King, 39, saw his favorite painting, Adolphe-William Bouguereau’s Hay-Maker, and compared its almost photographic realism with the muted, dreamy brushstrokes of another favorite, Renoir’s Young Girl in Pink. The group toured 11 works of art, discussing what inspired the artist at each stop.

King, a truck driver from Brookline, has used his museum membership to take scores of docent-led tours through the museum’s galleries since just before the COVID-19 pandemic—probably 100, he estimates. He knows there’s always something new to discover as he logs more miles in the galleries and the docents help him find it.

“They make me a better art viewer,” says King. “They bring me to stuff I may not look at on my own and expand my palate as an art viewer.”

Docent Lyn Silverman ends each of her tours by asking what piece of art the visitors will still be thinking about three weeks later. For King, it was Daniel Buren’s One Piece in Four Parts, featuring four striped panels of cloth stapled to the corners of an otherwise stark wall. Buren’s stripes help viewers appreciate a structural element they otherwise might walk straight past. King and Silverman joked that they’ll take greater notice of stripes in the broader world, never looking at a crosswalk the same way again.

More than 300 docents like Silverman have devoted nearly a million volunteer hours to connect no less than a million people with art since the Museum of Art’s Edward Larabee Barnes building opened in 1974, according to Lucy Stewart, senior manager of lifelong learning for Carnegie Museum of Art.

It was then that the museums’ Women’s Committee organized an all-volunteer force to provide guide services in the expanded Museum of Art.

“The docent program is deeply embedded in the volunteer structure of Carnegie Museums,” Stewart says. “They provide so many ways for adults and kids to connect with art, and the program continues to grow and flourish at a time when other museums have done away with docent programs.”

Going strong after celebrating its 50th anniversary last year, the docent program stays relevant because docents are always learning, Stewart notes.

From absorbing new exhibitions and works added to the collection to adapting to the ongoing reinstallation of galleries, docent education is constantly evolving to meet visitors’ wide range of interests and needs.

Current chair of the docent program Scott Grosh says one of his more memorable tours occurred several years ago during a Thursday evening public program.

Lots of people were mingling in the museum lobby when Grosh was about to begin a tour, and then something unexpected happened.

“I ended up walking up the Grand Staircase and realized about 70 people were following me,” Grosh recounts. “Those [evening] events are geared toward young adults and people were there to have fun, so those tours are really interesting.” 

Even at top volume, Grosh was challenged to engage such a large crowd, so he had to tackle the tour with a flexible, creative approach. As he ascended the staircase commenting on the John White Alexander murals, tour goers repeated his comments backwards, passing the information down their ranks in a telephone game-style.

The docent program was the ideal retirement activity for Grosh when he finished a career as an art teacher and administrator in Pittsburgh Public Schools.

“I was looking around for something to do, and I wanted it to be something that would connect with art, but also be of some service to the community,” says Grosh, of Mt. Lebanon.

No Art Pedigree Needed

Grosh’s experience as an art teacher certainly is a benefit when he tackles docent duties, but an art background isn’t required. The docent team includes attorneys, accountants, nurses—people from all walks of life; some working, some retired.

Photo: Joshua Franzos

Anne George, a retired computer science professional from the North Side, celebrated her first anniversary as a docent in April.

George’s participation in Mindful Museum, a weekly program bringing yoga, drawing classes, and various other activities for the over-55 crowd to the Museum of Art, sparked her interest in volunteering.

She’d never done anything quite like the docent program. But, overcoming some initial hesitation, George flung herself into the yearlong docent training, starting with an art history “Crash Course” reviewing artistic styles from ancient Greece through today.

“I turned up white-knuckled at Crash Course—armed with a pen and a notebook and scared to death,” George recalls. “It was for nothing. I thought I had to know everything and teach everything, but you interact with visitors to create conversations, and then start to infuse some of the facts and figures you know as it works in with the group dynamic.”

Docent and group tour coordinator Kathy Kienholz developed Crash Course, an intensive college-style seminar required as part of docent learning. The seminars are now available online, and Kienholz supplements them with a weekly one-hour course. Expanding when courses are available ensures that docent learning is more accessible to students and individuals who work full time.

Stewart and Kienholz also hope to grow the docent program’s volunteer base by offering the course more frequently. Prior to 2023, the docent training course was offered about every four years.

Photo: Joshua Franzos

“One thing I captured from our training is taking a 20- to 30-minute look. Just sit in front of a work and see what you see in there.”  

Anne George, Carnegie Museum of Art docent

“It was like the Olympics,” Kienholz quips. “The idea now is, if we offer it every year, we’ll have smaller, more intimate classes, and a more regular influx of volunteers.”

After a COVID-related lull in recruitment, participation in the docent program nearly doubled last year, growing from around 30 docents to 60. This year’s class has about 20 more docents-in-training.

A Rich Learning Community

In addition to Crash Course, docent trainees study art engagement methodology to learn how to draw visitors into meaningful conversations through close looking, open-ended questions, and active listening techniques.
The trainees hone these techniques on 10-minute, then 20-minute tours before completing their training with a full-hour “activation” tour. Along the way, experienced docents share their knowledge and mentor the new group of docents.

Retired business management professional and university instructor Diane Ramos served as a mentor to the last two docent training classes and says the interaction among the team is as satisfying as helping visitors experience art in new ways. She’s developed cherished friendships through the docent program and recently visited two members of her training class who moved away and are now docents at other museums.

Photo: Joshua Franzos

“We develop this bond as part of a really rich learning community centered around art,” Ramos says. “We come for the art, and we stay for the people.”

Once docents become active, they attend weekly professional learning sessions from September through June to stay up to date on the changes to the collection and glean information from curators that will help them lead conversations with visitors.

There’s no script to follow, however. Each docent develops tours based on what they relate to. A new lunchtime tour, called “3 in 30,” gives docents a chance to be especially creative, selecting three works of art to feature for guests in 30 minutes, and tying them together with a common idea.

“They make it their own, which is one of the attractions of it,” Kienholz says.

Preparation and ongoing research are part of the docent experience. George regularly takes advantage of the docent library, perusing dossiers the museum has amassed on the artists in the collection, along with reference materials on various artistic movements and time periods. She also does a “quiet walk-through” when a new featured exhibition comes in, observing and reflecting on the installation.

“One thing I captured from our training is taking a 20- to 30-minute look,” she says. “Just sit in front of a work and see what you see in there.”

Something for Everybody

Ramos, of Fayette County, discovered art as a first-year student at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1960s, when her student ID got her free museum admission. She says she has a special fondness for leading student tours.

On one of her earliest school tours, she was ecstatic to see a group of initially disinterested teenage boys from a rural area become mesmerized when they recognized something from home: van Gogh’s Wheat Fields After the Rain looked just like the fields in their own community.

Photo: Joshua Franzos

“We develop this bond as part of a really rich learning community centered around art. We come for the art, and we stay for the people.”  

Diane Ramos, Carnegie Museum of Art docent

“It was a good reminder that there’s something here for everybody,” she says. “If you make it exciting, they will see the museum as part of their life and a place for respite, inspiration, and just plain enjoyment. It’s a joy to be a person making that happen for somebody, especially a kid.”

Whether hosting a school group, a family, or a few strangers gathered for a public tour, docents work to acknowledge everyone in the group and give each of them space to participate, Stewart says. While docents guide, everyone is encouraged to discover and reach their own conclusions about art.

“Visitors aren’t static, and museums can’t be static either,” Stewart notes. “We’re ever shifting and constantly learning.”

Docents also play an instrumental role in welcoming everyone and accommodating visitors with special needs.

Some of Ramos’ most rewarding experiences have stemmed from the museum’s programs to help visually impaired guests enjoy a museum experience. She received special training to give visual description tours, depicting various pieces of art and inviting both visually impaired and sighted visitors to join in conversation about the works.

One visually impaired high school student was so appreciative of the special tour Ramos gave her advanced creative writing class that she wrote and recorded an original song in Ramos’ honor.

“Whenever I’m feeling a little inadequate,” Ramos says, “I play Diane the Docent and remember I touched the heart of this extraordinary young woman.”

The post Guiding the Conversation appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Opportunities to experience a large selection of Saunders’ work haven’t been frequent. His paintings—often a cryptic concoction of fine line drawings and scribbled text, or objects glued to a canvas—have been known to the art world for decades, but large-scale exhibitions of his work have been few and far between. Until now.

Pittsburgh audiences will have that chance in Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden at Carnegie Museum of Art from March 22 through July 13. According to its curators, Flowers from a Black Garden is the most in-depth consideration of this 91-year-old artist’s oeuvre ever assembled. (Saunders is now retired, no longer making art, teaching, or giving interviews.)

It’s hard to pin down Saunders’ work because his paintings don’t really fit in, says Eric Crosby, who curated the exhibition for the Museum of Art with assistant curator Alyssa Velazquez. “They don’t conform to a specific movement or school of art that we might generally use to describe painting,” says Crosby.

For example, Layers of Being, a 1985 canvas that is part of the Museum of Art’s permanent collection, is chalkboard black, with colors splashed or smeared onto it in paint; there are notes stuck to it; calligraphic script written across it; a palette of color samples from a paint set stuck to the canvas; and equations and words scattered like a school blackboard’s residue. “He’s after a creative state where it’s hard to assign language to the process of painting,” Crosby notes.

