Cradled in a bed of felt and fiberglass in the basement of Carnegie Museum of Natural History is the fossilized jawbone of the first thing in history to ever be called Tyrannosaurus rex.

The 66-million-year-old carnivore’s jawbone still bears the serrated, banana-sized teeth that were used to rip through the flesh of its prey.

When this fossil was discovered in Montana in 1902, it was a revelation. What is today one of the most recognizable dinosaurs was then completely unknown. The find was but one piece of the puzzle that would become the T. rex holotype, or the name-bearing specimen upon which the entire species is based.

The museum purchased the fossilized T. rex skeleton from the American Museum of Natural History in 1941, and it continues to thrill visitors in Pittsburgh as part of the Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibition. But the head on display is a reproduction. The real fossil skull bones are too heavy, fragile, and scientifically significant to be on public view.

Instead, they reside in one of two underground rooms referred to by museum staff as the “Big Bone Room” and the “Little Bone Room,” where the bulk of the museum’s vertebrate paleontology collection is kept and cared for.

The collection’s size, breadth, and scientific significance distinguish it as one of the finest in the world, containing specimens—including the T. rex holotype—that continue to shape humanity’s understanding of the history of life on Earth.

“These rooms hold one of the world’s great vertebrate paleontology collections,” says Matt Lamanna, the museum’s Mary R. Dawson Curator  of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Into the Bone Zone

Vertebrate paleontology is the study of prehistoric animals with backbones, and their fossils are carefully stored in nearly every square inch of the “bone rooms.”

The Big Bone Room (which, like its smaller counterpart, is named for the size of the space, not the size of its specimens) is larger than a basketball court, with low, whitewashed ceilings and dozens of shelves holding fossils, some still wrapped in protective materials.

Photo: John Schisler

The Little Bone Room is a short jaunt down a hallway, where the polished concrete floors are still veined with tracks that were once used to move heavy specimens via rail cart into the museum’s basement over a century ago.

Like the Big Bone Room, the space boasts rows of movable shelves and drawers that date back to the early 20th century. All told, the collection contains about 120,000 specimens, approximately 500 of which are holotypes. They range in age from 450 million years old to 500 years old and come from every continent, including Antarctica.

Since Andrew Carnegie started it in the 1890s, the collection has produced groundbreaking discoveries. This includes the first 50-million-year-old mammals ever found in the Arctic—a find made in the 1970s by paleontology pioneer and former head of the museum’s vertebrate paleontology program Mary Dawson. It also boasts the holotype skeleton of Anzu wyliei, a 7-foot-tall feathered dinosaur that received its name from Lamanna and three colleagues in 2014.

The contents of the bone rooms draw researchers from around the world. The museum’s fossils of the gigantic, long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs known as sauropods are among the most scientifically important on the planet.

“More information about sauropods has been derived from our collection than maybe any other,” says Lamanna.

“The Carnegie paleontology collections—you just can’t beat them,” adds paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Sarah Davis. “Especially for large dinosaurs.”

The bone rooms are Davis’ domain. She’s the museum’s collection manager of paleobiology, a position she took in April 2024 following the retirement of longtime collection manager Amy Henrici.

Davis cares for a staggeringly diverse assemblage of fossils, most of which are not on display.

Some are smaller than the head of a pin. That includes the holotype specimen—a tooth—of the 56-million-year-old Teilhardina magnoliana, one of the geologically oldest primates ever discovered in North America. In life, the tree-dwelling, marmoset-like creature weighed less than an ounce. Dental fossils are often the only surviving evidence that these tiny animals existed.

Other specimens are comparatively huge. One is the fossilized skeleton of a mastodon, an elephant-like animal that roamed North America until about 12,000 years ago. Even in pieces, the specimen is stunning, with a church-bell-sized skull.

Photo: John Schisler

Believed to be among the largest mastodon skeletons ever found, it was one of Andrew Carnegie’s first acquisitions for the museum and was on display until 2013, when the museum removed it to restore some of its bones. That conservation work was completed last year, and the mastodon now rests where Davis can keep an eye on it until it is ready for exhibition again. Lamanna hopes that day will come soon, especially after the museum’s recent $25 million dollar gift from longtime patrons Dan and Carole Kamin, part of which will be used to renovate the dinosaur exhibition and neighboring galleries.

Davis’ job is to ensure that each fossil is kept in the best shape possible—this includes checking that they are correctly identified, recorded in the museum’s database, and safely stored. Davis also helps other scientists use the collection, from fielding data requests to overseeing the use of a forklift to access large specimens.

Some of those large fossils are on a shelf near the mastodon. They are the manhole-cover-sized vertebrae of a dinosaur species whose initial discovery helped put Carnegie Museum of Natural History on the map: Diplodocus carnegii.

The first fossils of this sauropod were unearthed in an 1899 expedition funded by Andrew Carnegie. Later nicknamed “Dippy,” the famous dinosaur spawned casts that have been distributed around the world, and the original is still on display in the museum.

The Diplodocus fossils kept in the Big Bone Room, however, mostly don’t belong to that first find. Instead, they’re part of a second Diplodocus that was discovered in the same quarry the following year and used to fill in some missing parts of the specimen on display. That doesn’t mean they are any less significant.

“You could absolutely make a case that science has learned more from the second specimen of Diplodocus carnegii than it has from the first,” says Lamanna. That’s why a collection like this is so vital.

“It’s super important to have real fossils on display, but there’s a trade-off,” the museum’s longtime paleontologist continues. “Doing so tends to decrease access to the fossil for research. When we have specimens down in the collection, they can be studied, measured, photographed, and 3D-scanned from all angles. And that’s often how knowledge of paleontology advances.”

Dinosaur Color Theory

A drive for discovery is what brought Davis to the museum.

The Arizona native grew up the child of two scientists—an engineer and a pharmacist. She was drawn to paleontology as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, where she pursued research projects on dinosaur appearance and color chemistry that she later built upon for her PhD thesis at the University of Texas at Austin.

“The research I did was into this pigment system called carotenoids, which are involved in the expression of pink, red, yellow, and orange, among other colors,” says Davis. “They are very tricky because they are unlikely to fossilize. What we find in the fossil record are melanin-based colors, which are black, brown, and gray.”

Photo: John Schisler

Davis turned to birds—descendants of dinosaurs—to examine how color may have been expressed in prehistory. Alongside her graduate adviser at UT Austin, Julia Clarke, Davis evaluated colors of more than 4,000 living bird species, as well as dinosaurs’ distant relatives, crocodiles and turtles, to determine the likelihood of carotenoid colors appearing in their extinct cousins.

She found that it’s possible that dinosaurs sported yellow, orange, or red skin features.

Lamanna was eager to learn more about Davis’ research after Clarke introduced the two of them. They worked together on Antarctic fossils, and Lamanna was impressed by her intelligence and enthusiasm.  

When the collection manager position opened, Lamanna thought of Davis right away. He figured the museum’s ornithological and paleontological collections would be an ideal professional home for her.

She agreed.

“This work is super rewarding,” says Davis. “I love being surrounded by fossils all day, and then also getting to do my own research.”

In With the Old and New

The collection manager job is a big one, and not just because of the size of its specimens. Davis is a steward to over a century of paleontological work, evidenced by the original tea-colored, cursive-written field notes still associated with many fossils.

Some notes are from a dig in Utah that helped build the foundation of the collection.

That excavation, begun in 1909, was led by Carnegie Museum paleontologist Earl Douglass. He was unearthing what would turn out to be the fossilized skeleton of a giant Apatosaurus when his team came upon the bones of another dinosaur, then another, and another.

Over 14 years, they collected 350 tons of prehistoric bones from that single locality, which today is known as Carnegie Quarry at Dinosaur National Monument.

“Much of what was there ended up here,” Lamanna says. “By most estimations, it’s the greatest single locality of Jurassic-age dinosaurs that’s ever been discovered anywhere in the world. It rocketed our museum into the stratosphere.”

The vertebrate paleontology collection continued to grow in size and scientific significance over the decades. More fossils came from digs around the world, including those in Egypt and Antarctica led by Lamanna.

Despite the allure of fresh-from-the-dirt discoveries, the oldest specimens can still yield great things.

Lamanna recalls a find made in the mid-1980s by Davis’ predecessor, Henrici. She was a preparator at the time, working on a hunk of rock from Dinosaur National Monument. It wasn’t believed to contain anything significant. But as Henrici chipped away the rock, she discovered one of the only lower jawbones of a Stegosaurus ever found.

“That’s why we hang on to this stuff,” says Lamanna. “New eyes come along, new technologies come along, new viewpoints and expertise. You learn new things from old stuff.”

Even a closer look at a well-known specimen can yield exciting findings.

Below the terrifying teeth of the T. rex holotype jaw are two or three gouges on its chin.

“We think this animal was nipped by another
T. rex at some point in his or her life,” says Lamanna. He points out how the surrounding bone shows signs of healing, indicating that the Cretaceous-era conflict occurred long before the dinosaur’s death.

“What’s awesome to me is that these show us evidence of two different animals and an interaction between them,” he continues. “It’s a literal moment  in time, captured for us to learn from 66 million
years later.”

Through that framing, the museum’s bone rooms are a trove of prehistoric stories, some told already, some still waiting to be discovered.

“This place is a library of the history of life on Earth,” says Davis. “The specimens are incredible on their own, but so are the people that built this collection. It’s amazing to be part of that history now, and to keep taking care of it for generations to come.”

The post What Lies Beneath appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Dan and Carole Kamin have a long history with Carnegie Museums, but their relationship with Carnegie Science Center Director Jason Brown began a little over five years ago at a garden party.

It was May 2019, and Carole’s famous tulips were in bloom. Brown, who had recently been named as the Science Center’s director, was honored to have been invited as a guest to the Kamins’ annual tulip party. Brown had spoken with Carole before but had never met Dan.

