In many ways, it looks like your typical prom story: mulling over an outfit to fit the theme, messing up makeup right before the dance begins, equal parts anxiety and excitement over how the night goes.

But when 16-year-old Ava is shopping for her prom dress, it carries a special weight. It’ll be her first time wearing a dress since coming out as transgender.

Ava’s story, and those of other attendees at The Andy Warhol Museum’s LGBTQ+ Youth Prom last year, are the subject of (pride/prom), a feature-length documentary from the museum’s boutique production studio, The Warhol Creative.

The 2024 prom was the event’s 10th anniversary, and the theme—Welcome to the Queernival—gave the team at The Warhol Creative an opportunity to explore the emotional depth of the queer experience: joy, hardship, and all the gray areas in between.

Ava accidentally came out to her mother, Chrissy, in a message intended for someone else. When Chrissy found out, she hugged Ava.

But the film doesn’t shy away from the messy parts: In a tearful interview, Chrissy admits she struggles to use she/her pronouns for Ava, often settling on they/them or occasionally misgendering her.

“I want to be that safe place for my kid,” she says in the film. “As a parent, that’s what you should be. Your kids should always be able to come to you as who they are, and you just accept them.”

News clips about anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and sentiments make up a small part of the film’s narrative, but the challenges the young people face is only one part of their experience.

New York-based director Sam McCoy let the subjects of the film guide it, and the documentary is imbued with giddy excitement. In one scene, Vlad, a 16-year-old transgender boy, draws on a villainous curled mustache for the prom. In another, Chrissy refuses to stop saying “body-ody-ody” when discussing the fit of dresses on her daughter, much to Ava’s dismay.

“It was all about capturing them and their essence and them as human beings,” says McCoy, who uses they/them pronouns. “It really was documentation and making sure that they were being captured authentically.”

During a private screening in March, the audience was rarely quiet, sharing laughs as Ava and her mom bantered while dress shopping and ooo’ing and aww’ing as the kids tried on outfits. When the credits rolled, a chorus of cheers and whistles carried through the theater.

“It was all about capturing them and their essence and them as human beings. It really was documentation and making sure that they were being captured authentically.”

Sam McCoy, Director of (pride/prom)

The team at The Warhol Creative turned the film around in just a few months after the prom in June 2024, bolstered by a capable team of The Warhol Academy filmmaking and postproduction fellows in The Pop District office next door to the museum.

A sizzle—or short promotional video—for (pride/prom) produced in 2023 even attracted the eye of one of Pittsburgh’s most established queer figures, actor and singer Billy Porter, and The Brutalist producer D.J. Gugenheim, both of whom became executive producers.

The project gave fellows—and former fellows turned Warhol Creative hires like Aaliyah Lewis and Ezra Jones—their first film credits. From the sizzle  to the final cut, upwards of 30 fellows worked on the film.

“For most of us, this is our first feature-length film credit,” says Jones, assistant editor and junior producer. “We all have IMDb pages now, whether it be editor or producer—that’s an awesome thing to have that you can show people and say, ‘Hey, yeah, this is what I’ve done.’”

There will be a public screening of the film at The Warhol on June 20. And while there are no plans for a film at this year’s prom, that won’t stop Vlad from planning an elaborate outfit for the cryptid-themed dance.

At a panel after the screening, Vlad says the film has a simple but important message: “community, community, community.”

“As we have this communication with each other and this love for each other and this support for each other,” Vlad says, “we will continue to survive, and not only to survive, but to flourish.”

The post Lights, camera, production appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Who:
Ray and Joneen Betler 

What They support: 
Carnegie Science Center

Why it matters:
“I see the opportunity to expose young people much, much earlier than I had the opportunity to be exposed to science and technology and engineering.”  –Ray Betler

 A career in engineering seemed to always be right there for Ray Betler; he just needed to find a bridge to it.

His stepfather encouraged him to enter the field, which was thriving in the 1960s and ‘70s at  Pittsburgh companies like Westinghouse Electric. But, as a kid from a working-class community in South Park, there were precious few opportunities  to gain a toehold.

“I never had a chance to do internships and get exposure,” he says. “That’s why I have this affinity and commitment to young people and science and engineering.”