Or, as Saunders himself has said, “I don’t want to know who I am. I paint  to try to access that.”

However, Crosby thinks there is at least one word that can help us enter into Saunders’ work.

“The word I always return to when I think about Saunders’ work is ‘love,’” says Crosby. “He has always related with such loving care to the visual languages of painting, those of his peers past and present. The way in which his work and personality—his very being—exude a love for the medium, and a love for those also engaged with it, is a very moving thing.”

There is love for painting as an art form. For example, in Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, American Painting from 1988, Saunders fixed the tools of his artistic practice—color tests and a stained plastic mixing tray for his pigments—against the black background for which he is well known. But just as often, that “love” takes the form of a passion for the expression that painting allows—endless color, variations of brushstrokes, and the vast collection of choices available to the artist.

“The word I always return to when I think about Saunders’ work is ‘love.’ … The way in which his work and personality—his very being—exude a love for the medium, and a love for those also engaged with it, is a very moving thing.”   

Eric Crosby, Henry J. Heinz II Director of Carnegie Museum of Art

“Some of us have a hard time connecting with abstract art,” says Crosby. “But the immediacy of Saunders’ work is very emotional. He gives us many points of entry into his paintings—love for the medium, love for those who spend time with his works, and a love for oneself.”

A Homecoming

Saunders is no stranger to Carnegie Museum of Art. It’s a connection that goes far deeper than his work in the museum’s permanent collection or exhibitions such as his 1996 Forum Gallery showing that reintroduced the artist to hometown art lovers.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1934, Saunders attended Schenley High School and, in the early 1950s, studied under Joseph Fitzpatrick, the museum’s legendary art educator who also taught Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and others. The experience left an indelible mark on Saunders that resonated throughout his career.

Nearly half a century later, when asked about artists or people that had influenced him, he was still citing it as the formative moment of his artistic life.

“I’m from Pittsburgh and they had a very unusual and outstanding art program for kids,” Saunders said in a lengthy sit-down interview with SFMoMA in 1994. “I’m part of a tradition, an educational process—and that is the city, and it’s the association with the city and its people.”

As a child, Saunders attended the famed Carnegie International, which is the longest-running North American exhibition of international contemporary art. It was there that a young pre-teenaged Saunders discovered Matisse, Picasso, and other master painters through their actual art rather than through books.

“On Saturdays, I had to walk through the museum—through the dinosaurs, through the birds—and a lot of what is in my art is what is recalled from that childhood detailing of the art experience.”

Raymond Saunders

Fitzpatrick’s Saturday-morning classes were reserved for the most artistically talented students in the Pittsburgh area, and there is no doubt Saunders was among them. By the age of 19, in 1953, Saunders had his debut solo exhibition at the Pittsburgh Playhouse Gallery in South Oakland. And while his post-university life was spent on the West Coast, Pittsburgh was never far from his heart, or his painting.

“On Saturdays, I had to walk through the museum—through the dinosaurs, through the birds—and a lot of what is in my art is what is recalled from that childhood detailing of the art experience,” he said in the 1994 interview. “There’s some retained thing that brings it into play—that’s been my life.”

That art experience reveals itself in the array of interests and images that Saunders combines in his work, but also more directly: In Joseph Fitzpatrick Was Our Teacher, from 1991, Saunders creates a palimpsestic canvas like a poster-covered city wall scattered with familiar Warholian subjects—Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley—as well as flyers and newspaper clippings from anti-war and anti-hunger protests.

In the same way that Saunders took in Picasso and Matisse alongside Renaissance and Impressionist art by wandering the halls of the museum, Crosby sees Flowers from a Black Garden as an opportunity for today’s audiences to encounter abstraction in a new way.

“When we think about the museum as a place where we can grow as individuals, grow our awareness of the world, art provides something immediate and visceral,” says Crosby. “And Saunders gives us that with intensity and passion. With each painting, you have such a sense of presence, of the artist and of yourself. It will be hard not to take that presence with you as you depart the museum—it can be an awakening to something just as it was for him.”

Black is a Color

Saunders’ career began to take off in the early 1960s. After earning degrees from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), in 1960 he left Pennsylvania for the last time and moved to Oakland, California, to earn his MFA. In the Bay Area, Saunders found his calling—a combination of his own deeply personal artistic practice and teaching art at California College of the Arts in Oakland and a few miles down the highway at Cal State, Hayward.

Soon after arriving in California, Saunders’ work was already displaying some of what would become his signature visual themes. His 1962 paintings Night Poetry and Winterscape show the artist beginning to work with a palette of blacks and grays, still life and landscape imagery peeking from behind rough brushstrokes and calligraphic lines; Something about Something is more colorful, with a trim of stenciled lettering. Within a few years, he was attaching objects and collages and writing in chalk on his large-scale paintings, like Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines.

But even among his colorful and object-laden assemblages, Saunders’ use of black became his signature. Within a few years, his canvases would become increasingly chalkboard-like, with matte black as their background and shades of black becoming dominant in many other works as well.

In 1967, the underground author and poet Ishmael Reed published an essay in Arts Magazine titled “The Black Artist: Calling a Spade a Spade.” Reed was aligned with the nascent Black Arts Movement and called for Black artists to make work that spoke directly to the Black experience in America, deriding those who didn’t as “retired humanists.” Saunders responded with an essay published in Arts Magazine and as a pamphlet called Black Is a Color.

In Black Is a Color, Saunders argues that to force all artists who are Black into the shoebox of “Black arts” is to do them (yet another) grave injustice; that he, for example, is Black and is an artist, but that these things aren’t always related to one another and shouldn’t have to be:

“I am not responsible for anyone’s entertainment. I am responsible for being as fully myself, as man and artist, as I possibly can be, while allowing myself to hope that in the effort some light, some love, some beauty may be shed upon the world, and perhaps some inequities put right.”

Saunders’ essay, in pursuit of a “wider reality of art, where color is the means and not the end,” proved influential. It arguably launched what became an in-print conversation over several years debating the meaning of “Black art.”

While Saunders says he has never wanted to “represent” Black culture with his art, Black identity has always been a key part of his work. Saunders often writes the names of Black artists on his canvases, as he does in the Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden painting. He’s also named pieces after Black icons Charlie Parker, Malcolm X, and Jack Johnson. Yet these paintings aren’t straightforward tributes: Malcolm X: Talking Pictures from 1994 doesn’t contain images of the civil rights leader; and while Jack Johnson (1971) is a portrait of the famed boxer—the first Black heavyweight champion of the world—he’s portrayed in an abstract field of oranges and reds, and relaxed in suit and tie rather than his more familiar fighting stance. This isn’t Jack Johnson, the boxer battling bigotry, but the retired success story.

It’s a complex attitude toward a question that is just as contemporary today as it was in 1967.

“It is a conversation that persists today: Should individual artists be expected to represent some essentialized idea of the experience of others?” says Crosby. “Saunders never provides easy answers.”

Being: An Artist

Saunders’ artwork does resonate with political and social questions—sometimes even directly.

In Black Men, Black Male, Made in the U.S.A. from 1994, images related to American racial and immigrant history (Sambo, the White Star Line) mix with Saunders’ abstract colors and painting-related ephemera. More often, however, references to Saunders’ politics are less overt. They are in the choices he makes, such as his black backgrounds or texts from protest fliers added to the canvas.

When asked to talk about those resonances, Saunders responded that he couldn’t—because, even while social and political issues are present in his work, he didn’t intentionally “put” them in there. When prodded on that topic in the 1994 SFMoMA interview, he says:

“I would say, tell me about the other resonances, because I’m sure that’s my intention. There are a lot of things going on, I’m an American, I’m Black, I’m a painter, so all those things enter into what it is that becomes what I present.”

Crosby suggests that these “other resonances” aren’t just outside of racial and social questions, but also outside of language itself.

“Saunders, in his artwork, is trying to inhabit a creative space that exists before our interpretation—before we assign it language,” says Crosby.

He adds that Saunders is trying to get at something that exists only in the abstract—something that he expresses without the ability to say it.

“We often hear about how abstract expressionist artists spill their emotional states onto the canvas,” Crosby notes. “When we talk about Pop art, we riff on the infinite reproducibility of the photographic image. Saunders dialogues with both—but he refuses to let the work conform.

“He’s after something deeper.”

The post Layers of Being appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

The hat, cat, and tree are recurring themes in  her work. But when juxtaposed in The Stroll, the combination of the witchy and the ordinary produces a compelling piece of art that is both childlike and haunting.

The painting employs a simple-yet-strange visual language that the bohemian artist used to invite viewers to connect with her art.

“She called it the ‘point of contact’ and thought it was absolutely essential to art,” says Sarah Humphreville, Lunder Curator of American Art at Colby College Museum of Art in Maine. “It’s where the viewer meets the artist’s idea, emotion, or experience.”

Humphreville is co-curator of Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery, an exhibition of dozens of Abercrombie’s paintings on view in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Scaife Gallery 1 through June 1. Each has its own point of contact, some employing rather surreal strategies.