When the two men were introduced, Dan—who built his career in commercial real estate—wasn’t interested in talking about flowers.

“When he heard that I ran the Science Center, he said, ‘If I wasn’t a real estate guy, I could have been an astronomer,’” Brown recalls. “He said, ‘I still have these two questions that I’ve never had answered: What exists just outside the boundary of the universe, and what existed one millisecond before the Big Bang?” 

Brown admitted that he didn’t have the answers. But the conversation signaled something about Dan’s deep curiosity in science, which he traces back to when he was a boy exploring the Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science, the precursor to Carnegie Science Center. He would cite that history again when, five years after that conversation with Brown, the Kamins announced a $65 million gift to the Science Center, the largest in Carnegie Museums’ history.

After that first meeting at the tulip party, Brown stayed in touch with the Kamins, inviting them to the reopening of The Buhl in 2020 following a multimillion-dollar renovation, and also sharing with them an ambitious vision that was taking shape for the Science Center’s long-term future on the North Shore.

Photo: Christina Montemurro

The Kamins have been patrons and supporters of Carnegie Museums for decades. In 2016, a $5 million commitment from the Kamins permanently endowed the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s director position, now held by Gretchen Baker, who is the Daniel G. and Carole L. Kamin Director of the museum. The following year, they were inaugurated into the Carnegie Nobel Quartet Society, which recognizes lifetime giving to Carnegie Museums that exceeds $1 million. Carole also is an emeritus member of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History Advisory Board and a longtime member of Carnegie Museum of Art’s Women’s Committee.

The couple’s support of Carnegie Science Center—which is being renamed the Daniel G. and Carole L. Kamin Science Center in their honor—not only stems from Dan’s lifelong love of science, but also from his confidence in the vision that Brown and his leadership team crafted for the institution. 

“The Science Center is a vital contributor to the economic vitality of the Pittsburgh region and a great partner to our schools and science-based businesses,” Dan says. “Carole and I were inspired by the future vision presented by the Science Center’s leadership, and we felt compelled to support it in a meaningful way.”

At the core, it is a vision for deepening engagement with boundary-pushing science and connecting it with the larger Pittsburgh community. It is about inspiring visitors—young and old—to ask the complicated questions like those that Dan put to Brown at that tulip party, and perhaps also pursue the answers.

“Giving young minds the opportunities to explore and wonder what else is out there, just as I did, creates a lifetime of memories,” he says. 

The post A Lifelong Love of Astronomy 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.  

The post Closer Look: Walking the Land appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Wow. 

When the hall opened with its first concert on Nov. 5, 1895, it was a national story—one that inspired a Pittsburgh-themed special issue of the New York City-based Musical Courier. The prominent weekly extolled the hall’s three-tiered, 2,000-seat, domed-ceiling hall, including the “elaborate and handsomely decorated proscenium arch [that] springs from the stage … [the decoration] everywhere accented with gold, heightened by the use  of the electric light … the effect appropriate to a palace of music.” 

 The hall was part of a gift from Andrew Carnegie to the growing city of Pittsburgh—a cultural complex that included a library as well as museum wings dedicated to art and science. It aimed to fill a need for what a Courier writer called  “important concert giving” to improve the lives of the rich as well as the poor, while supporting itself and the rest of this new Carnegie Institute. 

Carnegie Museums once again aims to serve the public and generate revenue with the modernized version of the music hall, which closed in June 2023 for its most substantial renovation since it opened 128 years ago. 

“Carnegie Music Hall is a cultural treasure of deep historical significance, not just to Carnegie Museums but all of Pittsburgh,” says Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh President and Chief Executive Officer Steven Knapp. “Just as it was a gift to the community well over a century ago, the renovated Music Hall will be a gift to the larger community of organizations that will welcome guests into this beautifully restored space.” 

The $9 million project has painstakingly preserved the hall’s beauty and bones, including the sconces along the back wall of the first balcony and flowers on the arch. Those plaster pieces that were broken or missing were restored using molds of the originals sculpted by Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontology preparators accustomed to working with millions-year-old fossils. 

Carnegie Museum of Art conservators guided painters in matching antique and modern paints and using cotton swabs and vinegar to clean decorative panels. Scores  of workers re-plastered, repainted, and cleaned gold leaf all the way up to the ceiling fleurs-de-lis.

But the renovation wasn’t just about aesthetics, says Melissa Simonetti, a seasoned design professional with a preservation background. Carnegie Museums hired her as the director of construction and project management, starting with this marquee project. 

The bulk of the renovation added critical updates such as new wiring and climate control—including, for the first time, modern air-conditioning—as well as improved accessibility. Custom-designed wider seats and aisles with slopes replacing steps will meet current building codes and maximize comfort and safety. 

“What makes this renovation important is, we’re making it more usable to more people,” Simonetti says. The challenge, she notes, especially for an institution dedicated to preserving old things, is “to reach the right balance of making something code-compliant and new again while also keeping its character.”

Honoring a Historic Space

The vintage grandeur of the hall has hosted an historic array of diverse performers, including the Pittsburgh Orchestra, which started at the music hall in 1896 and became the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Other performers range from Italian opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti to popular singer Norah Jones, and speakers including five U.S. presidents. 

Events in the hall have paid tribute to Fred Rogers, the victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, and University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine students getting their white coats. 

And the hall will once again be the home venue of local groups such as Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures, which in early January announced the spring return to the hall of   its Ten Evenings series “with great joy.” 

Rachmaninoff performed here. So did “Weird Al” Yankovich. 

And on a late afternoon in mid-December, Michael Volpatt stood on the stage of the darkened hall, after crews had left for the day, and delivered a moving soliloquy about what it means to his family’s Volpatt Construction to partner on overseeing the project.  

 “When I walked into this space, I was overwhelmed by the greatness of it,” he says in a hushed tone that nevertheless carried into the rafters of the empty hall. His company is known for its renovations of historic edifices, such as nearby St. Paul Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, a French Gothic church on the National Register of Historic Places that was built several years after Carnegie Music Hall. However, Volpatt adds that his firm has “never done a music hall of this magnitude.” 

At the height of construction, the music hall was filled with a thick 60-foot-tall forest of steel scaffolding. Volpatt climbed up in the dome to explore the attic, where he marveled at an old film projector still in a tiny, tucked-away office. It was just one of the hidden treasures of the hall, which includes its epic pipe organ—still not in full working order because it wasn’t part of this restoration, save for some cleaning of its exposed pipes behind the stage.

Volpatt looked down to show off a new feature that today’s patrons will never see: the entirely new floor in the orchestra and circle level, its gentle curves and slopes sculpted in many differently shaped custom cuts of plywood. 

“They built a puzzle without pieces, is how I like to put it,” he said of the floor. “I love to point it out and I love to walk it. It magnifies the skill set of the carpenters on this project.” 

All told, Simonetti says, people from more than a dozen companies contributed—“a lot of experts.” 

Their work required a lot of materials, too, including 60 tons of scaffolding, 400 sheets of plywood, and 3,000 square yards of carpet. Carpenters, painters, and art conservators sanded and refinished 40 doors, restored 43 sconces, reapplied 1,179 fleur de lis stencils, and cleaned 33 decorative art panels on the orchestra level and 11 original decorative gold leaf panels on the proscenium arch.

Simonetti notes, “We rewired every single light,” with LED bulbs chosen for casting the same warmth. Her favorite transformation is to see the soot-scrubbed arched ceiling gleaming so brightly. 

By January, the floors were covered with a fresh layer of “Barolo” (like the red wine) carpet so they could be topped with new seats.  

Volpatt stressed how his company recycled every bit of the hall it could, including the metal from the old seats. He personally cut swatches of deep red velvet from some of the seats and donated them to be made into a dress for Pittsburgh Earth Day’s Ecolution Fashion Gala set for June 5 this year at Carnegie Museum of Art. 

 While a few salvaged seats were given to donors or put up for sale, the old seats weren’t historically important, Simonetti says. She believes they were replacements made during an earlier restoration, probably in the 1970s, based on construction and design clues found by the work crews. That’s also when she thinks some workers discreetly wrote their signatures on top of the arch and organ. She notes that the hall had undergone a renovation around the 1920s, as well.

Changing With the Times

Simonetti stresses that this project isn’t a recreation of the hall at any given point in the past but a continuation of the story of sustaining the hall for the future. Change comes with that. 

In fact, the hall’s exterior changed dramatically just 12 years after it was opened as part of the huge 1907 expansion of the Carnegie Institute complex. The exterior lost the twin Venetian towers on either side of its Forbes Avenue front (Andrew Carnegie hated them). Covered up were the hall’s original curved  exterior walls, which still can be glimpsed from the basement; additions included the hall’s grand foyer that generations of Pittsburghers now love as an event space.  The institution had to grow and move on.

The hall’s 1,530 new scroll-armed, steel and maple-stained plywood seats were made and installed by Ducharme Seating in Montreal, Canada. They still have the classic red (well, “Cordovan”) velvet upholstery, and those on the aisles of the orchestra level have ornate, antique-looking cast-iron aisle panels whose custom design was inspired by a pattern on the proscenium, Simonetti says. 

As she explains, “The reality is, you have to work on things to preserve them. Our take on this project was to keep as much of the old as we could and not recreate something.” 

It’s detailed, it’s complicated, and yet, “This is my dream project,” says the western Pennsylvania native, who says she feels a responsibility to others for whom the hall is an important part of local life. “So it’s very humbling.” 

Simonetti thoughtfully left her successors—whomever and whenever that may be—more helpful records than she had to work with. She even left them a “time capsule,” too. (The envelope of construction photos and “letters to the future” are on top of the arch, until it is found.)