Ray is now retired after a remarkable career at Westinghouse, where he became the company’s youngest-ever president and chief executive officer. He and his wife, Joneen—a couple since they were teenagers—want to help young scientists and engineers forge their own path through their support of Carnegie Science Center. They note that the Science Center can be a bridge to careers in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—and be a place where kids of all income levels and backgrounds can get inspired.

“To me, the Science Center is like the touchstone,” Ray says. “It’s the one asset that we have in Pittsburgh that everybody regionally can relate to in terms of science and technology.”

Ray and Joneen have been donors to the Science Center since the early 1990s, and Ray has been a Science Center board member for nearly as long. At 32, he was promoted to VP of Engineering at Westinghouse Transportation—the youngest in the company’s 120-year history—before ascending to become its youngest president and CEO when he was just 38.

As a child, Ray rarely visited museums or even Buhl Planetarium, now part of the Science Center. Inspiration had to come from elsewhere. Fortunately, a high school physics teacher saw promise in Ray, and connected him and a few other students with a Saturday enrichment program for promising young engineers at Westinghouse Research Center.

Years later, and after earning degrees in engineering and business from Carnegie Mellon University, he returned to Westinghouse where he not only ascended through the ranks at a historic pace, but also looked to cultivate a new generation of talent. He created a robust internship program, which brought in hundreds of budding engineers to learn and work each summer.

If Westinghouse is the place where young adults can start their STEM careers, the Science Center provides the initial spark of interest, Ray says. He has sought to bridge the two institutions through employee incentives and other programs. Westinghouse gave out museum memberships to employees as prizes, held its annual holiday party at the Science Center, and sponsored the museum’s annual Science Center awards.

“I made sure there was a close relationship with the company, and we were constantly trying to engage with the high schools and colleges to promote STEM-related activities,” he notes.

But the Betlers’ interest in supporting the Science Center isn’t just about inspiring local kids to go into STEM fields. They’ve spent many afternoons at the Science Center with their three sons—now all grown—and have since accompanied their 10 grandchildren there on visits. Even though four of their grandchildren live in Connecticut, they make sure to visit the Science Center on every trip to Pittsburgh.

“The youngest grandkids don’t live here, so they go twice every time they come,” Joneen says. “We also get them back to Pittsburgh to do the summer camps. It’s really nice.”

The Betlers are especially excited about ongoing transformation at the Science Center, including the recent relocation and expansion of the BNY Fab Lab on the third floor of the main building.

“I see the opportunity to expose young people much, much earlier than I had the opportunity to be exposed to science and technology and engineering,” Ray says, “and an opportunity to support families in this area that maybe didn’t have the opportunity to see and get exposed to the Science Center. That’s really what interested me and has been extremely gratifying.”

Learn more about how you can support your museums!

The post Building a Bridge to an Engineering Career  appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

In the first gallery, a pair of boys leaned toward a touch screen that demonstrates how animators made Elastagirl’s arm stretch in The Incredibles. A few teens snapped gray magnetic shapes onto a base to create a robot. Others took turns posing for pictures in front of life-size statues of Mike and Sulley, who were decked out for Monsters University.

The 81 participants, born approximately between Cars (2006) and Cars 2 (2011), are part of the Carnegie Museums Teen Membership program. Since it launched in November 2021, more than 19,000 teenagers have enrolled to receive free membership to all four Carnegie Museums.

Teen Membership is just one category of the Community Access Memberships, which also include a Family Access Membership available to low-income individuals and families and an Organizational Outreach Membership that provides complimentary admission to community-based nonprofit organizations such as those that work with underserved youth, unhoused individuals, veterans, and seniors receiving public assistance.

“Museums are transformative places, and we want more people of all ages to be able to connect with each other and the world around them at the four Carnegie Museums,” says Steven Knapp, president and CEO of Carnegie Museums.

Community Access Memberships grew out of museum leadership’s vision to open up access to the museums following its 125th anniversary in 2020. The Community Access initiative that was announced in October 2021 also aimed to expand lifelong learning experiences through more teen-centric offerings and programming targeted to seniors. Donor support in honor of Carnegie Museums’ 125th anniversary would make the launch of the program possible.

“Museums are transformative places, and we want more people of all ages to be able to connect with each other and the world around them at the four Carnegie Museums.”