“By working in this representational way—you understand what the discrete objects are even if you don’t know what they’re doing— she uses a really pared-down visual language,” Humphreville says. “But then she’s also using humor—there’s a giraffe sticking its head out of a building—or she’s making it spooky. It appeals to basic emotional instincts, and that brings people in.”

In 1948’s Where or When (Things Past), an intense woman stands in a sparsely furnished room and stares directly at the viewer. She holds a long string that leads from a cat sitting at her right to a cone-shaped object resembling a peaked hat on the opposite side of the room; one of Abercrombie’s own paintings of a dream-like white horse and dead tree hangs on the wall behind her. Echoing Humphreville’s assessment, everything in the painting makes perfect sense; but their positioning, their plainness, becomes something surreal.

In 1954’s The Queen, a woman with a crown and scepter has the long train of her turquoise dress held up by an owl. Is this plain, ordinary, empty room in the same house as 1966’s Horse, Owl and Chaise—a white horse, looking through a window at an owl perched above a similarly turquoise chaise lounge? None of these simple images attempt to fit together, they’re simply grouped in one frame.

“She was one of many artists dealing with living in challenging circumstances at that time. And to deal with it, she came up with this way of expressing the uncanny of the everyday.”

–Cynthia Stucki, curatorial assistant, Carnegie Museum of Art

Taking everyday objects and inserting them into a fantastical world was not merely an artistic choice, but also how Abercrombie made sense of a chaotic world in the grip of global war and economic depression, says Cynthia Stucki, curatorial assistant at Carnegie Museum of Art.

“She was one of many artists dealing with living in challenging circumstances at that time,” says Stucki, who worked on the exhibition with co-curator Eric Crosby, Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Museum of Art. “And to deal with it, she came up with this way of expressing the uncanny of the everyday.”

Abercrombie’s entire life was one of constant upheaval and adaptation. She was born in 1909 to traveling opera singers, and spent the first seven years of her life traveling around America and Germany before the advent of World War I meant leaving Europe and returning to Chicago—a city with which she would be forever associated.

Abercrombie was like a Zelig of 20th-century Chicago: She trained as a commercial artist and began her career making department store ads and catalogs before joining the Works Progress Administration—President Roosevelt’s agency for renewing America through infrastructure, education, and the arts in the wake of the Great Depression. Later on, she would be known as “Queen of the Bohemian Artists” and become a fixture of the jazz scene in Chicago, befriending icons from Dizzy Gillespie to Charlie Parker.

It’s a fascinating biography. But Humphreville and Stucki hope the exhibition brings more attention to Abercrombie’s art, and her standing as one of the great painters of a modernist American era in which a woman from Chicago was always going to be overshadowed by men from New York City.

“Because she had such an interesting life, that biography has oftentimes overtaken the art,” says Humphreville. “Part of the mission of the show has really been to say, these are amazing artworks in and of themselves, even if you don’t know anything about her.”

Major support for the exhibition has been provided by Carnegie Museum of Art’s Virginia Kaufman Fund and James H. and Idamae B. Rich Exhibition Endowment Fund. Additional support for the exhibition has been provided by Nancy and Woody Ostrow, Valerie Carberry and Richard Wright, the Robot Family Foundation, Schoelkopf Gallery, and Waqas Wajahat. Carnegie Museum of Art’s exhibition program is supported by the Carnegie Museum of Art Exhibition Fund and The Fellows of Carnegie Museum of Art. 

The post Points of Contact appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Carleton E. Watkins, whose photographs of Yosemite Valley and the Columbia River secured his reputation as one of that era’s defining artists, worked in Oregon on behalf of a powerful river transportation company and in California for the state’s geological survey. His work supported the concept that nature and industry can exist in harmony and stoked a “hunger for land” alongside the “desire to preserve it,” as the art historian Rachael Z. DeLue writes in the book accompanying Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape, an exhibition at Carnegie Museum of Art through January 12, 2025.

Although Watkins and his brethren who established the foundations of landscape photography aren’t featured in Widening the Lens, their legacy looms over it nonetheless, as the exhibition pokes and prods at the ways our environment has both shaped and been shaped by the art form.

Many of the 19 featured artists contextualize the past, present, and future of landscape photography in ways that raise questions about what is and isn’t shown and the influence of those choices. In an era when nearly everyone can readily capture a landscape with ease—and as the natural world is threatened in ways scarcely imagined in the 19th century—the exhibition feels all the more urgent, says Dan Leers, the museum’s curator of photography.

“It was sad to feel like things hadn’t improved as much as we would’ve liked. But it’s also inspiring to think that these are questions people have been thinking and writing about for 60 years, and we’ll probably be engaging with for the next 60 years.”  

–Dan Leers, curator of photography, Carnegie Museum of Art

Questions about climate change and environmental degradation have been at the forefront of Leers’ mind and many others’ in recent years. “These felt like issues that were too big to ignore,” he says. In considering how to approach them at the museum, he read Silent Spring, the 1962 book by Pittsburgh native Rachel Carson that ignited the environmental movement. He was struck by its continued relevance.

“It was sad to feel like things hadn’t improved as much as we would’ve liked,” Leers says. “But it’s also inspiring to think that these are questions people have been thinking and writing about for 60 years, and we’ll probably be engaging with for the next 60 years.”

Beyond the Flat Image

Widening the Lens flows through four themes, building a loose narrative that carries the history of landscape photography forward through work that often tangles with the legacy of the genre.

Visitors can encounter the exhibition from either end of the Heinz Galleries, but entering from the Scaife Lounge sets the stage with the section called “Archive,” which features work focused on the historical relationship between humans and the environment. The next gallery, “Remembering,” explores the ways photographers imbue nature with their own identities and memories. “Pathfinding” considers movement and migration across landscapes. Finally, “Horizon” looks to the future, wondering how our relationship to landscape may change in a time of environmental anxiety. 

The works throughout the exhibition rarely look much like the photographs of Watkins and those who shaped our ideas of the genre, Leers notes. The landscapes on display include the blurred waistline of a man in the streets of Los Angeles; aerial views of the toll that uranium mining has taken on the Southwest; naked bodies embracing in the high desert; and images of Puerto Rico’s built environment.

The latter appear in El Destino (Destination) by Edra Soto, which highlights the exhibition’s interest in expanding beyond traditional conceptions of photography. The work is a three-dimensional, room-sized structure modeled after Puerto Rican breeze-block architecture. Soto embedded nearly 200 viewfinders in the structure’s joints, inviting the audience to look closer to see photos she took during frequent visits to Cupey, the barrio where her mother was in hospice care before her passing.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, landscape photography takes the shape of tapestry, ceramic, video, and silk, pushing boundaries and encouraging introspection about where and how we see landscapes and feel an environmental presence.

“The way that everything is in conversation is a much-needed, expansive look at what photography is and what it can be—and also how it might be an agent of change,” says Melissa Catanese, a Pittsburgh-based artist whose piece Fever field was one of three commissioned for Widening the Lens, including Soto’s.

Catanese took many of the dozens of photos assembled in Fever field in Northern California during the spring of 2021, when the region was experiencing its driest season in more than a century and the pandemic was putting notions of loss front and center in the public consciousness. Its primary visual motif is the California poppy, a hardy flower that clusters together in mounds across the Bay Area, even during drought. Each photo in the towering 12-foot-by-16-foot collage is hung individually, unmatted and unframed, allowing gentle flutters and curling edges to bring Fever field to life. Given the fraught moment in which it was created, Catanese considers it “an elegy for collective grief, collective loss, personal loss, and political and ecological loss.”

“The way that everything is in conversation is a much-needed, expansive look at what photography is and what it can be—and also how it might be an agent of change.”   

–Melissa Catanese, Pittsburgh-based artist

Fever field carries a message in its form as well, Catanese says, employing three different photographic processes as a comment on the piece’s ecological considerations. Most of the images are archival inkjet prints, a modern, nontoxic technology; several are cyanotype, a 19th-century process that uses little more than iron salts and sunlight; and some were made with lampblack ink, a historical medium that is “basically pure carbon,” Catanese says.

Among all those poppies, two of the photos show hands—one in an X-ray, as well as several hands that seem to be waving. They echo hands found in artworks throughout the exhibition, adding to a sense that every landscape has been shaped, in some way, by human touch.

“We wanted to think about the humans within the landscape itself. What kinds of histories are buried underneath? What kinds of stories are overlooked? And what kinds of perspectives have been ignored?”   

–Keenan Saiz, Hillman Photography Initiative Project curatorial assistant, Carnegie Museum of Art

Dionne Lee’s Fire Bed shows her hand clearing a space for a campfire on the forest floor, contemplating the complicated relationship between Black Americans and the land. In the diptych Breaking the Fall, Lee’s hands tear the waterfall out of an image taken from a nature magazine. In Erin Jane Nelson’s The Tenderizer, the artist’s handprints are pressed into an embroidered quilt with images of the reflective waters of the Okefenokee Swamp near her home in Georgia. As with Fever field, all are in the “Remembering” section.

“We wanted to think about the humans within the landscape itself,” says Keenan Saiz, the museum’s Hillman Photography Initiative project curatorial assistant, who organized the exhibition with Leers—the fourth since the initiative began in 2013. “What kinds of histories are buried underneath? What kinds of stories are overlooked? And what kinds of perspectives have been ignored?”