In the meantime, she knows how passionate people are about this historic landmark. Those people include George Vosburgh, a retired principal trumpet of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra who now is associate teaching professor of trumpet & wind ensemble studies at nearby Carnegie Mellon University, and director of the CMU Wind Ensemble. 

The ensemble regularly performs at the hall, so he knows how hot it could be in summer and how “brutally cold” it gets during winter. But he appreciates how the original “state-of-the-art, no-expense-spared” music hall tends to make his young musicians sound much better than they do in the smaller, more “sound-bouncey” hall where  they rehearse on campus. “It’s a beautiful, beautiful hall.” 

Jeff Betten, who promotes Pittsburgh as a music city as owner of two indie record labels as well as a record manufacturing plant, said, “It’s one of my favorite venues in the city. The acoustics are impeccable, and I haven’t yet found that there’s a bad seat in the house when it comes to viewing the stage.” He loves how “grand it feels,” for not just classical music or opera but also a rock show. He cites a 2017 concert there by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds—he was seated in the first balcony, stage center left—as “probably the best concert I’ve ever seen in my life.” 

Vosburgh said he can’t wait for his students to perform there going forward. “This is what we do as musicians. We want to play in great spaces. And this is a great space.” 

Nearly 50 donors contributed to the first phase of this historic restoration. Lead support has been provided by The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Allegheny Regional Asset District (RAD), the Charles M. Morris Charitable Trust, and the Scott Foundation, Inc. Major support has been provided by Mr. and Mrs. Lee B. Foster, the Akers Gerber Family, Hilda M. Willis Foundation, and Christopher Fry.

The public is invited to support the Carnegie Music Hall renovation in a “Take Your Seat” campaign coming March 25!

Take Your Seat In Carnegie Music Hall!

The post Restoring A ‘Palace of Music’ appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

And though they’re not paid, the hundreds of volunteers who serve the Carnegie Museums in Oakland, the North Shore, and the Laurel Highlands at Powdermill are essential to the functioning of the institution.

“We could not do it without our volunteer community,” says Ashley Brandolph, manager of volunteer and internship programs. “They bring with them a wealth of experience and different perspectives, and different contributions and skill sets.” 

Volunteering has been a part of Carnegie Museums since the organization’s inception in 1895, but the program didn’t become officially established until 1974. Last year was by far the strongest year on record for volunteering, with a total of 900 volunteers contributing over 50,000 hours among the four museums and Powdermill. 

A handful of these volunteers, ranging from people in their teens to their 90s, spoke with Carnegie magazine about their experiences. The following are their stories, in their own words.

Carolina Rodriguez Guerra | 31, Shadyside

Information Volunteer, Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History, since 2022

When I moved to Pittsburgh from Mexico, I knew I wanted to go someplace where I could volunteer because of my status [as a non-U.S. citizen]. I can’t work professionally. So I wanted to do something, and I figured that working in a museum would be a good idea. 

I’ve definitely learned a lot. For example, once they took us on volunteer day to the PaleoLab [in Carnegie Museum of Natural History]. It was really interesting because just coming to the museum and seeing the dinosaurs, we don’t really see the actual work that’s behind that. It was really impressive to know all the things they do, from searching for the bones, doing the cast, assembling it to look like an actual dinosaur. 

I get surprised every time that I learn something new from a visitor. When they ask me questions and they get chatty and talk to me about some of their experiences. That’s something that I’ve really been appreciating, to know the visitors and their experiences and their lives. On one occasion, a woman came and started telling me about how she used to come to the museum when she was in college here in Pittsburgh and that this was her first time coming back since then and how excited she was.

I think it was a great decision that I made in trying to get into the museums. I’ve found an amazing team that makes you feel welcome and appreciated here at the Volunteer Office. Being here has brought so much learning about art and history that otherwise maybe I wouldn’t have learned.

Millicent Smith | 71, Oakland

Docent, Carnegie Museum of Art, since 2019

When I was in my 30s, I was in my aunt’s kitchen and I told her that when I retired I wanted to become a docent. I didn’t even know what it meant. I had to look it up. So, 30 some years later, in 2019, I was looking through Carnegie Museum Art’s website because I decided to take an art history class, and in the description it said it was a prerequisite to becoming a docent. I thought, “Oh, there’s that word again.” So I enrolled in the class, loved it, and I applied to become a docent. 

There’s a lot of artwork that most people just walk right by because it doesn’t look attractive. And I’ll use a piece that most people walk by because I want them to understand where the artist is coming from. We have a piece by Isa Genzken, and it looks like it was made with trash. But she made it because she was in New York City when the [World Trade Center] towers fell. She uses found materials, and that was her response to living in the city at the time the towers fell. I wanted to understand where she was coming from so that I could help the visitors see the work in a different manner. The role of the docent is to help visitors see artwork differently. Because when they can identify with whatever the artist was going through, they can be inspired by what an artist does. 

I want to be of service. I want to help visitors enjoy the time they’re here in the museum. I don’t want anyone to come to the museum and not have an experience where they find something that just really inspires them.

Alizmare Reinert | 19, Forest Hills

Demonstration Theaters volunteer, Carnegie Science Center, since 2021

I started here through an internship program through my high school. I am stationed in the theaters department right now. We do live demonstrations out on the floor and they had me doing some of that during my internship and I really got into it. 

I’m a baker at LeoGreta in Carnegie. It’s also nice getting better insight about food science from here because you think a little more about why different things happen. For example, I know what to do so that the cookies don’t get really flat. 

I’m actually learning Science in a Scoop right now, which is our ice cream show. I love doing that show. I really love working with nitrogen. Nitrogen is also really, really cold. Negative 321 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s really dangerous, but once you know how to use it, it’s really fun. You can make ice cream in three seconds. There’s a part of the Freeze show where some demonstrators put balloon animals in the nitrogen. I love doing that. It’s fun seeing what it does to other things and how it makes things really crispy. It’s crazy. Flash freezes everything. 

I am actually hoping to go back to school and become a pastry chef, so I can definitely see this aiding in that. This gives me a good background for my work. Also, I’m not the most outgoing person in the world, but as I’ve been here more, I’ve gotten used to it. Doing super huge shows with a hundred people is still a little bit harrowing, but it’s a worthwhile experience. It’ll teach you some things. You’ll get used to public speaking. The staff are really supportive, and they give you a lot of leeway when you need it. It’s just a really good place to be.

Mike Mykita (aka “Conductor Mike”) | 60, Middlesex Township

Volunteer with the Miniature Railroad & Village®, since 1986

I graduated in 1985 from the University of Pittsburgh and had been putting myself through school by working as a stock boy and salesman at a lumberyard. I was used to coming home at night and having homework to do and being busy on the weekends. And suddenly, I felt like I had a lot of time on my hands. Back then, the miniature railroad [at the Buhl Planetarium] was seasonal. It opened for Thanksgiving and closed at New Year’s, but they were doing a special viewing in the spring. I took my two young nephews to see the railroad and there was a flyer about becoming a volunteer. Again, I just felt like I had so much time on my hands after getting a degree in computer science that I thought, “Oh, four hours a week, I can do that.”

I just like meeting people. Years ago, I used to volunteer Sunday mornings and there were two people that came in. They were father and son lighthouse keepers from Nova Scotia. It was February, and the ice floe had got to the point that there was no navigation. So they thought, “Hey, we’re allowed to leave the lighthouses.” And what did they do when they were in the lighthouse? Well, they both had a model train set. So they came down here to see this one, and they spent my entire four-hour shift here. They asked me about it, finding out everything they could. And then they left business cards. How often do you get a  business card from a lighthouse keeper? 

For a while we used to have a book and we would ask people to sign their name and where they were from. And you would expect cities all over the United States. But when you started seeing foreign countries, or the writing was in the Cyrillic alphabet, you realize people from all over the world are coming in here. I never know who I’m going to meet on a given day. 

I’ll give you a personal note: The last year for the railroad at Buhl Planetarium was 1990, and it opened in the current building in 1992. In ’91, at the age of 28 with a 2-year-old son, I was told I had leukemia. I was fighting cancer. They told me at the time that I had a 50-50 survival chance. I’m 60 now. Surviving something like that is a great attitude adjustment, and I learned not to take things too seriously. So I come here for a few hours a week and have fun. 

I don’t know the numbers, but my impression is that a lot of people reach retirement age and then decide they’re going to volunteer. So I’m finally catching up to the age where most people start volunteering and it’s like, boy, I am coming up on 40 years. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here as a volunteer, but I’m still enjoying it, so I imagine I’ll be here for quite a while.

Zach Lyons-Weiler | 22, North Hills 

Volunteer, Vertebrate Paleontology, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, since 2016

I originally started as a volunteer as a teen docent. Then, in college [at University of Pittsburgh], I became a volunteer in the vertebrate paleontology department. I’m now a senior.

I’ve always loved museum work. It’s just something that I have wanted to do ever since I was very small. My mom worked as an educator in a little local museum from where she’s from in Troy, New York. So I was brought into the museum all the time. That’s what I wanted to do with my time. If I wasn’t spending time outside, I was at the museums.

Being able to spend time learning [as a teen docent] how to educate at the age of 15 and 16—having conversations with the public—was teaching me how to be an educator at a very young age. It was really a place where I felt that I could expand my knowledge outside of the classroom. 

My research [as a student at Pitt] focuses on local fossils from Pittsburgh, including some fossils from my backyard. In 2021 and 2022, I spent a lot of time in fossil preparation because I was bringing in a lot of specimens. I spent most of my time up in the PaleoLab. And then, over the past year, I’ve been organizing everything in the [vertebrate paleontology] collection, identifying it, and making sure that it’s modernized, because the fish collections have not had the same amount of focus as, say, our dinosaurs. There’s a lot of unknown stuff in there! 