–Steven Knapp, president and CEO of Carnegie Museums

“A milestone anniversary is a time to remember how far we have come, but it’s also a time to dream how far we can go,” Knapp said in announcing the program. “So we are using the occasion of our 125th to look beyond the doors of our museums and imagine new ways of opening them to the communities we serve.”

Shannon Jeffcoat, senior director of membership and annual giving, has been the driving force behind launching and growing the initiative.

During the first year, Jeffcoat and her colleagues expected that maybe 1,000 teenagers would enroll. Within two months, they had more than double that. Families unable to afford the cost of membership also jumped at the chance to become part of Carnegie Museums’ member community. Social-service groups were always encouraged to bring clients to the museums, but the new complimentary membership provides free admission to as many as 11 people per visit, giving groups more flexibility to come as often as they like. Currently, 3,800 families and individuals who qualify for public assistance have signed up to participate, as well as 120 regional social-services organizations.

“One of the biggest challenges to visitation is the financial barrier to participation,” Jeffcoat says.

For individuals or families who are eligible to receive public assistance, Family Access Memberships reduce the annual cost from $160 to $20. Registration is based on the honor system.

Over the past three years, nearly 3,000 visitors have come to the four Carnegie Museums through the Organizational Outreach Membership. Member organizations include Hello Neighbor, Community Living & Support Services, Family House, and Wesley Family Services, among many others.

“When we travel, museums are often a key to learning about the history and culture of a place. The same is true for our new neighbors from around the world,” says Jenni Walkup Jayes, public anthropologist and program manager for Hello Neighbor. “Programs like this invite refugees and immigrants to feel themselves fully at home in Pittsburgh.”

 Improving access to Carnegie Museums has also meant creating new kinds of programming for teens and seniors.

Since the start of the Community Access program, more than 3,000 teens have participated in teen events. Bridget Hovell, assistant director of membership and annual giving, says she’s heard from parents who have driven an hour into the city so their teenagers could be part of the experiences.

“There are so few opportunities for teens to have a third space between home and school,” Hovell says. “I think our teen nights kind of offer this very safe, very welcoming, and educational opportunity for them to hang out with each other.”

All four museums now also offer seniors-only events. At Carnegie Museum of Art, the Mindful Museum program brings seniors into the museum on Wednesday mornings, before the doors open to other visitors, for chair yoga, private tours, and artmaking—and some personal time in the galleries.

The Wednesday after the Pixar event, the Museum of Art hummed with Mindful Museum participants. That week’s theme was collage. During the artmaking portion, participants sat around tables in groups, some quietly flipping through magazines and some engrossed in lively conversation. One table of the latter combined women who knew each other from childhood, as well as new friends they met through Mindful Museum and other events. They’ve grown so close during this shared time that they’ve even traveled together.

One of those women, Sue Joslyn, began attending events as something to do after she retired. She loved them so much that she became a docent for the Museum of Art.

“I’ve told them before,” she said, looking around the table, “it changed my life.”

Community Access Membership is presented by Huntington National Bank and supported by Giant Eagle Foundation. Teen Membership is supported by The Grable Foundation and the Robert and Mary Weisbrod Foundation.

Support Community Access Memberships

The post Access for All appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

As the museum worked to preserve and digitize the photos and identify the people portrayed in them, it organized temporary exhibitions of the collection in which viewers were treated to several dozen images at a time—of dance halls and baseball games, intimate family moments and Civil Rights protests. Often, in a single frame and unfiltered, Harris presented the seldom-seen complexity and joy of African American life and identity.

 Each exhibition provided snippets of what is considered one of the country’s most detailed and comprehensive photographic records of the Black urban experience. But there has never been a space that showcased all the facets of the archive at once, as Harris had always hoped.

“Harris wanted you to see it all, but he also wanted you to listen to the stories he was presenting in his art,” says Charlene Foggie-Barnett, Charles “Teenie” Harris community archivist. With every image, she adds, “He is leaving clues. He is revealing story lines and truths. He’s making a statement.”

Later this year, museumgoers for the first time will be able to explore this vast archive with a reinstallation of Harris’ work in the Scaife Galleries. The new Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive Gallery will feature never-before-seen components of the archive, including reels of film in canisters, and prints, some in color. Visitors will even be able to view Harris’ photographic negatives, which make up the bulk of the collection.