Photographers like Watkins and his 20th-century successors, including Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, left humans out of their landscapes. But their absence can’t be ignored simply by keeping them outside of the frame. As Leers writes in the introduction to the exhibition’s book, “There are always many people in every landscape, even if we cannot see them.”

People vs. Land

Portions of the exhibition directly confront the tension that exists between people and the land, as in three large-format photos of the California desert by Victoria Sambunaris, found in the “Pathfinding” section. They show a railcar chugging across vast open space, and dirt bikers and dune buggies racing across sand dunes, leaving their imprint on landscapes that formed over millennia. Nearby, Chanell Stone, participating in her first major exhibition, traces the history of the Great Migration in a series of striking black-and-white self-portraits. Dressed in cotton, she wades into the waters of the Mississippi River and sinks into its muddy banks, a study in silt.

In works like these, the exhibition challenges inherited wisdom about the landscape and its “bucolic, romanticized nature,” Saiz says. In the process, it provokes new ways of thinking about the connections between photography, ecology, and ourselves.

“The photograph itself is a catalyst for curiosity,” Saiz notes. “As a document it has limitations, but it’s an avenue for people to see something beyond themselves—to see the world at a distance. That’s the power of a photograph.”

Widening the Lens raises important questions about how that power has been used through the decades, and what it might accomplish in those to come.

“The photograph itself is a catalyst for curiosity. As a document it has limitations, but it’s an avenue for people to see something beyond themselves—to see  the world at a distance. That’s the power of a photograph.”   

–Keenan Saiz

In addition to the exhibition and accompanying book, the museum explores those ideas in a six-episode podcast series, hosted by tennis champion and arts advocate Venus Williams, in conversation with several of the artists featured in the exhibition.

“Photography has helped shape our natural world,” Williams says in episode 1. “It has helped those in power expel peoples, extract resources, and claim space for development and industrialization. And in doing so, photography has helped lay the groundwork for some of our most daunting ecological crises today.”

But, she points out, that power can also be used to help us build a better way forward.

“Landscape photography has also created a critical record of what we have lost,” Williams says, “and maybe even asks us not to take for granted how fragile the environment is—and how powerful our actions really are.”

“Photography has helped shape our natural world. It has helped those in power expel peoples, extract resources, and claim space for development and industrialization. And in doing so, photography has helped lay the groundwork for some of our most daunting ecological crises today.”   

–Venus Williams, in Episode 1 of the Widening the Lens podcast

If photographers like Watkins changed the way we understand landscapes and our relationship to them, the artists working today—and those of us capturing and sharing our own landscapes—can influence the environmental future, Leers and Saiz contend. But there is risk, Saiz notes, in the ubiquity of landscape photos and the ease with which they’re taken.

“Is what we all do with our phones another form of aestheticizing the land in a detached way?” he asks. “How much potential do we have with these tools to further understand the intricacies in the land, not only its history but its geology and the environmental knowledge it holds?”

Looking to the future, the exhibition’s final theme, “Horizon,” is embodied in the work of Lucy Raven, who shatters the traditional notion of a photograph. In Demolition of a Wall (Album 2), ultra-high-speed cameras and digital processing techniques allow her to visually map the extreme pressure sweeping across the landscape of Socorro, New Mexico, following explosions at a ballistics research lab. The piece is “an assault on the senses,” Saiz says, complete with room-rattling subwoofers that broadcast the concussive blasts and a set of metal bleachers from which visitors can take in the spectacle.

In Depositions, a more subtle but no less powerful series commissioned for the exhibition, Raven offers another way to consider the demolition of a wall and its impact on a landscape. She created a chamber filled with mounds of earth and lined with silk screens, then pumped in water from New York’s East River until the simulated dams inside the chamber breached and deposited their remnants on the silks. The result is four large-scale images formed by silt that somehow resemble mountains and deserts—land becoming landscape.

The series doesn’t implement light or lenses, Saiz says, but it still feels at home in an exhibition about landscape photography. It was inspired by the planned removal of four hydroelectric dams along the Klamath River at the California-Oregon border, and interrogates the role of industry in the American West that Watkins’ work once tacitly encouraged. The dams’ dismantling, which was completed in August, offers hope to threatened salmon species and the prospect of undoing ecological harm.

Like the landscapes that help define our relationship with the environment, Raven’s Depositions are fragile and malleable, Saiz points out. The silks that hold them are thin; particles are gradually flaking off. Museum conservators routinely visit the pieces, carefully collecting the dust that falls onto their wooden frames, sweeping away the remnants of earth and the memory of a dam that once was.

For Leers, Raven’s work is an opportunity to reflect on the profound impact we have on our surroundings—and the ways that landscape photography can make our influence clear to us.

“Even small actions we take reverberate,” Leers says. “They have an impact that moves through space and time.”

Major support for the exhibition is provided by the William Talbott Hillman Foundation and the Henry L. Hillman Foundation. Significant support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Henry Luce Foundation. Generous support is provided by Teiger Foundation. Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The post Reimagining Landscapes appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Giving Forward

When Bob Fierst was a young adult in his 20s, the social mindedness of his parents and grandparents had an undeniable impact on how he saw his role in the world.

He recalls how his maternal grandmother helped care for wounded soldiers through a Ladies’ Aid Society. His stepfather’s generosity was more personal, quietly offering financial support to anyone that he knew who was in need.

“I understood early on that this was the right and moral way to live,” he says. “I never knew anything different growing up.”

Fierst has lived out this sense of responsibility to give back throughout his life, largely through his philanthropic giving to local institutions that he feels create a more culturally rich, equitable society. And the four Carnegie Museums are among the top institutions he supports.

“Carnegie Museums is, in my opinion, the most important cultural institution we have in the Pittsburgh area,” he says.

This is why he wants them to be open and accessible to all Pittsburghers, through programs like the Community Access Memberships, which include a free teen membership and reduced-price family membership, and Carnegie Museum of Art’s Neighborhood Museum, which offers free programming and memberships for refugee families.

“I feel it is very important for everyone, regardless of their means, to be able to enjoy these jewels,” he says. “By giving back to the Carnegie Museums, if it helps touch even one individual, I will have accomplished my goal.”

His own connection with the Carnegie Museums dates back to the late 1940s, when he was just 5 years old and his grandfather took him to Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Those trips sparked an interest in Earth’s history and the world beyond, planting a seed of curiosity that took root and flourished.

“The vastness, the grandeur … and it did tend  to be a little spooky, which I enjoyed,” Fierst says. “I had a vivid imagination, and what better place to indulge?”

As a teenager, his footsteps beat a well-worn path along the sidewalks that connected his home in Squirrel Hill to the “palace of culture” in Oakland, where he’d spend hours roaming the halls. “Some of my earliest memories were the dinosaurs, the Egyptian exhibition, and the Hall of Architecture where the large plaster casts of ancient buildings are.”

That personal connection is what continued to feed his desire to give back, first by becoming a member. As his long-standing relationship and attachment with the museums continued to grow, he eventually made the generous decision to bequest a Legacy Gift to the museums.

“I am 82 now but in good health, so it may still be awhile,” Fierst jokes, having shifted into semi-retirement with an advisory position in the family business, a wholesale flooring distributor.

In recent years, he’s committed to additional philanthropic support by joining the Patrons Circle, and he remains a familiar face during events and openings, as well as a proud tour guide for out-of-towners.

He is especially eager for the opening of the Museum of Natural History’s Egypt on the Nile exhibition, planned for 2026.

Reflecting on his memories and the wonder he continues to experience whenever he walks into the building, it’s his desire that other children, teens, and adults from all walks of life—especially those in underserved communities—will experience the same spark; one that makes an indelible impact on their lives, just as it did on his.

“The value that Carnegie Museums brings to our region is priceless,” he says. “It’s a pillar in the community.”

Learn more about how you can support our museums!

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“It was terrifying,” he says. 

Fortunately, the North Side resident found another way—leveraging a digital content creation program at The Andy Warhol Museum to break into the burgeoning field of video production. 

“When you try to break into creative industries, it’s very difficult, very competitive,” says Jones, 20, who is now an assistant editor and junior producer for The Warhol’s boutique production studio, The Warhol Creative. “This really helped me make connections, and it led to a great job.”

The Warhol Creative is one pillar of The Pop District, The Warhol’s multi-pronged, 10-year strategic expansion announced in 2022 to transform the six-block section of the museum’s North Shore neighborhood into a cultural and economic hub.

Launched with support from the Richard King Mellon Foundation and the Henry L. Hillman Foundation, The Pop District features public art installations, workforce development programs, and eventually a creative arts center in what is now a parking lot across the street at the intersection of Sandusky and East General Robinson streets.

After two years, The Pop District has already met and in many ways exceeded its original goals, especially for the workforce development component, says Dan Law, associate director of The Warhol. 

“We hoped it would be successful, but it’s really gone through the roof,” Law says. 

He notes that the museum envisions the $60 million Pop District as a way to provide new revenue streams while advancing Carnegie Museums’ overarching vision to turn its museums “inside out” by engaging with the community outside their walls. 