I view my role, whatever position I’m in, as a conduit through which the mysteries and the vagaries of the natural world can speak to people. I can take things—these really strange and obscure concepts that people might not necessarily grasp when they’re just looking at rock strata or a forest—and interpret it as a story for people. Through all of my experiences as a volunteer and being so up close with these specimens, I’ve been able to get a really good understanding of the natural world that I can share with people.

Billie Kissel | 92, White Oak

Information Volunteer, Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History, since 2002

I began volunteering after I had been widowed. I was sort of at loose ends and decided I wanted to really get out of my home in White Oak and expand my lifestyle. 

Most of the volunteers I started out with are gone, but the one I remember the most was Anna Cunningham. She was a beautiful woman, tall and gracious, and I just fell in love with her and we kept in touch. There were so many volunteers with whom I just formed casual friendships. It was so nice and we would do a few things together. Most of us were older ladies that were retired from our jobs, and we just wanted to increase
our lives.

White Oak is on the perimeter of McKeesport. When I moved to this area, it was a booming mill town, but I’ve watched it decline. But going into Pittsburgh, you become revitalized. You see that things are happening [at the museums and universities] and you are surrounded by young, growing, enthusiastic people. The people are bright and interested and intelligent and asking questions. It’s just wonderful to be here. 

My son Mark is a world traveler. He’s been in the foreign service for years. When I come to the Carnegie Museums, I feel like I’m a world traveler, too. I enter the museum and I visit the whole world. Everything is beautiful at the museum. Right now, I’m in love with the botany area. And then I went down last week and there were the Christmas trees, and it was just beautiful. It’s ever changing. And it makes you grow with it. You grow with  the museum.

I play a very small role as a volunteer, but I feel as though I’m giving something back to this beautiful city. I’m glad to do that. And I think it just keeps me current and interested and makes me a more
interesting person.

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“When you get to the wreck site and realize you’re the first person to touch these artifacts after the passengers perished and suffered such a horrifying death, it gives you chills,” Wozniak says.

Wozniak served as the conservator on the four-week 1994 expedition that marked the third RMS Titanic Inc. visit to the wreck site. She then worked for two years at LP3 Conservation in France, preserving the Titanic’s artifacts. Afterward, she returned to Pittsburgh, her hometown, to conserve the Chariot of Aurora mural from the French ship, the Normandie, at Carnegie Museum of Art, where she worked for a decade, primarily as the objects conservator. Many of the objects she treated appear in TITANIC: The Artifact Exhibition. 

During the Titanic expedition, Wozniak never ventured to the sea floor. She was too busy working through the night to treat and stabilize the diverse collection of objects recovered—everything from crystal decanters and third-class coffee mugs to the ship’s fittings, such as bronze portholes and cast iron bollards—all of them changed by decades spent in conditions from which nothing had ever before emerged. 

When smaller objects arrived in the basket of the Nautile submersible, Wozniak quickly placed them into tubs to be covered with water once again, then carefully cleaned each one with a soft brush so they could be inventoried, measured, photographed, and their condition assessed. It was a revelatory experience for a conservator—and for the broader world of conservation—with a host of challenges unique to this wreck. 

“I had the unfortunate experience of running out of gloves while cleaning the artifacts,” Wozniak says. “My hands were literally burning from the acidic silt.”

Wozniak describes the “miraculous” treatment of papers recovered inside of suitcases. Stacks of paper were freeze-dried so pages could be separated and bathed in a chemical solution to reduce and remove sulfides that had blackened them in their time underwater. Before her eyes, she saw one stack revealed to be letters—love letters. Along with a colleague at LP3, she read the letters, wondering if their author had ever returned to his paramour. “It brought tears to my eyes,” Wozniak recounts.

Given the fact that more than 1,500 passengers and crew members died when the ship sank, so many of the artifacts recovered from the wreck carry a similar emotional weight. A gold pocketwatch was returned in 1993 to Edith Haisman, who had survived in a lifeboat at age 16. It had been her father’s; the last time she had seen it was 81 years earlier when he was waving to her from the deck of the sinking ship. 

As a conservator, Wozniak says she hopes her work can preserve for future generations the love letters and pocket watches that offer people a connection to such a specific time and place.

Each object brings its own challenges. After the cork popped on a full bottle of champagne once it was recovered, Wozniak knew she needed six people standing by to secure the corks on the half-dozen other bottles. One of those bottles is part of the exhibition at Carnegie Science Center. 

At LP3, organic materials like paper, wood, textiles, and leather were prioritized to reduce corrosion that would make them brittle. Hydrolyzed components of these artifacts had to be replaced so their structures had the necessary support to be removed from water baths in order to mitigate biological damage. Metal objects, meanwhile, needed to be placed in an alkali solution to be desalinated without further risk of corrosion. Depending on the metal, an artifact’s surface was treated, dried, and coated to protect against future corrosion. 

No matter the artifact, the guiding principle was to stabilize it and preserve as much of the history of the shipwreck as possible, so the world could see an honest representation of what remained. 

“If you do your job well, people don’t know that you did it at all. It shouldn’t show,” Wozniak says. “Conservation may be somewhat of a thankless profession, but in the end our thanks is that the objects are still surviving and they’re still stable and they’re still here for future generations.”

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Sherif never took for granted the towering antiquities just a short walk away. His fascination with ancient culture only deepened when, at 15, he went on a school field trip to the Citadel of Cairo, the seat of government from the 13th to 19th centuries. The fortress had brass windows, stone walls—and, most importantly to his future career—decorative wooden ceilings. 

“I always had a spirit of history,” he says of his upbringing in Egypt. “I had a continuous and direct communication to monuments and archaeology.” 

That was the spark for his esteemed career as a conservator of ancient wood, propelling him to work on precious objects at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization and historic sites in Egypt. 

That expertise, in turn, has brought Sherif to Pittsburgh as a new conservator at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, where he will work on one of its most beloved objects—the 4,000-year-old funerary boat excavated from Dahshur, Egypt. 

“The [Dahshur] boat is now deinstalled and stored, so I will use this opportunity to study and observe all details of the boat to improve its mechanical properties so it can live in the future in good condition,” Sherif says.

The museum took apart the famous boat—one of only four in the world—so he can analyze, preserve, and reassemble it. The Dahshur boat will be a showpiece for the museum’s Egypt on the Nile exhibition, slated to open in 2026—a highlight of human interaction with the Nile River and the ancient cultures that still inspire us today.

The Perfect Hire

Like a good doctor, a good conservator should first do no harm. The idea is to protect the integrity of the object with as little intervention as possible. 

 For example, Sherif points to one of the coffins in Sennedjem’s tomb in the museum’s Walton Hall, where there are some gaps. It would be easy to use modern materials and paints to hide the gaps, but that would be anathema to his job. He calls it forgery.

 “We don’t need to make it beautiful,” he says. “I add the minimum intervention.”

That will be his approach to the Dahshur boat, where Sherif will do the painstaking work of inspecting some three dozen planks of cedar wood, inch by inch, documenting decay and damage and coming up with a treatment plan.

“I can’t imagine a more perfect candidate for this project, just as far as his work experience and educational background,” says Lisa Haney, Egyptologist and assistant curator of the upcoming Egypt on the Nile exhibition. 

Sherif has a doctorate degree in structural conservation of historical wood from Cairo University and has worked on many large objects, which was a prerequisite for leading the conservation of the boat, as well as working on a coffin that has never been on display before.

“Mostafa’s a great hire,” says Gretchen Anderson, head conservator at the museum. Some conservators, like herself, are generalists. Even wood specialists often work on furniture, not ancient boats. 

I will use this opportunity to study and observe all details of the boat to improve its mechanical properties so it can live in the future in good condition.

–Mostafa Sherif, conservator at Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Sherif’s resume includes another unique credential: He’s already worked on two of the four sister boats from the same Dahshur excavation.  

“Archaeological wood is particularly tricky,” Haney says. “This wood has been buried in the desert for thousands of years. The dry climate really desicates it. It becomes extremely fragile and falls apart very easily.”

Anderson says excavating wood and exposing it to a new environment further weakens it. “Each plank is very susceptible to changes in relative humidity, to changes in temperature, to increased oxygen, and will begin to decay,” she says.

The exhibition history in Pittsburgh also damaged the museum’s boat. Although it was relatively stable while displayed in an exhibition case from 1907 to 1956, it was out in the open for the next 20 years. People handled it and even etched graffiti into it, Anderson says. “There are stories of people climbing into the boat. Objects were thrown into it.”  

The boat was back in a display case in Walton Hall of Ancient Egypt since 1990, but the museum dismantled it during the spring of 2022 because of preservation concerns during roof repairs.

Sherif’s experience inspecting the two Dahshur boats in Egypt will inform the conservation of the one in Pittsburgh. In 2018, he was part of the committee who studied the conditions of the boats before they were transferred from the Egyptian Museum in the Tahrir area, Cairo, to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, where he had been conservator since 2013, a post he held until he came to Pittsburgh. 

The sophisticated construction of the Dahshur boats never fails to impress Sherif. “The ancient Egyptians used wooden dowels and joints to connect the planks to each other,” he says, adding that it makes the planks safer and more flexible with movement.

Perhaps his most significant conservation project in Egypt was the Singem Tomb Door, with its roughly 4-foot-high panels featuring intricate figure paintings and hieroglyphs. The door had cracks, deteriorating layers of paint, missing parts, and was covered with dirty film. Sherif painstakingly repaired and cleaned the ancient wood by hand, using cotton swabs dipped in chemicals, for  example, to gently remove the dirt and bring the original colors back to life.

Yaser Yehya Amin Abdel-Aty, Sherif’s PhD adviser and professor of structural and architectural conservation of historic buildings at Cairo University, says Sherif’s skill restored the tomb door to its former glory and made it a main attraction at the museum. “It’s an archaeological masterpiece,” Abdel-Aty says.