“We’re taking a more comprehensive, intentional, and creative approach to sharing and honoring the Teenie Harris Archive and how the photographer’s art has illuminated the city’s history,” says Dana Bishop-Root, the museum’s director of education and public programs, who worked with Foggie-Barnett and Curator of Photography Dan Leers, as well as a team of creatives, on the project. Throughout their work, which is ongoing, they considered how the museum invites, welcomes, and engages with the community—including those who knew Harris, his subjects and their families, schoolchildren, teachers, scholars, and other visitors from near and far.

“Thinking about the ways that people can experience the archive has been at the forefront of our approach to sharing it,” says Bishop-Root. “We’ve long said that people need the museum, but the museum needs people to keep it alive, inclusive, vibrant, and contemporary.”

Viewing ‘Teenie’ as Never Before

When the exhibition opens, Harris’ films, works in color, self-portraits, negatives, and more will be available for visitors to work with, listen to, read about, see—and yes, touch—Leers says.

For the first time, visitors will view Harris’ videos and still images side by side, projected on a wall using a multichannel projector. Visitors can also interact with Harris’ negatives, the thin strips of transparent plastic film that gave the photographer his first look at the subjects, using a light table stationed in the gallery. This opportunity to touch and explore the negatives is possible only because of the decades of intensive work that has gone into preserving the archive.

Many of Harris’ negatives were stored in his basement studio before the museum received them. “There were a group of negatives that were seriously curled up on each other and without protective sleeves,” adds Leers. The work of restoring and digitizing them, which is nearly complete, has been intensive and daily over the past two decades.

Pittsburghers first saw Harris’ photos in black and white in the pages of The Pittsburgh Courier, the city’s influential Black newspaper. For the first time, the museum will print some of those images on newsprint, giving visitors a look and feel for how Harris’ photographs appeared when they rolled off the press.

Experiencing the Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive Gallery will also include seeing the photographer as never before.

Harris was a month shy of his 90th birthday when he died on June 12, 1998. But in exhibitions of his work, the artist is typically portrayed as a much younger man in his 30s—bright-eyed, with finger waves in his black hair, and sporting his signature suit and tie. For the first time, the museum will present self-portraits, some in color, of Harris as an older man.

“Deciding to present portraits of the older Harris offered an opportunity for us to broaden the personal image of Harris, and who he was as a community member, family man, and artist,” says Leers. Those new portraits of the photographer will be interspersed in a mosaic display that features Harris’ life and career, layered with the major moments in Black history, American history, and international history he chronicled.

The museum also wants to broaden and focus on the visitors who will be engaging with the work Harris created.

“Deciding to present portraits of the older Harris offered an opportunity for us to broaden the personal image of Harris, and who he was as a community member, family man, and artist.” 

–Dan Leers, Curator of Photography, Carnegie Museum of Art

Visitors to the gallery will step into an expansive space that is accessible to people of different abilities, and designed for sitting, listening, viewing, touching, reading, learning, talking, and lingering as “they experience the depth of Teenie Harris’ work and how he was looking at the world,” explains Bishop-Root.

For example, the museum is outfitting the gallery space with modular seating that can easily move and be rearranged when groups and individuals come to watch a film, hear a lecture, or just talk to each other about Harris’ art. When Foggie-Barnett considers this intentional gathering space, she sees opportunities for critical conversations to also happen there: “about race, reconciling, identity, and the unknown of Black life in America,” issues she says Harris confronted in his images without saying a word.

Seeing Themselves in the Images

As a community archivist and longtime Hill District resident, Foggie-Barnett understands the importance of forging and cultivating relationships with surrounding communities, especially with those who call the Hill District home. Much of her work has focused on identifying individuals in Harris’ images and, whenever possible, meeting with those who are still living to collect their oral histories.

It’s necessary, rewarding, and ongoing work that has been “fundamental to expose the archives in ways that are personal,” says Foggie-Barnett, and that engender trust from those who share their memories and stories with the museum. One such relationship, she recalls, was with Daisy Curry Simmons, who was a young wife and mother of six when Harris photographed her on August 17, 1963. On that day, in her small, tidy bedroom, she stood in silent protest, wearing a hastily written cardboard sign on a string around her neck. It read: “Do your children live like this in Squirrel Hill? We are still human not animals.” Inside the museum, 58 years later, Curry Simmons stared for the first time at that photo of her younger self hanging in the Harris gallery.