“There’s a tremendous opportunity to take the museum outside the four walls,” Law says. “There is a growth mechanism and a growth mindset that unlocks revenue potential and sustainability potential for the museum.”

The initiative has garnered accolades for The Warhol. The tech entrepreneur news site Technical.ly named The Pop District its Culture Builder of the Year in 2023. The New York-based news site Observer has cited it as a possible “blueprint for museum recovery” as cultural institutions continue to bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic. And Artnet pondered whether it could be a new model for museums’ civic engagement. 

“We’re able to lead the way nationally, demonstrating that museums can evolve and innovate post-pandemic,” Law says.

All the while, the entrepreneurial initiative remains aligned with its namesake’s legacy. Andy Warhol was famously entrepreneurial while making art, once saying, “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

The Warhol Academy

Last year, Clarise Fearn was operating her part-time crafting business as a pop-up store, and it was proving so popular that she wanted to turn it into a permanent operation. Fearn conceived a kind of restaurant for art where patrons could make reservations to come to a cafe-like setting and order from her menu of craft projects.

But she lacked the tech savvy to promote it online. Then she heard about a new digital marketing course offered through The Warhol. Fearn, 30, says the 24-week course she took last year gave her the confidence and digital skills to open up the Mindful Craft Cafe in the Mexican War Streets on the North Side in August.

“The course really did change my life,” Fearn says. “It gave me the confidence to know that I could open a brick-and-mortar business and market it.” She says the course helped her elevate her website from “OK to amazing.”

A critical part of the vision for The Pop District’s creative workforce development efforts was to provide people with the skills to participate in the 21st-century economy. The Warhol Academy became the hub for this programming. 

Operating out of The Pop District headquarters next door to the museum on Isabella Street, The Warhol Academy offers paid fellowships in filmmaking and post-production, as well as digital content creation. It is also the home of Carnegie Museums’ digital marketing diploma program, which currently is free to participants. Specifically aimed at providing pathways to employment for marginalized communities, The Warhol Academy does not require its diploma and fellowship applicants to have a high school diploma. The only requirements are that they be at least 18 years old and eligible to work in the United States. 

The Warhol aimed to remove as many barriers to entry as possible—including cost and prerequisites—so that its programming was attractive and accessible to a diverse array of students, says Ryan Haggerty, school director for state-licensed programming and adult workforce development at The Warhol Academy. 

“We consider accessibility in everything we do,” Haggerty explains. “It’s part of the mission of empowering people to be competitive.”

“If you did a fellowship with The Warhol Academy or you were able to jump in on a shoot for Dell or The Warhol Museum, that’s massive. Having that line on your resume or project in your portfolio can get your foot in the door.”  

–Ryan Haggerty, school director for state-licensed programming and adult workforce development at The Warhol Academy

By the end of 2024, nearly 600 people—ranging from teenagers to mid-career professionals—will have participated in The Academy’s programming since the pilot program launched in 2021. This year, The Academy was named “Innovator of the Year” by Goodwill of Southwestern PA.

The Warhol Academy also offers paid fellowships to about 32 people a year—one in digital content creation for brand videos and other short-form work, and a film and post-production fellowship for longer-form videos and films. These fellowships offer a $3,000 stipend and are highly competitive. 

Since last year, Pop District mentors have been available to work one-on-one with fellows and digital marketing participants, helping them make connections and offering career advice or resume-writing guidance even after the participants leave the program. The fellows also are given projects intended to stretch the boundaries of their creativity.

For Erika Kondo, who was part of the film and post-production fellowship, that meant creating a music video of Pittsburgh pop musician Kahone Concept. “They gave me access to equipment that I don’t have. I produced everything myself within the span of two months.”

Haggerty notes that the fellowship opens doors for job seekers and small business owners. “If you did a fellowship with The Warhol Academy or you were able to jump in on a shoot for Dell or The Warhol Museum, that’s massive. Having that line on your resume or project in your portfolio can get your foot in the door.”

Expanding on these successes, in May 2023, Pennsylvania’s Department of Education licensed Carnegie Institute, the state-registered entity for Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, to launch its first-ever diploma program in digital marketing at The Warhol. That program, which is unique as the only museum-based school licensed to operate in Pennsylvania, is also currently offered for free and has averaged more than 40 annual graduates. 

Students who graduated with a digital marketing diploma are landing jobs, Haggerty says. Eighty percent were employed within a year, with an annual salary between $35,000 and $75,000, Haggerty notes.  

It adds up to a lot of wealth created for the region. Those salaries, as well as the wages, contracts, stipends, and honoraria paid by The Warhol Creative and The Warhol Academy, totaled $1.5 million this year alone, Law says.

“That’s money going back on the street, money in people’s pockets.”

Emily Armstrong was hired as project coordinator of Pittsburgh Robotics Network after receiving her digital marketing diploma in 2023. Armstrong, who studied studio art at Carlow University, had been working at The Warhol as a museum youth program coordinator when she heard about the program.  

She notes that instructor Maddi Love demystified the process of digital marketing. “New technology is really scary and off-putting. She was really supportive,” Armstrong says of Love’s guidance. “She said, ‘You can do this. It’s not that hard.’  She definitely helped mentor me.” 

The Warhol Creative

In 2023, when Kondo graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in cinematography and film and video production, she faced a bleak and depressing job market in the highly competitive film industry.

“I applied to over 150 jobs,” she says. 

Every job listing was flooded with applicants, Kondo says, and one New York-based editing position she saw posted to LinkedIn had 3,000 applicants in 48 hours. “It is an absolutely awful market right now,” she says.

Thanks to the work she did during her fellowship, Kondo was offered a position as a junior producer and assistant editor at another pillar of The Pop District—its production studio, The Warhol Creative. 

“Everyone wants to go to New York and LA, and they want to go big,” Kondo says. “I have huge ambitions, too, and I think I can really bring forth some of my ambition here.”

This was, after all, part of the intention behind The Pop District: to nurture young creatives in Pittsburgh so that, according to Law, “the next Andy Warhol doesn’t have to leave the city to become Andy Warhol. It’s kind of our North Star, the guiding principle of our vision—don’t let our creative community go elsewhere. Keep them in Pittsburgh and help them grow here.”

The Warhol Creative does this by offering paid opportunities to people—mostly those who, like Kondo, have come through The Warhol Academy training programs—to produce social media content and films for local and national clients. These include Dell Technologies, NBCUniversal’s Creative Impact Lab, and Miami City Ballet. 

The Warhol Creative has produced more than 1,000 videos for 33 clients and generated $1 million in revenue through contracts and sponsorships.

Age and experience are less important criteria in hiring decisions than finding people who are highly motivated to learn, says Christian Lockerman, executive producer of The Warhol Creative. Lockerman is a filmmaker with two decades of experience who has developed original content for corporate clients like Spirit Airlines, and held research and teaching positions at Point Park University and the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. He manages a team of seasoned professionals who work with their charges to produce award-winning work.

“The important idea is to help young people who don’t get an opportunity,” Lockerman says. “We provide a professional environment where you can be mentored. You can gather experience on sets, on shoots, on projects that most people—even in film school—don’t get.”

In the late summer and early fall, a group of young producers of The Warhol Creative were filming and editing videos for Dell, shooting a docuseries about contemporary artists, working on a video promotion for a City Theatre play, and creating video content for both The Warhol and Carnegie Museum of Art, to name a few. The team also is producing its first feature-length film, a documentary on the LGBTQ+ prom held every year at The Warhol. Lockerman says they plan to submit it to several film festivals.

“One of the things we’re most proud of is providing these opportunities for people from less-represented portions of society to get into this world of film production,” Lockerman says. 

He cites Alejandro Jimenez as an example of someone whose career has flourished after completing the fellowship program during the first cohort in 2021.

This fall, the 35-year-old Jimenez, who emigrated from Ecuador and now works for The Warhol Creative as a producer and editor, flew with Lockerman to Miami to do a shoot for the Miami City Ballet. “He’s the lead on some very big projects,” Lockerman says. “The opportunities are there.”

“There’s a tremendous opportunity to take the museum outside the four walls. There is a growth mechanism and a growth mindset that unlocks revenue potential and sustainability potential for the museum.”  

–Dan Law, associate director of The Warhol

Jimenez, a former painter, says, “I’m always trying to combine fine arts with filmmaking—even though we make a lot of promotional videos and nonfiction work, there’s always a way to add something extra.” 

Jimenez says he was captivated by Warhol while studying art in Argentina—“He changed the way people looked at art.” But having a deep prior knowledge of the legendary Pop artist is not a condition of employment. Students don’t need to have a background in art, period.

Jones, the former fellow who now works for The Warhol Creative as an assistant editor, had never heard of Warhol growing up in the North Side, not far from the museum.

His introduction to Warhol came when he enrolled as a high school junior in The Academy’s digital content creation program. That opportunity led to a sports marketing job and then a dream job with The Warhol Creative. He now brings his own creativity to his video-production work, such as adding a visual effect he might have seen on Instagram. 

“I’m really getting a sense of artistry,” he says. “We do videos based around marketing, but art is at the center of it all.”

Public Art and the Factory

A critical piece of being a “district,” however, requires engaging with the public outside on the streets.