Sherif also worked on the 142-foot-long Khufu boat, or sun boat, one of the oldest planked vessels in the world that is considered a masterpiece of ancient Egyptian woodcraft. He inspected it, created a first-aid plan, and consulted on its transfer from a museum building in Giza Plateau to the Grand Egyptian Museum. 

I can’t imagine a more perfect candidate for this project, just as far as his work experience and educational background.

Lisa Haney, Egyptologist and assistant curator of the upcoming Egypt on the Nile exhibition

In Pittsburgh, Sherif also will be working on the soot-covered coffin of Natjaukhonsurudj, an individual who lived during the 25th or 26th Dynasty in ancient Egypt. Henry J. Heinz had the coffin as part of his personal museum and loaned it to the Museum of Natural History in 1898 before it was officially gifted. Sherif will work with Kea Johnston, a coffin specialist, to remove layers of soot—a vestige of Pittsburgh’s smoky industrial history. They will also examine and conserve inscriptions, decoration, and construction of the coffin.

Sherif says restoring the coffin will be an even bigger challenge than the boat. “It is in difficult condition, not only covered in soot with water damage, but also structural damage.”

The coffin of Natjaukhonsurudj has never been on view before. The museum selected it for Egypt on the Nile because it’s the only coffin that came into the museum’s care without its occupant. The museum will be removing the coffins currently on display in accordance with its pending policy to no longer display human remains.  

“We’re excited to have someone to take care of this piece and also to be able to share something new with the museum’s visitors,” Haney says.

Conserving in Front of an Audience

In Pittsburgh, the public can look through a protective glass partition to observe Sherif work as part of a “visible lab.” The lab will be part of The Stories We Keep, a temporary exhibition at the museum that will open in March 2024. Museum conservators will answer questions from visitors about how they preserve valuable artifacts, and visitors will be able to try out conservation techniques using microscopes and black lights to detect previous repairs on simulated objects.

“We want visitors to understand all that goes into this and know that real science is happening here,” says Sarah Crawford, the museum’s director of exhibitions.

On a recent morning, a group of girls from an art club in Hadley, Pennsylvania, in Mercer County, watched Sherif as he used his handheld microscope to analyze a paddle from the Dahshur boat.

“Curious, are you?” asks Anderson.

 “Very,” answers 17-year-old Nevaeh Sturgin.

Sherif shows the girls the handheld digital microscope that helps him write a detailed analysis of every plank. This type of technology wasn’t available the last time the boat was preserved in the early 1990s. 

Anderson explains to them that the Dahshur boat came to Pittsburgh in 1901 thanks to the deep pockets of Andrew Carnegie.

 “How much did it cost?” Sturgin asks.

“Andrew Carnegie paid $476,” Anderson answers. Even with inflation—it would cost about $17,000 in today’s currency—it was a terrific bargain for an incredibly rare object.

“It’s amazing to see this firsthand,” says Rachael Harold, the group’s art teacher and art club adviser.

 Applying treatments and reassembling a priceless artifact can be a high-wire act, especially when you’re doing it in front of a real-life audience. Not everyone is comfortable doing that, Crawford says, but Sherif is both confident and enthusiastic. “It’s a very brave idea,” he says with a smile.

Sherif never lost the wonder of these antiquities and the people who created them. The kid on the rooftop, looking out at the Great Pyramid, is now ensuring that people in far-flung times and places get to share in that fascination with the ancient past. 

 “It’s fantastic,” he says. “The people in the past—their scientific skills were so clever. You can still learn from them today.”

The post Bringing Ancient Egypt Alive appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

“They’re so critical in many different parts of the food web and various environmental processes,” says Keegan, the collection manager for Lepidoptera in the Section of Invertebrate Zoology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. “So, it’s just like, how could I not be interested in this?”

Keegan doesn’t expect anyone—not even his peers in the invertebrate zoology section—to be as nerdy about moths as him. His passion for moths, and the immensely complicated family Noctuidae, in particular, is rare. That’s what makes him such a valuable asset to the museum’s moth and butterfly collection. He is someone willing to take on the Sisyphean task of organizing and managing millions of specimens so that researchers, including him, can access them in their work to unlock scientific questions, large and small.

The 36-year-old Keegan is among a younger generation of millennial-aged collection managers who have recently joined the Museum of Natural History, taking the torch from their longtime predecessors whose careers began before Keegan and his peers were born.

Only a fraction of the specimens that collection managers care for will be viewed by the public, but their work is essential to the larger research-driven mission of the museum. At its most essential, being a collection manager means organizing specimens, handling loan requests, and ensuring that the artifacts, birds, bugs, and beasts—many of them irreplaceable—are stored safely for future generations.

“Really, they’re the custodians of this historic, priceless set of objects,” says Chase Mendenhall, William and Ingrid Rea Assistant Curator of Bird Conservation.

But organizing specimens is not all that they do. Collection managers today confront extraordinarily complicated scientific and ethical questions. They grapple with the legacy of their collections and how the artifacts in their care were acquired, as well as conduct research using DNA analysis and tools not available to previous generations.

Though not required, advanced degrees held by collection managers are increasingly common. Some also produce research that advances their respective fields, with or without a PhD.

Three of the museum’s newest collection managers have their own unique stories to tell about what drew them to this vocation and how they approach managing historic collections in the 21st century.

Serina Brady: Creating Wholistic Specimens

Serina Brady’s love of all things avian began two decades ago when, as an animal-loving fifth grader growing up outside Buffalo, New York, she asked her parents for a parrot. She got chickens instead.

“I wanted a parrot growing up, but parrots are long-lived and my parents didn’t want to commit to a ‘forever toddler,’ so I couldn’t have a parrot in the house,” says Brady, collection manager for the Section of Birds. “So I compromised and I said, ‘Fine, we’ll get chickens.’”

But if she was disappointed, it didn’t last. The flock of chickens grew to 17 and would kindle a fascination with birds throughout her life and career. It remained throughout her years as an undergraduate biology student at Cornell, her time spent earning a master’s degree in biology and another in museum studies at the University of Mexico, and as she traveled the world doing field ecology research for various organizations, universities, and government agencies.

Even now, the sight of a common sparrow tickles her. “They’re just very charismatic,” she says of birds.

When she was hired in June 2022, Brady took over responsibility for the ninth largest bird collection in the United States—roughly 200,000 specimens of bird skins, skeletons, eggs, nests, and pickles.

And yet, she found, there was still so much data that was missing.

In the past decade, researchers have begun talking about the “extended specimen” and the notion of capturing all the data possible about a bird and its environment. That involves having fresh tissue samples, including internal organs, available for DNA analysis, photographs of the habitat it was collected from, photos of the specimen when it was first collected, and then linking all that data to the individual specimen. That data can then be shared with researchers around the world studying biodiversity changes, diseases, and the sustainable management of natural resources, among other things.

Most of the bird specimens in the museum’s vast archive are “skins,” emptied of their organs and preserved primarily for their external appearance. DNA science didn’t exist decades ago, so researchers didn’t know that preserving the innards would be beneficial to future study.

A long-term goal of Brady’s is to build a tissue library—with muscles, intestines, kidneys, etc.—so that researchers will have access to all of the data not just from feathers, bones, and feet, but of the entire bird. The collection continues to grow—specimens are donated every year by researchers, individual birders, and institutions who have found birds dead—though not nearly as many as in the heyday of the early 20th century, when the museum took in thousands of bird skins every year.

For now, however, she’s working to bring the collection into the 21st century by digitizing the printed records, upgrading its database, and modernizing some of its practices for storing specimens.

“It feels very much still stuck in the ’80s. It is a forgotten gem,” she says. “There’s still a lot of research that can be done in the collection, and our collection can be used in a lot of different ways.”

The task is daunting, she admits. Mendenhall is confident that it will thrive under her management.

“She knows the history and the overlapping value of each of these objects,” he says. “Every single specimen is treated with great care.”

And while Brady could be kept fully busy just handling loan requests and preparing new additions to the collection, she hopes to manage her section not only by bringing it up to modern standards, but also by aiding research that advances the field.

“Collection managers are always trying to think about questions that are going to be asked in the future, which is really hard to do,” she says. “So you just try to do a catch-all [of bird tissue collection] and, hopefully, one day in the future, it can be utilized.”

Kristina Gaugler: Ethics and Anthropology

Kristina Gaugler doesn’t remember wanting to be anything other than an archaeologist. “My dad’s a really big history buff,” recalls Gaugler. “He just always talked about what was going on in the world, archaeological stories that were coming out like, ‘Oh, they just discovered this.’”

Those stories sparked her imagination and, as Gaugler grew older, she came to appreciate how history could inform modern life. But she also came to understand the problems that accompany many historical narratives.

“As time went on, I realized, especially in the U.S., the education about Indigenous culture is not great,” she says. “It paints people as being stuck in the past without highlighting their accomplishments of today. You’re just not really getting the full picture.”

As the Museum of Natural History’s anthropology collection manager, Gaugler is now grappling with the complicated questions involved with more than 100,000 ethnographic and historical artifacts in the collection. For more than a year now, she’s been meticulously sorting through every storage shelf inside the Edward O’Neil Research Center, the museum’s large warehouse annex in East Liberty, learning as much as she can about the artifacts that hail from every continent except Antarctica.

Gaugler’s audit of the collection is a gargantuan task that took her predecessor, Deb Harding, years to complete.

“It took me two years to learn where everything was,” Harding recalls. “Some of the stories about [the artifacts] never got written down.”

Harding took over the collection manager role in 1985, the same year Gaugler was born, and spent the ensuing decades documenting, organizing, and managing every item and loan request. Since her retirement, she’s been imparting her knowledge of the collection to Gaugler during weekly sessions in which they go cabinet-by-cabinet, with Gaugler video-recording Harding providing a kind of oral history of each object.

