four years of construction and nearly ten of planning, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation was the first public building in United States to be designed by architect Tadao Ando, who won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1995.

The art is often installed in ways that highlight or engage with the architecture of Tadao Ando, who has written that in the design of the Pulitzer, he sought “to create a very stimulating place, where works of art are not exhibited merely as specimens but can speak to us as living things.” In addition to its curatorial staff and guest curators, the Pulitzer has a history of artist-curated exhibitions, including Blue Black (2017), curated by Glenn Ligon, who was inspired by his initial experience viewing Ellsworth Kelly’s site-specific sculpture of the same name.

Both Kelly and Serra collaborated with Mrs. Pulitzer and Tadao Ando on the installation of their works, of which Ando writes: “Into the spaces that I created with form, material, and light, Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Serra brought their own expression, conceiving a space for art that could exist only there.”[11] The Pulitzer engages in a variety of public programs that directly relate to the exhibition on view or are aligned with ongoing community initiatives.

Reset also included a St. Louis Symphony Orchestra performance of the U.S. premiere of John Cage’s “Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras,” a work which the Los Angeles Times referred to as “the most significant American orchestral work never played in America.”[13] The Pulitzer has organized the debut of a number of public performances through commissions and residencies, including new poetry by Claudia Rankine (2014) and a video poem by Rankine and filmmaker John Lucas (2016); a sound event by composer David Lang (2015); a residency and performance by interdisciplinary artist Chris Kallmyer (2015); and an iteration of artist Aram Han Sifuentes’s Protest Banner Lending Library (2018).

The Pulitzer has a history of developing projects and programs aimed at engaging local communities and inviting participation from a wide variety of individuals and groups.

Working with Prison Performing Arts and the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, the Pulitzer developed two iterations of Staging: a program that invited homeless veterans and formerly incarcerated individuals into the galleries over several weeks for a program that included theatrical training, employment counseling, and arts education, culminating in a public performance that invited audience members to see the artwork through their eyes and experiences.

[16] The second iteration of PXSTL was a commission by artist-architects Amanda Williams and Andres L. Hernandez that resulted in a multiphase project evaluating the life cycle of a building.