Along the museum’s exterior wall on Silver Street is Typoe’s Over the Rainbow, a vibrant mural painted on the exterior wall that was the first public artwork commissioned by the museum in 2021. Accompanied by stringed bistro lights and seating, it transformed an otherwise hidden alleyway into bright space for the public to gather.

“I hope that all who visit The Warhol are welcomed by these fields of color and leave having experienced their own journey in form,” Typoe said at its unveiling.

Meanwhile, across General Robinson Street in Pop Park, The Warhol unveiled in May a newly commissioned sculptural work by the artist KAWS to mark the museum’s 30th anniversary. Titled Together, it’s a massive teak sculpture two stories tall that represents two of the artist’s signature cartoon-like characters embracing. It was preceded by other temporary art installations in Pop Park that include Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree, and Anatomy of the Human by local Nigerian American artist Mikael Owunna. 

Law notes there’s still work to do in getting the public to identify it as a “district,” like the Cultural District in Downtown, where visitors would want to make return trips. He acknowledges that most people don’t yet recognize The Pop District as a cultural destination, although the outdoor art installations are slowly changing that. 

That’s sure to change when a planned creative arts center—another key plank of The Pop District called “The Factory”—opens at the site of the current Warhol parking lot. Its name harkens back to Warhol’s famed New York City-based Silver Factory, a hub of activity where Warhol managed his art and business empires, all while hobnobbing with celebrities.  

“That’s when banners will go up,” Law says.

Law believes the new 800-person standing room Factory—part interdisciplinary arts space, part concert hall—will generate a lot of excitement, hosting musical acts and shows that traditionally bypass Pittsburgh on their concert calendars. Expected to open by 2027, the space will enliven The Pop District—located just across the Andy Warhol Bridge from Pittsburgh’s Cultural District—especially during the evenings.

When that happens, it will become a kind of capstone for The Pop District, and further The Warhol’s larger goal to have a more dynamic relationship with its audience.

“I think there’s a contrast to be drawn between a static, one-directional paradigm where we are the holder of these precious valuables to a more direct relationship to the community,” Law says.

Ezra Jones agrees. The Pop District, he says, will help revitalize the place where he grew up. “It gives people the direct route to make connections in the art world, the
world of filmmaking, and I want to help foster that.” 

The post Progress in the Pop District appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

A wall display of functional art—20 chairs that are part of the Extraordinary Ordinary Things exhibition—served as a backdrop and inspiration for the theme of that morning’s lesson, “Design Thinking.”

It was in this context that these teachers would develop new ideas for their classroom, and maybe find a bit of a battery recharge for themselves, as part of the museum’s summer Educator Residency. The three-week program, designed for educators across all disciplines, consists largely of Pittsburgh Public Schools teachers.

Divided into pairs, the educators were given a pouch of materials that included tissue paper, paper clips, rubber bands, pipe cleaners, and other supplies. Their assignment, typed on a piece of paper they’d plucked from a pile, asked them to build something new: a game, a “feminine hygiene product,” a “cordless hair-styling device.”

After a brief brainstorming session, the educators’ busy hands began to build simple innovations—from a set of “curlers” and friction-creating tongue depressors to a waist trainer for menstruating women, complete with built-in aluminum foil “heating pads.”

Maisha Johnson, senior manager of youth and family teaching and learning at Carnegie Museum of Art, sat on the perimeter of the action, watching the educators collaborate. She views this time of creative recuperation as a way of sustaining a community of learners. Though she’s been at the museum for less than two years, she’s been in education as a teacher and school administrator for more than two decades. 

“[This role has] made me think about how many opportunities I had to play in the workspace,” she says. “Having fun, being happy—that’s important to well-being.”

“We thought to ourselves—how can our museum not only support the professional development of our regional educators, but also support their overall well-being? This led to educators being connected to art, ideas, and one another.”

-Maisha Johnson, senior manager of youth and family teaching and learning at Carnegie Museum of Art

Yet “having fun” is just one aim of the summer Residency, which the museum launched in 2021 in response to educators feeling depleted from lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and cuts to public education funding. The Residency has three goals: Establish a community of learners, explore the museum as a learning resource, and experience creative recuperation.

“We thought to ourselves—how can our museum not only support the professional development of our regional educators, but also support their overall well-being?” explains Johnson. “This led to educators being connected to art, ideas, and one another.”

A ‘Battery Recharge’

The Residency immerses educators, who apply each spring, in a creative environment in which to develop their teaching practice in relationship to art. The museum offers an outside-the-classroom space that helps residents remember their “why” for teaching and reconnect to the practice.

Through experiential learning, each resident designs a lesson plan by the end of the third week that connects an artwork of their choosing to their curricular goals. These lesson plans, which include social emotional learning, creativity, observation, and critical thinking, are then made available to other educators, free of charge, on the museum’s website. Throughout the process, educators learn to be sensitive to contextuality, making sure that all students feel a part of the learning, too.

Jacqueline Clarke, who teaches African American history and psychology at Barack Obama Academy of International Studies, completed the program in the summer of 2023. She learned about it through Johnson, who had been her assistant principal prior to stepping into her current role. Clarke immediately was intrigued, relishing the chance to collaborate again with Johnson, invest in her own creativity, and think outside the box about how to incorporate the arts into her curriculum.

The experience showed Clarke how professional development can be authentic and stress-free with the ability to create, discover, and think about art in new and educational ways.

“The creative recharge definitely allowed me to be open to thinking uniquely about the impact of art in history,” she reflects, “and allowed me to appreciate the storytelling, activism, and design aspects of art that are also core elements of history.”

In creating her own invention out of a bag of supplies during her Residency last year, Clarke says she was reminded of how art can be innovative and transformative when thinking about solving problems for society.

An example of weaving history and social activism into art played out during a show-and-tell session in June, when Johnson distributed to Residency educators a list of Black inventors who had inspired that morning’s invention prompts. Among the names: Mary Kenner, who invented the sanitary belt in 1957, and Marjorie S. Joyner, who created the permanent hair-wave machine in 1928. Kenner and Joyner may not be household names, but their inventions went on to have significant impacts on American society.

Johnson used this as a chance to highlight the power of amplifying voices that have been marginalized, something crucial to the education department and the Museum of Art as a whole.

“In turn, we lift up and facilitate experiences for the problem solvers in our classrooms,” she says.

Making New Connections  

Past program participants say it reinvigorated their notions of how to connect material with their students’ experiences.

Andrea Sisk, a math teacher at Woodland Hills High School for 19 years, applied to the program in the spring of 2021. Many of her students are from underserved communities and get bombarded with messages about not being good in math and not needing these skills to be successful. Sisk has sought to boost their interest in math by connecting it with other subjects and highlighting its relevance to students’ everyday lives.

“In order for my students to find relevance in my content,” she explains, “it is essential for me to make connections with other disciplines. I am adept in making connections with science, English, sports, foreign languages, theater arts, geography, and technology, but had no real understanding of visual arts. I felt as though I owed it to my students to help them make every connection possible to engage them.”

Sisk most loved learning about pieces in the museum, and how these discoveries might lead to fresh lesson ideas that could pique her students’ interest. For example, after a visit to the Hillman Hall of Minerals and Gems in Carnegie Museum of Natural History, educators were tasked with using oil pastels to create a color wheel based on gems and minerals of their choosing.

Photo: John Schisler

Clarke appreciated getting behind-the-scenes exposure to different layers of the art world, too, specifically in interacting with individuals who design and execute new exhibitions. “It allowed me to see a whole new level of careers and opportunities I could potentially expose my students to within the art field,” she says.

Sisk learned so much about infusing art into her classroom that now, when she teaches a math remediation class, she incorporates pieces of art at the museum. Students write equations of lines by superimposing a grid over a print of Untitled (Red Butterfly Over Green) by Mark Grotjahn or explore proportionality by examining Equivalent  by Joan Witek and then measuring and computing which of their body parts (wingspan, height, length of middle finger, etc.) are proportional. They write about what “negative” means in terms of negative space in sculptures like Georgia Gate by Thaddeus G. Mosley.

At the culmination of Sisk’s unit, her students took a field trip to the museum to see the artworks they’d been studying in class. After a guided tour, they spent the day exploring both the Museum of Art and Museum of Natural History.

“I cannot tell you how much it means to my students to go on this field trip,” she says.

Lasting Impressions

Clarke says she left the program with strategies to help students engage with art and valuable resources for her classroom. She also has a relationship with Carnegie Museum of Art’s education program. She’s been able to take students to the museum as a partnership with Winchester Thurston School to explore Charles “Teenie” Harris through photography.

“I have also begun to design lesson plans I can implement into our coursework that allow students to question history through the artist’s work,” she says.

Sisk compares the ending of the Residency in the summer of 2021 to saying goodbye at sleepaway camp. “The museum staff created a truly unique experience of both professional growth and personal nurturing,” she says. “I learned so much about art and infusing it into my classroom, while making connections, both with Museum of Art employees and other educators.” She deems the Educator Residency as the single greatest professional development she’s ever experienced.