Meanwhile, Gaugler has ongoing projects to repackage artifacts with acid-free materials and digitize the collection’s records.

Looming large over the tedious tasks are broader ethical questions of how to engage with the descendant communities from which the artifacts came.

One recent opportunity involved the Apsáalooke (pronounced ap-SAH-loo-gah) collection. Members of the Apsáalooke Nation recently visited as part of a traveling exhibition, Apsáalooke Women and Warriors, which was curated by an Apsáalooke scholar in partnership with Chicago’s Field Museum. Carnegie Museum of Natural History has around 300 Apsáalooke artifacts, most of which were collected in the early 20th century during one of the most “intense times of colonialization,” Gaugler says. The collection came from nine donors and many artifacts were legally purchased from Apsáalooke artists. But that doesn’t mean they were ethically acquired, she notes.

“Why were these people selling these objects?” Gaugler questions. “Because they were being displaced? Maybe they needed to sell things that they wouldn’t normally have because they were facing poverty. There are a lot of dimensions to the ethics of the collection beyond ‘Was this item stolen?’”

The answers to those questions can determine an artifact’s future, whether it continues to remain with the museum, and how it is stored and presented during exhibitions.

The artifacts in the museum’s collection weren’t part of Apsáalooke Women and Warriors. But when members of the Apsáalooke Nation arrived in Pittsburgh to consult on the exhibition, they visited the annex to inspect some of the objects made by members of their community. They offered some important feedback that compelled Gaugler to rearrange how the artifacts were stored. The artifacts had been organized numerically by accession number, but that resulted in children’s toys being stored next to implements of warfare, like clubs.

“So one of the things they were saying is, ‘We would prefer it if you didn’t store these objects next to these objects,’ ” Gaugler recalls. “That has more to do with the context of the object, as opposed to storing them numerically.”

Gaugler says one of her goals is to store objects in ways that follow Indigenous protocols, including using the correct tribal names rather than whatever term was assigned to them by their colonizers.

“I want to store things in ways that make the descendants feel good about them being here and in a way that is respectful,” she says.

Harding says Gaugler’s academic training and sensitivity to ethical issues will be of immense value as she manages the collection.

“I think she’s going to do very well with this,” Harding says. “I have learned that what I was taught when I was younger was not correct. Kristina just knows it. I try to treat every person as an individual with respect, but there are nuances that I was not aware of.”

Kevin Keegan: Untangling ‘A Taxonomic Nightmare’

Before he even arrived at Carnegie Museums in 2021, Kevin Keegan had a reputation for tackling impossible projects.

Keegan’s doctoral thesis involved untangling the evolutionary history of the third largest family of moths—Noctuidae, or owlet moths—which includes around 12,000 described species. They are the “mothiest of moths”—the ones you see fluttering around porch lights and camping lanterns—and a “taxonomic nightmare,” says Ainsley Seago, the Museum of Natural History’s associate curator of invertebrate zoology. For hundreds of years, the immense diversity of the family has led even the best noctuid taxonomists to misclassify species. Only recently have researchers been able to cut through the confusion, thanks largely to the incorporation of DNA data into their research.

To some, it might sound tedious. Not to Keegan, who says he “could organize stuff forever.”

“One of the really exciting things is coming across a moth and not knowing what it is,” he says. “I mean, it’s like Christmas morning every time I get a new species into our data set and see where it belongs.”

Originally, Keegan wanted to focus on a particular type of owlet moth. But like pulling a thread on a sweater only to watch it unravel, he realized he couldn’t answer his original question without addressing the larger taxonomic problem.

“Instead of screaming and running away, which is what most of us in that position would do, he’s actually embraced it,” Seago says. “It’s really rare to get a freshly minted taxonomist that works on Noctuidae. So he is a precious treasure to us.”

The invertebrate zoology collection contains an estimated 16 million specimens, around half of which are moths and butterflies. It’s an impressive treasure trove, used by researchers the world over to study taxonomic questions, terrestrial food webs, the impact of changing habitats, and other environmental issues. Much of the moth collection was built by the late John Rawlins, Seago’s predecessor who she says had a philosophy to collect first and curate later. Rawlins would go into rare and disappearing habitats in order to find imperiled species that couldn’t be found anywhere else in the world. But, unfortunately, he retired before he got around to organizing them. Rawlins passed away the day after Christmas in 2021 at age 71.

And so, Keegan is now working his way through the collection to do that work. Sometimes identifying a specimen is as easy as going to online lepidopterology forums to look for matches. Other times, it might require some DNA analysis.

Keegan also enjoys getting outside of the lab. In March, he joined a team of researchers for a three-week moth-collecting expedition to Uganda.

Not all collection managers are PhD-level researchers, Seago notes, and she feels fortunate to have Keegan overseeing perhaps the most complex and sprawling collection in the museum.

“He’s going above and beyond to continue to do research. He’s not required to do it, but I’m so grateful that he does,” she says. “And the stuff that he learns is going to help improve the management of our collection.” 

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Some of the museum’s most iconic works of modern and contemporary art—Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure and Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man I—were acquired by Washburn, who served as director from 1950 to 1962. During that time, he also curated five Carnegie Internationals, and is credited with revitalizing the International as a major worldwide art exhibition.

“The letters back and forth between Washburn and the museum staff were written every few days at the most, and sometimes every day,” says Tufts-Brown. “In them, there is much talk of the little black books—updating them, sending whole books or just pages to Washburn at whatever hotel in whatever country he was staying in.”

His experiences of scouring studios and workshops and galleries across Europe, finding artists to exhibit in Pittsburgh, had been well documented in letters, memos, ship manifests, and other documents that reside in the museum’s archives. But the little black books appeared to have fallen into a black hole. Tufts-Brown couldn’t find any evidence of them.

It was a mystery.

Then one morning in early February 2017, Ingrid Schaffner, curator of the Carnegie International, 57th Edition, 2018, got a phone call from Paris. The woman on the line said her name was Frances Washburn. 

Schaffner described what happened next to an audience at the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries in 2018.

“‘My father used to be the director at your art museum,’” Schaffner recalled her saying. “‘I live in a tiny little apartment in Paris and I’m trying to get rid of some things, and I have these little black books.’”

“She literally said, ‘these little black books’—and I’m like: ‘Hold the line!’” Schaffner recounted how she ran down the hall, got Tufts-Brown, and both listened as the woman in Paris told them the museum was “welcome to have them.”

There were a total of 23 binders in all, each roughly about the size of a small paperback. (Carnegie Museums later donated nine of them to the Asia Society in New York because they pertained to Washburn’s work there after he left.)

“If we lost our phone we’d be terribly upset; if he lost this, he’d be really upset.”

–Elizabeth Tufts-Brown, Associate Registrar At Carnegie Museum Of Art

As luck would have it, Akemi May, the museum’s associate curator of works on paper, was scheduled to fly to Paris the following week. Carnegie Museum of Art was lending one of its Pissarros to an exhibition at the Musée Marmottan Monet, and May was delivering the painting and overseeing its installation. So she agreed to retrieve the black books.

Once the Pissarro was in place, May took the Metro from the 16th district across town to the Place de la République. Frances Washburn’s apartment was on the fourth floor. May took the stairs.

A tall, thin woman with short gray hair and glasses answered the door.

“She was very lovely,” May recalls. They chatted for more than an hour.

The black books were full of typewritten pages detailing all the resources Washburn would require in each country: hotels, restaurants, galleries, shipping agents, lists of artists.

“We talked about her father and his time at the museum,” says May. “She had kept these things in deep storage. She hadn’t looked at them in quite some time. She realized she didn’t have much use for them … but since they related to his work for this institution, she thought we should have them.”

Tufts-Brown is still studying the books, which are a combination of travel planner and Rolodex. They are the backbone of Washburn’s European trips: where he stayed and ate, who he likely met with, all annotated in Washburn’s scrawl. Some pages have his pencil sketches of artworks he saw. They are analogous to a modern traveler’s smartphone. Tufts-Brown says, “If we lost our phone we’d be terribly upset; if he lost this, he’d be really upset.”

Some include lists of artists or artworks—with letter grades next to them. One piece in the museum’s current collection (Tufts-Brown was hesitant to name the work) received a D. “It’s very harsh,” she says. 

While the books—at first glance—can seem bare-bones, they can also collate with other archive documents in fascinating ways.

The success of Washburn’s Internationals wasn’t simply the quality of the artwork he solicited; it was also making sure there were buyers. “At that time, the works were sold right out of the show, and we had to keep track of the buyers and where to ship everything after the show closed,” notes Tufts-Brown. Washburn was also cultivating potential patrons on his trips to Europe.

As Tufts-Brown works her way through the details in the books, she says they offer other pieces to fit into the puzzle of connections between curator, artists, and patrons—of how Washburn worked, how the Internationals came together, and why the current collection came to be what it is.  

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The Cloud Factory
In reality, the Bellefield Boiler Plant is not in the business of producing clouds. Its purpose is much more practical. The three-story, Oakland-based facility was built in 1907 to power and heat the expanding Carnegie Museums and Library. Originally fueled by coal, the plant now runs exclusively on natural gas and is owned and operated by a consortium of eight neighboring Oakland institutions, including universities, hospitals, and Carnegie Museums. Nestled in the valley below Schenley Park Bridge, the building itself is easy to miss. However, the white, fluffy clouds billowing from its tall smokestack—the result of hot water vapor coming into contact with colder air—captured the imagination of then-University of Pittsburgh student Michael Chabon. In his 1988 book The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author dubbed the plant the Cloud Factory. And, so it remains in the hearts and minds of local residents.