The support educators receive extends well beyond their three-week residency. All residents are invited to gather at the museum approximately eight Thursday evenings a year to connect, explore a piece in the gallery, and make art, Sisk explains. “We share how we use art in our classes, and trade resources,” she says. “I truly treasure my nights at the museum as a few hours of calm in the midst of chaotic weeks.”

Sisk stayed in touch with a university teacher she met during the Residency and speaks to their class each spring. Through the Residency, she also learned about the Empowered Educator series, which is offered by the museum’s education department and engages educators to examine race and experiences through art. She’s referred colleagues in Spanish, history, and performing arts departments to the field trips offered by the Museum of Art, too. “The connections I make and the professional and personal growth it has afforded me makes me a better teacher, and a better resource for my students,” she says.

Clarke has attended artist meetups to connect with other residents, and she’s stayed in contact with Johnson to set up curated field trips. She deems the Residency “the most creative and refreshing professional development program I have been a part of thus far in my career.”

Current participants agree. At the culmination of one June 2024 lesson-planning session, Katie LaCava of New Kensington-Arnold School District made a point to praise Residency leaders. “This program is unique because of these individuals who are with us every day,” she says. “They’re very open, and they work really hard.”

On that June Monday, after viewing the educators’ creations, Johnson praised the teachers in her midst. “We appreciate your courage in not giving up,” she told them.

While sitting among the exhibition’s many decorative arts pieces—largely created as solutions to problems—she returned to the exercise’s theme of being an inventor and the importance of having a “what if” mentality, particularly in their own classrooms.

“How do we encourage that within our students?” she asks the group. “It’s in them already.”

The Educator Residency is generously supported by The Grable Foundation.

The post Educators at Play appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

An essential part of Richard Long’s artistic practice is taking a walk. 

The 79-year-old British land artist has strode across grassy fields in his native England, the glaciers of Iceland, the Australian bush, and to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. He sometimes documents these walks with drawings, poem-like “textworks,” or photographs of the worn path, as he did in 1967 with his conceptual piece A Line Made by Walking. Other times, he collects rocks and pieces of Earth as mementos of his journey, rearranging them into geometric shapes.

Elterwater Stone Ring, on view in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Scaife Galleries, includes 113 stones Long gathered from his walks in the mid-1980s around Elterwater, a small village located in northwest England’s Lake District. It is a mountainous region known for its large slate quarries and agriculture, and it’s a popular tourist destination for “fell-walkers”—hikers drawn to hills.

The angular Elterwater stones stand on end and vary in size, but most are below knee height on an average human. They’re arranged in a 2-foot-thick ring that is 9 feet in diameter, assembled into a kind of monument to the landscape from which they came. 

The jagged edges contain earthy stains that pop from the slate gray—burgundy, cream, and olive. But they can’t be seen together from the same vantage, the way one might observe a canvas painting. The stones point at different angles and obscure details, tempting curious observers to move around the sculpture, taking a walk of their own.  

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In Marie Watt: LAND STITCHES WATER SKY, a solo exhibition that opened April 13 as the 88th installment in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum series, the sculptor Marie Watt unites the material and the labor that defined America’s great skylines to tell a story of her own. Two of the four new works that comprise the exhibition, Quilt (Legendary) and Quilt (Lost Thunder Chorus), weave together an assemblage of reclaimed steel I-beams, given new context but some still bearing the marks of the mills that forged them and their years of use. For Watt, a citizen of the Seneca Nation, they also carry the imprint of generations of “skywalkers,” the Haudenosaunee men who climbed hundreds of feet into the air to form beams like these into skyscrapers.

The exhibition is “a concise but powerful statement that ties together western Pennsylvania’s past and present-day engagement with steel from a contemporary Indigenous perspective,” says Liz Park, the museum’s Richard Armstrong Curator of Contemporary Art.

The two Quilts are joined by a pair of reclaimed wool blankets that run the entire length of the stone wall from the gallery space to the Scaife Lobby. Placeholder (Horizon) and Placeholder (Companion Species) are double-length blankets, sewn with Czech seed beads that read, respectively, “Transportation Object.” and “My Neighbor.” Watt was drawn to the “cinematic” grandeur of these oversized blankets, she says, and the way they seem to envelop a viewer seeking to understand and interpret the text she’s sewn onto them.

Blankets have been Watt’s medium of choice for two decades, stacked and sculpted into buildings of their own as they bend and stretch skyward. In the Seneca Nation, blankets are held in high esteem, often given away as a form of acknowledgment or to commemorate an important life event, she says. Blankets also receive us into the world and enclose us on our way out, she notes. Watt retains any stains or blemishes she finds in her blankets so they can bring their complete history to her works.

“Between birth and death we’re constantly imprinting on this humble cloth,” Watt says. “They’re storied objects.”

“My ancestors or your ancestors—people who have been involved in Pittsburgh’s steel industry—could have touched the I-beams that we’re working with today, which I think is really profound.”

–Marie Watt

So, too, are the steel beams used in Watt’s Quilts, one of which also contains a glass I-beam—a reference to another pivotal material from Pittsburgh’s past. Steel is the most recycled material in the world, carrying its “past lives” even as the metal is recast into something new, Park says. In Watt’s work, museum visitors will encounter those histories in a new form and reflect on the layers of meaning woven into her art.

“My ancestors or your ancestors—people who have been involved in Pittsburgh’s steel industry—could have touched the I-beams that we’re working with today, which I think is really profound,” Watt notes.

Watt, who is based in Portland, Oregon, held workshops with members of the Pittsburgh Poetry Collective and museum educators to develop a bank of words that speak to the past, present, and future of western Pennsylvania. Her collaborators, including a fifth grade class from Winchester Thurston School, then inscribed the words in their own hand on the I-beams in her Quilts, which were fabricated with help from Pittsburgh’s Poki Moto Studio. The use of language in the sculptures—words like “heirloom,” “gather,” and “ghosts”—reflects Watt’s interest in call-and-response, as she listens for what the past can tell us.

“What does it mean to call back to our ancestors and call forward to future generations and think about how we’re connected in this layered way?” Watt asks.

For Park, Watt’s exhibition, which is on view through September 22, is all the more meaningful because of how it echoes many pieces in the museum collection. The Quilts share a material and scale with the late Richard Serra’s Carnegie, a 40-foot tower installed as part of the 1985 Carnegie International. They also call to mind Louise Nevelson’s Tropical Garden’s Presence, a sculpture of painted aluminum located in Sculpture Court and viewable from the Forum Gallery. Watt’s artistic practice, Park notes, is in conversation with El Anatsui’s imposing Palettes of Ambition, a sculpture made of metal scraps and bottle caps that stands 16 feet tall and 32 feet wide in the museum’s Scaife Lobby. Like Watt’s blankets, Cameron Rowland’s Jim Crow puts on display an object fraught with a history of discrimination and persecution to be freshly considered.

“This exhibition will be a place to have conversations that are warm and generous and serious about what it means to consider this work from a number of different perspectives—Indigenous perspectives, the perspective of a worker, a child, an elder—and to do that through material language,” Park says. “This is an exhibition that has the capacity to really resonate outside of the walls of the museum.”

Major support for Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum series is provided by the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation. Additional support for this exhibition is provided by the Ruth Levine Memorial Fund. Carnegie Museum of Art’s exhibition program is supported by the Carnegie Museum of Art Exhibition Fund, The Fellows of Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Carnegie Collective.

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It carries the signifiers of a children’s cartoon character while emoting more somber human feelings: Is it the acquiescence of total relief or utter hopelessness? Perhaps COMPANION’s not even resting, but dead—like the person in the images next to it, in Andy Warhol’s Ambulance Disaster. Hung on the wall above COMPANION, Ambulance Disaster is made of two nearly identical pictures, from photographs of a 1960 automobile accident—a dead body, thrown halfway over the window of a crumpled ambulance.

The sculpture COMPANION 2020 by the artist Brian Donnelly, better known as KAWS, and this definitive piece from Warhol’s 1960s Death and Disaster series seem like grim outliers from two artists better known for bright colors and pop-culture inspiration. But as The Warhol’s 30th anniversary exhibition KAWS + Warhol aims to show by bringing these two iconic artists together for the first time, there is another side to each of them—a darker side.

Warhol and KAWS are both often misinterpreted because they use pop culture and bright colors; because young people are attracted to the work. People think their work is light, or even superficial, and I think that’s far, far from the truth.  

–Patrick Moore, Former director of The Andy Warhol Museum

KAWS and Warhol have a lot in common, despite being generations apart. Like Warhol, KAWS continually breaks down the barrier between art and commerce, equally adept at exhibiting in major international galleries and selling T-shirts and figurines featuring COMPANION and similar characters. KAWS started his career in New York City as a graffiti artist, just like Warhol’s young friends Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. And KAWS’ collaborations, such as the one with General Mills to make mass-produced cereal boxes, takes the Campbell’s soup-can aesthetic one step further—moving KAWS’ artwork outside gallery spaces and onto supermarket shelves.

But that’s not the only common thread connecting the two.

“Warhol and KAWS are both often misinterpreted because they use pop culture and bright colors; because young people are attracted to the work,” says Patrick Moore, former director of The Andy Warhol Museum, who was the curator of KAWS + Warhol. “People think their work is light, or even superficial, and I think that’s far, far from the truth.”