Maria
In Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent German film Metropolis, an industrial magnate bestows upon a tin-plated “man-machine” the face of a real woman named Maria who had stolen the affections of most of the workers in the fictional, turn-of-the-19th-century city. In this futuristic deliberation on the relationship between labor and management, Lang’s Maria looks like a human but lacks any sense of humanity. And, for much of the 20th century, this depiction of robots, however lifelike the rendering, was the norm. In 2009, Carnegie Science Center’s roboworld provided the first physical home for the world’s most famous imagined robots—Carnegie Mellon’s star-studded Robot Hall of Fame. The replicas on display are a tribute to the fictional machines that helped spark the visions of those who created the real robots that followed. Real or not, Maria remains one of the most powerful female images in film history.

Anne in White and Her Blue Silk Sash
Best known for his depictions of the bustling urban landscape and boxing matches in the backrooms of bars in New York City, realist painter George Bellows also made masterful likenesses of his wife, Emma Story, and their two daughters, Anne and Jean. In February 2020, Anne’s daughter, Marianne S. Kearney, donated to Carnegie Museum of Art the blue silk sash her mother wore in the 1920 portrait Anne in White, one of six works by Bellows in the museum’s collection. For the last 14 years of her life, Anne lived in Upper St. Clair and would visit the museum to spend time with the portrait, which was her favorite. “In later years, when she showed me and talked about the blue silk sash, it was easy to see that the sight of it took her to a happy time and place when she had the undivided attention of the father she adored,” wrote Kearney in a letter to the museum. “He gave back to her a portrait of a lanky 9-year-old made beautiful with skilled hands and the eyes of love.” Bellows, who was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, was regarded by many as one of America’s greatest artists when he died at age 42 from a ruptured appendix.

George W. Bellows, Anne in White, 1920, Carnegie Museum of Art, Patrons Art Fund

Brillo Boxes
In 1964, when Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes debuted at the Stable Gallery in New York, collectors and critics were perplexed, and maybe a little annoyed. “Is this art?” they asked. Warhol’s now- famous installation featured 80 plywood boxes, identical in size and shape to the shipping cartons sold in grocery stores, which he and two studio assistants painted and silkscreened with spot-on consumer product logos: Campbell’s Tomato Juice, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Brillo Soap Pads, Mott’s Apple Juice, Del Monte Peach Halves, and Heinz Tomato Ketchup. They were virtually indistinguishable from their real-world cardboard counterparts and stacked as if crammed into a grocery store warehouse. The artist envisioned people buying them and walking down Madison Avenue with the boxes under their arms, but they didn’t sell well. The joke, of course, is on the critics: In 2010, a signed Brillo Box sold for $3 million.

Andy Warhol, Brillo Soap Pads Box, 1964, The Andy Warhol Museum; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Pennsylvania Land Snail
Pennsylvania land snails, which include more than 100 species of both shelled animals and slugs, are found almost everywhere, yet the public knows little about them. They’re important ecologically, providing food for all sorts of mammals, birds, and insects, while they themselves do the critical work of munching on decomposing vegetation. George H. Clapp, a founder of what is now Alcoa and a trustee of Carnegie Museums for more than half a century, collected many things, and shells were a true passion. Shortly after the museum opened, Clapp donated his personal collection of some 300,000 mollusks, with a focus on land snails (including these Mesodon thyroidus from Pennsylvania)—mightily contributing to the foundation of the museum’s collection that now includes nearly 2 million specimens and boasts more land and freshwater snails from the Keystone State than all other U.S. museums combined. Those numbers continue to grow, as curator Tim Pearce and a small band of volunteers work on a definitive census of Pennsylvania’s land snails.

Astronaut Mike Fincke’s T-shirt
Astronaut and Emsworth native Mike Fincke has logged nearly 382 days in orbit during his three space missions. During those flights, he conducted important scientific experiments, performed critical spacewalks, and enthusiastically waved The Terrible Towel in support of his hometown team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. That towel, along with the “I Love Carnegie Science Center, Pittsburgh, Pa.” T-shirt he wore while aboard the International Space Station, has since landed in Carnegie Science Center’s SpacePlace exhibit, which also features the hometown hero’s flight suits, gloves, watches, flip charts, and mission books. As a kid growing up not far from the city, Fincke spent endless hours in the Buhl Planetarium learning—and dreaming—about the stars. Now, he’s hoping to inspire the next generation of explorers to follow their own dreams.

The Neapolitan presepio
It’s an elaborate Italian street scene seemingly captured mid-breath. Carnegie Museum of Art’s Neapolitan presepio shows merchants selling their wares, a marching band in full stride, animals mingling among the residents, both human and heavenly—some seemingly oblivious to the newborn Christ child and his parents. Popularized in the 18th century, presepi were often commissioned by wealthy Neapolitans to celebrate one of the most important holidays in the Catholic faith, situated within present-day Naples. The craftmanship of the day remains impressive some 300 years later, from the textiles used—including silk damask and denim twill—to the tiny props of cheeses molded from clay and fruits and vegetables sculpted in wax. For the past 65 years and counting, the day after Thanksgiving marks the unveiling of this annual exhibition. Following tradition, every year curators rearrange the elements to create the panorama anew. At more than 200 pieces, it’s one of the most complete sets in the world.

The Red Couch
Once a fixture at Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory, the now-legendary red velvet couch first made famous in one of the artist’s underground films was trash turned treasure. It was discovered in early 1964, abandoned on the curb in front of the YMCA located across the street from Warhol’s original studio on East 47th Street. No doubt it was destined to become rubbish until Warhol collaborator Billy Name, the man who literally put the silver in the Silver Factory, recognized its charm and, utilizing its rollers, simply pushed it into an elevator to get it into Warhol’s fourth-floor space. The couch soon became the preferred place for overnight guests to crash, and a favorite focal point for many of Name’s well-known photographs. A few years later, the couch was lost in much the same way it was found: The Silver Factory was on the move to a new location in Union Square, and the red icon was left unattended on the curb, never to be seen again. Nowadays, visitors to The Andy Warhol Museum are greeted by a faithful reproduction in the museum’s entrance space. The couch continues to beckon the famous (Jay-Z is pictured above) and those yet to claim their 15 minutes to take a seat—and a picture.

The Observatory
On select clear nights, visitors to the Henry Buhl, Jr. Planetarium & Observatory at Carnegie Science Center can go to the fifth-floor observation deck, peer through a Meade LX200 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, and get an up-close view of amazing celestial wonders. If the stars and planets are aligned, they may even catch a glimpse of Saturn’s rings or the surface of the moon. During the SkyWatch program, amateur stargazers start out the evening with a virtual view of the night sky inside the newly updated Buhl Planetarium. Then they head up to the observatory to try and spy the real deal in the night sky. Science Center staff are on hand to chat about what they see through the high-powered 16-inch telescope that’s provided, or guests are invited to bring their own telescope for an unforgettable night beneath the stars.

Zimaseka “ZIM” Salusalu, Gugulethu, Cape Town
A self-described visual activist, Zanele Muholi of South Africa has dedicated their career to promoting awareness of their country’s LGBTQI+ communities. Although South Africa legalized same-sex marriage in 2006, discrimination and violence against LGBTQI+ individuals remains widespread. Muholi’s photographs and the accompanying testimonies form a growing record of people risking their lives by living authentically in the face of oppression and persecution. “This is not art; this is life,” says Muholi. “Each and every photograph is someone’s biography.” Portraits from their series Faces and Phases, now numbering more than 300, appeared in the 2013 Carnegie International, including this one, which is part of Carnegie Museum of Art’s collection.

Zanele Muholi, Zimaseka “Zim” Salusalu, Gugulethu, Cape Town, 2011, Carnegie Museum of Art; A. W. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund © Zanele Muholi, Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery

Van de Graaff Generator
Just about every week during the school year, educators for Carnegie Science Center’s Science on the Road program perform science shows for a different elementary and middle school—these days virtually. In a typical year, the program reaches some 170,000 students. In one popular hair-raising lesson, educators pull out all the stops with a machine that makes the same kind of electricity that lightning makes: static electricity. An educator waves a silver wand toward a sputtering Van de Graaff generator, causing a white electric bolt to leap from it with a loud crack, eliciting “oooohs” from the audience. Then, to illustrate how lightning travels, students form a small line—the chain of pain—and link pinky fingers. The staff educator stands on a milk crate so that she isn’t grounded, and as she rests her hand on the generator, her hair stands on end. Laughter erupts. When she touches elbows with the first student in the line, a spark flies, and soon every child in the line pulls away from the surprise of the shock.

Pangolin
Despite their lizard-like appearance, pangolins are mammals that are often referred to as scaly anteaters. They have no teeth and lap up social insects like termites and ants with their sticky tongues—tongues that can grow as long as their bodies minus their tails. Pangolins can be covered in up to 1,000 protective scales—which, like human fingernails, are made of keratin—and their natural defense is to roll up into a ball. But there’s one predator they can’t seem to escape: humans. The weirdly wonderful pangolin is the most illegally trafficked animal in the world—mainly in Asia and in growing numbers in Africa—hunted by poachers for their meat and scales, which are used in traditional medicine practices. This taxidermy pangolin, most recently on view in Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s landmark exhibition We Are Nature: Living in the Anthropocene, is one of 27 in the museum’s care.

Warhol’s Dental Molds
Andy Warhol was a famous pack rat, stashing away direct-mail flyers, greasy wigs, and an assortment of other items he came across in his daily life. But even Warhol experts weren’t sure what to make of all the dental models he kept in his collection of random stuff. All they know is that one summer day in 1982, the artist and his assistant Jay Shriver walked into Columbia Dentoform Corp. on East 21st Street in New York City. They handed over $484 and walked out with an odd assortment of dental forms. Matt Wrbican, the late chief archivist for The Andy Warhol Museum and Warhol scholar extraordinaire, put the 144 objects on display at the North Shore museum in 2004. He said that it was a mystery why Warhol collected the models, some with teeth missing, others with removable teeth or no teeth at all. Wrbican wasn’t sure why Warhol was so fascinated with the curiosities coated in a soft aluminum-pewter sheen, but he speculated that they were related to the artist’s fascination with human anatomy, and his own physical imperfections.