KAWS + Warhol shows these two artists not as pop phenomena or brothers-in-mass-market, but as subtler voices for the anxious. Not as celebrity-beloved trendsetters—though they are—but as observers of a generation that simply has seen too much and would so love to briefly close its eyes.

Pop Icons, Misunderstood

“I’ve always gravitated to Andy Warhol,” KAWS says from his studio in Brooklyn, New York. “When you’re young, you tiptoe into artists, and, aside from Van Gogh and the artists schools push on you as a child, it’s Warhol who’s one of those that really hits you first. He has such a free, open mind to different media and to occupying spaces—he opened a lot of doors for my generation, and for artists like [Keith] Haring, who in turn opened doors for me.”

Warhol’s silkscreens and Haring’s dancing, twisting figures have become fully integrated parts of Western culture—not just artworks, but also some kind of pop folk-culture that can be found on T-shirts in Urban Outfitters and television commercials aired during the Super Bowl. It’s the same with KAWS’ artworks, designs, and toys, so ubiquitous from New York to Tokyo that they’ve grown far beyond their creator.

Born in New Jersey in 1974, KAWS moved to New York City in the 1990s, working in commercial illustration and animation as well as his sideline in illegal street art. His early day-job work on animated TV shows (such as 101 Dalmatians, Daria, and Doug) and his graffiti bled together into a kind of artistic gumbo that evokes Disney and The Simpsons, Michelin Man and Bugs Bunny. Eventually, a recognizable form came into being: a series of characters—COMPANION, BENDY, ACCOMPLICE—that are part-humanoid, part-cartoon, with X’s for eyes like dead comic-book drawings. The ever-repeatable images in his paintings and sculptures, album covers and toys are manna to a global, digital generation for whom images matter perhaps more than they do to baby boomers or even Generation X.

Just as Warhol was initially derided for his Campbell’s Soup Cans, KAWS’ exhibitions are sometimes met poorly by parts of the art world. But neither artist makes work that is simply a shallow celebration of capital, which mass media and advertising might imply. To Moore, Warhol and KAWS both convey far deeper sentiments; sentiments often bathed in the darkness of anxious times.

“We live in a world of images—more than even Warhol could have imagined,” says Moore. “But these two artists are very aware of the dark side of image culture—where you’re looking at things but not really seeing them. They’re offering up images that are candy-colored, and that have popular-culture resonance for us, but then have a secondary meaning that’s more critical.”

To this end, KAWS + Warhol includes some of the most familiar images in each artist’s canon, available for reinterpretation. For example, the pairing of Warhol’s film Blow Job with KAWS’ sculpture of COMPANION or KAWSBOB (a kind of Spongebob Squarepants with KAWS’ signature X’d-out eyes) emphasizes the grotesque side of Warhol’s work. In this context, Blow Job star DeVeren Bookwalter suddenly appears death-like, eyes drooping, practically forming X’s.

Works from Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, such as the ambulance paintings and silkscreens of an electric chair, are juxtaposed with sculptures of COMPANION such as GONE, in which the figure carries the broken body of a KAWS-style character like Grover or Elmo from Sesame Street.

Marianne Dobner is curator at Mumok, the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, Austria, who has written on and curated exhibitions of Warhol, and who contributed an essay on KAWS and Warhol to this exhibition’s catalog. To Dobner, there is a key artistic category that ties the two men together: “the cute.”

“The cute means it’s something very easy to connect to, and yet if you keep digging, there’s something that criticizes society as a whole,” says Dobner. “Look at the Death and Disaster series, the electric chairs and accidents [from 1960s America]. COMPANION feels like we’re in a similar moment now—like there’s so much going on we can’t even find a proper way to talk about it.”

Consider how both artists render dark subject matter such as skulls, Moore says. 

“It’s the mark of a great artist that they take a subject that’s actually quite morbid, but through color and shape and form they turn it into something irresistible.”

Fun With Cereal

When presented in context, Warhol’s influence on KAWS becomes more apparent. And that inspiration isn’t just skulls and colors; it’s as much about Warhol’s approach as any of the artist’s actual pieces. Part of that is a passion for exploring different ways to make art, regardless of the medium.

“With Andy, if he’s working on film, that’s what he’s doing—he’s a filmmaker,” says KAWS. “If he’s doing an advertisement, that’s just part of his practice. And I think he’d just expect people to, you know, catch up!”

This includes collaborations with musicians. Warhol managed The Velvet Underground & Nico, the seminal 1960s proto-punk album for which he made the famed “banana” cover art. KAWS has 808s & Heartbreak, Kanye West’s game-changing 2008 hip-hop album, for which he designed images bursting with colors and typically KAWS-bendy icons. And while Warhol made renowned ads for magazines and the fashion industry in the 1950s, KAWS’ collaborations with Japanese fashion brand UNIQLO and Disney have turned the 21st century into a world of X’d-out eyes. Their album covers and ads may not be featured in KAWS + Warhol, but there are other ways in which Warhol’s ad-obsessed work and KAWS come into play.

One example includes new works that KAWS will debut in The Warhol’s 30th anniversary exhibition—a series of large-scale paintings of cereal boxes. In 2022, KAWS worked with General Mills to make new KAWS versions of their beloved monster-themed cereal boxes such as Franken Berry and Count Chocula, which are well known to anyone who grew up in the Saturday morning cartoon era. (KAWS was such a fan that, when approached to collaborate on a different cereal for GM, he immediately asked about the monster cereals.) Limited-edition cereal boxes sold in stores with the pink Frankenstein-esque Franken Berry, for example, showed the character with COMPANION-styled skull-and-crossbones head and X’d eyes. Now KAWS has painstakingly reproduced those designs as wall-sized paintings.

Photo: Joshua Franzos

“They’ve been on the wall for months,” he says. “It seems so straightforward—reverse engineering what I did for the cereal box. But those are ink drawings scanned into the computer, and now here I’m hand painting all these little lines which, at an 8-inch-by-10-inch scale is just a crosshatch with a pen and takes minutes. So this is months of just redrawing all of that—paying attention to the line weight. It’s fun. It’s therapeutic.”

Part of the project included plastic toys like the ones cereal boxes contained in his childhood. And as part of the exhibition, KAWS has recreated those toys as bronze sculptures, similar to the painting approach.

“Warhol was, obviously, very interested in this kind of work,” says Moore. “KAWS has taken that to a whole other level. You could walk into any grocery store and buy those KAWS cereal boxes, and now, to walk it back into a fine art context with these paintings and sculptures—it becomes like a hall of mirrors between things that are unabashedly commercial and those which are part of the highest level of the art world.”

A Fruitful Pairing

To celebrate The Warhol turning 30 years old, it seems appropriate to do what the museum’s namesake might’ve done and bring together his work with that of the  new generation.

The comparisons between Warhol and KAWS are so fruitful—whether it’s their more apparent interests in ignoring tradi- tional boundaries, or the dark “cute”-ness that Moore and Dobner find so compelling. The exhibition also creates a juxtaposition that could be seen as a collaboration between the two artists, their works shining new light on one another that gives rise to new interpretations—and new audiences.

“KAWS has an incredible drawing power with younger viewers,” says Moore. “When Warhol was in the last years of his life, he connected with and made collaborative works with Basquiat and Haring, and he got the idea that to remain relevant, I need a relationship with younger artists who will inspire me, and who I can bring attention to. That’s a strategy baked into Warhol’s life. He wanted to remain relevant, and one way to do that was to work with younger artists.”

Included in the exhibition is a painting called TIDE, which shows COMPANION barely floating—or perhaps not; perhaps sinking—in a moon-lit ocean, no shore in sight. The depth of color, the significance of the moon and its swathe of light across the water, the stillness of this image is comforting despite its potentially unsettling message. Similar to some of Warhol’s silkscreen portraits, COMPANION is like a jolly death mask of celebrity.

My work is very personal. I don’t approach it trying to create dark undertones. I feel like there are just a lot of reactions to the environment in my life, and these are attempts to create things from those reactions that are inviting and have empathy.

–KAWS

“To have these two big figures of the art world talking to each other—it almost feels like propelling Warhol into today,” says Dobner. “For me, those COMPANION figures feel almost like an avatar for myself, just like the Death and Disaster works were decades ago. It’s like me staring at the news—that feeling that we need to do something, and not knowing what we could do.”

What might be seen as an uncanny ability to give the audience its avatar could simply be something KAWS and Warhol exude: respect for the viewer. Neither one feels the need to tell the viewer what they’re seeing.

“My work is very personal,” says KAWS. “I don’t approach it trying to create dark undertones. I feel like there are just a lot of reactions to the environment in my life, and these are attempts to create things from those reactions that are inviting and have empathy.

“The work Andy created is a lot more guarded; cooler. With the work that I make, it’s myself. There’s no façade. I’m just a person making work.”

KAWS + Warhol is presented by Uniqlo. Lead support is provided by Nemacolin. Generous support is provided by Jim Spencer and Michael Lin, and Kathe and Jim Patrinos. Additional support is provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, and Steven and Lynda Latner. The Warhol’s exhibition program is made possible in part through support provided by the Curatorial Vision Fund. Contributors include Scott M. Mory, and Cris and Cindy Turner.

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