Dental Models, ca. 1982, The Andy Warhol Museum; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Baculites fossil with L.W. Stilwell label.

The Bayet Collection
Having gained infamy as the place where Wild Bill Hickok met his maker thanks to a gunshot in the back, the Deadwood, Dakota Territory, was not a place for the faint of heart. And yet, that’s where a frail, studious-looking Lucien Stilwell decided to settle in 1879. Looking to outrun a yellow fever outbreak, Stilwell headed west. By 1890, he had established his own thriving business selling fossils and minerals unearthed in the Badlands to world-class collectors like Baron de Bayet of Belgium. By the turn of the century, Bayet had amassed an assortment of 130,000 invertebrate fossils from more than 50 fossil collectors, 15 European countries, and 10 states—a collection sought by museums throughout Europe, Great Britain, and the United States. William Jacob Holland, Carnegie Museum’s second director, told Andrew Carnegie that the acquisition “will make our museum one of the Gibraltar’s of paleontological science in the world,” and it was indeed an early gem of the museum, with specimens exhibited in the dinosaur halls of 1907 and today. In a multiyear project, the museum’s section of invertebrate paleontology is now taking a fresh look at this somewhat hidden treasure.

Holy Cats by Andy Warhol’s Mother
Having artistic talent herself, Julia Warhola recognized her youngest son Andy’s abilities from a young age and encouraged him to pursue his passion, including sending him to Saturday art classes at Carnegie Museum of Art. When Warhol moved to New York City in 1949, it wasn’t long before Julia joined him, and he began enlisting her to add her unique handwriting to hundreds of his drawings, advertisements, and book illustrations. Julia also loved to draw, with cats and angels as her favorite subjects. In 1956, the pair made a book about their cats, 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, featuring illustrations combining Andy’s blotted line drawings and calligraphy by Julia. When she left out the “d” in the book’s title, her son loved it and opted to keep it anyway. Four years later, Julia wrote and illustrated Holy Cats by Andy Warhol’s Mother.

Julia Warhola, Holy Cats by Andy Warhol’s Mother, 1960, The Andy Warhol Museum; Gift of Angela Heizmann Gilchrist in Memory of Catharine Stewart Dives

The Art Lending Collection
It was 1991 when artist Alice Patrick’s mural Women Do Get Weary, but They Don’t Give Up first loomed large on the National Council of Negro Women’s Los Angeles building. Some 20 years later, a smaller yet still powerful framed print of the work hung in the Braddock municipal building. Thanks to the Art Lending Collection, Women Do Get Weary is one of more than 160 artworks available to anyone with an Allegheny County library card to borrow, display, and enjoy for up to three weeks at a time—changing the dynamic of who gets to interpret and experience art. Now funded by the Heinz Endowments, the collection was the brainchild of Braddock-based artists Dana Bishop-Root, Leslie Stem, and Ruthie Stringer. Their idea took root as their contribution to the 2013 Carnegie International, with all exhibition artists contributing original artwork for the collection. Since then, it has grown to include donations from private collections, original works from local artists such as fellow Braddock resident Jim Kidd, people imprisoned at the South Fayette Correctional Institution, and framed posters of classics.

Saturday Art Classes
They’ve survived the Great Depression, a world war, the rise and fall of art movements from Cubism to Pop, and now a pandemic. For more than 90 years, Carnegie Museum of Art has continued the tradition of working with Pittsburgh’s young artists to help them hone technical skills and foster imagination at Saturday art classes. While the name of the classes changed through the decades—Tam O’Shanter, Palette, and, currently, The Art Connection—the artistic discovery they’ve awakened in generations of students, often within the same family, has remained the same. For a small number of students—Annie Dillard, Andy Warhol, Jeff Goldblum, and Mel Bochner, to name a few—the program was an early step on the way to international renown. For many others, the classes have been a magical family tradition.

Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings
The colorful geometric drawings that grace the staircase leading up to Carnegie Museum of Art’s Scaife Galleries are hand-painted. Just not by the artist himself. A pioneer of conceptual art, Sol LeWitt took a decidedly hands-off approach when it came to putting brush to canvas (or wall). He created art by developing an idea and producing written instructions for other artists, many trained in his studio, to carry out. He believed the input of others was part of the process, and even children have contributed to some of his public works in schools. The museum’s pair of side-by-side wall drawings were originally painted in the mid-1980s—LeWitt designed the second work once he saw the location of the first. Twenty-some years later, their colors faded by the natural light streaming in through the large window to the Sculpture Court, the murals were repainted by museum staff joined by local artists. The project took on new significance when the 78-year-old Le Witt died shortly after the repainting was completed in 2007.

Carnegie Science Award
For 25 years, Carnegie Science Center has recognized the region’s shining stars in science and technology—ingenious students, inspiring educators, and industry-changing entrepreneurs—at its annual Carnegie Science Awards. A panel of past awardees and industry leaders selects winners whose contributions have led to significant economic or societal advancements in western Pennsylvania. With the support of committed sponsors, a new addition for the upcoming 2021 awards is the recognition of champions in sustainability and science, technology, engineering, and math equity.

Andy Warhol’s Movie Star Scrapbook
Like a lot of kids growing up during the Great Depression and World War II, Warhola brothers Paul, John, and Andy would find refuge in the three movie theaters near their South Oakland home. Paying a nickel or two, they knew that as soon as the lights dimmed the screen would be illuminated with the celebrities of the day—Joan Crawford, Henry Fonda, Jane Russell, and Mae West among them. Andy was particularly star-struck. He convinced Paul to write letters requesting signed photos, and Andy would meticulously add every new arrival to his rapidly expanding scrapbook. The album filled to more than 30 pages, but the 1941 hand-colored photo signed, with typo included, “To Andrew Worhola, from Shirley Temple” took center stage, until at some point it was removed and later found in Time Capsule 61.

Photograph album (Andy Warhola’s childhood movie star scrapbook), ca. 1938-1941 © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc

An Early Bloomer
On March 14, 1957, botanist Leroy Henry walked through the woodlands around Powdermill Nature Reserve, just one year after it was established as Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s field station, and collected coltsfoot, known scientifically as Tussilago farfara. To the untrained eye, the plant with yellow flowers might look like a common dandelion. But Henry, a former longtime curator of botany, knew what he had. Native to Europe, North Africa, and Asia, its flowers bloom in early spring, followed by leaves that look like—you guessed it—a colt’s foot, and last well into the summer, making it a good species for research. In fact, the coltsfoot is among the first plants to be used in a pioneering study published in 2006 using herbarium specimens. In Southern Quebec, they found that coltsfoot bloomed 15–31 days earlier in recent decades, compared to pre-1950. Earlier blooming was strongly linked to climate change. It’s one of hundreds of plants highlighted in Collected on This Day, a weekly blog by Curator of Botany Mason Heberling that’s funded by the National Science Foundation and features the important scientific and cultural stories of the specimens in the museum’s herbarium, making clear why natural history collections help us understand the world around us.

Binary Flip Clock
Visitors eating lunch in Carnegie Science Center’s RiverView Café may look up at what appears to be a modern wall sculpture made up of many plates. But wait. Those square plates are moving, flipping one after another, perfectly in sync. The plates, which are keeping the exact time, are the mechanical pieces of the largest binary flip clock ever created. Doug DeHaven, a mechatronics engineer at the North Shore museum, wanted to make a timepiece that was both visually interesting and functional for a new wall erected as part of the addition of the PPG Science Pavilion. But he didn’t want a clattering clock with noise that would disturb staff. So he dreamed up a mechanical creation consisting of three rows representing seconds, minutes, and hours—and, of course, a splash of artistry. Each column includes graphics that represent different ways humans count—from military time to Roman numerals, American Sign Language, and the programming language Scratch.

Mallard Duck Decoys
North American hunters have used decoys for centuries. Indigenous Americans fashioned them from reeds, clay, and stuffed skins to lure migrating birds within range of their arrows and spears. European settlers observed the effectiveness of what were often quite rudimentary decoy rigs, such as duck skins wrapped over floating logs arranged to look like a wading bird and adopted the practice. By the early 19th century, both commercial and sport hunters were using carved wooden decoys. However, some hunters preferred real skin decoys known as “stuffers,” like these made by Whistler Brothers. They were popular during the Depression and donated to Carnegie Museum of Natural History in 1980 by benefactor Edward O’Neil. Made from farm-raised mallards, the skins were wrapped around cork bodies, heavily varnished so that they float, and lead weights were added to the undersides to allow them to float upright. “I always thought this was a cool form of taxidermy begun by Indigenous people and still used to some extent today,” says Stephen Rogers, collection manager for the section of birds and a taxidermist.

Dippy’s Scarves
Diplodocus carnegii, the long-necked star of Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s world-famous collection of Jurassic giants, got its own public sculpture in 1999, celebrating a century since he was unearthed at Sheep Creek, Wyoming. That winter, Janice Heagy, former Carnegie Museums staff member, handmade Dippy a Jurassic-sized red and green scarf to mark the holiday season, kicking off a now-beloved Pittsburgh tradition—dapper Dippy dressed for the occasion: Steelers playoff football, Pitt move-in day, and LGBTQ+ Pride Month, to name a few. Dippy’s accessories have grown in number over the years to the point that he now has his own closet at the museum stuffed with at least 15 oversized scarves, lovingly made by both staff and volunteers. There’s also a top hat and bow tie, a mortarboard, and, most recently, several face masks. And every St. Patrick’s Day, Dippy celebrates the wearing of the green with his longest and most popular adornment measuring 18 feet long!

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