In March 2024, Curry Simmons’ daughter called to inform Foggie-Barnett, who had collected Curry Simmons’ oral history, that her mother had passed away. That phone call, says Foggie-Barnett, represents the kind of cyclical relationship the museum wants to have with people whose lives have been touched by Harris’ work. 

“They embrace us if we embrace them,” Foggie-Barnett says.

Carnegie Museum of Art plans to engage a lay volunteer corps over the next two years to help gather oral histories and memories from people who can speak about Harris and the lives reflected in his work. Those histories will help shape how the Harris Archive is maintained, Bishop-Root says.

“Having citizen archivists who will get to experience the Harris Archive in this way is what excites me,” says Bishop-Root, who is eager to incorporate these volunteer efforts into the museum’s programming. She also sees it as a “formalized way we can ask those in the community to contribute to the knowledge and context we are building around the Teenie Harris photographs.

Photo: Joshua Franzos

“I hope that they will see themselves as adding value, in their own way.”

Foggie-Barnett shares that vision of citizens as vital to helping keep the Harris Archive alive and relevant. “We are creating an opportunity for everyday citizens to become archivists who can inform the museum and then share what they are finding and learning with the world, and with family and friends.”

Indeed, Foggie-Barnett is part of the community that Harris captured.

On the walls of her Pittsburgh home, and included in some Harris exhibitions, are photos of her as a young girl. She had her first photo shoot with Harris when she turned 1 year old. Harris photographed the smiling Foggie-Barnett sitting on a table next to her big birthday cake. It’s one of more than 300 images Harris took of her family. She is now a well-respected “steward” of the Teenie Harris Archive, involved in preserving, curating, and broadening the collection’s reach and community relevance.

Those deep roots and her memories of Harris have proven invaluable to preserving and interpreting this archive, says Leers.

“Our collaboration has been incredible; especially given Charlene’s relationship to Harris and the stories she’s collected. She has shaped how I look at the different kinds of experiences and views that everyone brings, and that are unique to this reinstallation process.

“I used to look at the [Harris] Archive as a record of the past,” he adds. “But now I see that it is living.”

Leadership support is provided by the Drue and H. J. Heinz II Charitable Trust. Major support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Support the Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive!  

Find more information at www.carnegieart.org

The post A Living Archive appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

It’s a humid Saturday night in June, and teenagers are posing for selfies on the entrance steps of The Andy Warhol Museum. They are decked out in their finest formal wear—sidewalk-sweeping gowns, vintage polyester suits a touch too tight in the shoulders, and platform heels that somebody will surely kick off in an hour. The chattering thrum is punctuated with exclamations of, “You look amazing!” and requests for one more shot.

It’s prom season in America, and this scene is playing out in backyards and hotel ballrooms across the country. But what awaits these young adults inside The Warhol is more than slow dances and boutonnieres—tonight, the museum is their momentary place of refuge and relief.

Since 2014, The Warhol has hosted the LGBTQ+ Youth Prom, one of the only proms catering to queer young people in southwestern Pennsylvania. The event, open to people ages 13 to 20, is a safe, gender-inclusive celebration at a time when many state and national politicians and local school boards are rolling back the social and legal advances achieved by LGBTQ+ people in the last two decades.

“For some local queer youth who experience bullying, harassment, and even unsupportive faculty and administrators, going to their official high school prom isn’t an option,” says Mona Wiley, inclusion programs coordinator at The Warhol and a lead organizer of the prom. “The Warhol’s LGBTQ+ Youth Prom is a unique event that creates lasting memories, a sense of belonging, and the ability to participate in a significant coming-of-age milestone for attendees, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation.”

Seeking belonging

Into the sea of sequins and sparkle on The Warhol’s dance floor enters Kai, a 16-year-old vision—shoulder-grazing turquoise locs, a sleeveless black mini dress, fishnet thigh-highs, chunky heels, and blue-tinted eyeglasses, the lenses shaped like clouds. They spot their partner, Mochi, and he presents them with a corsage of orange and yellow roses. When Mochi slides it on their wrist, they are so happy they are close to sobbing.

The Warhol LGBTQ+ prom is special, Kai says, because it’s a space where they can just be. After surviving a few hellish years of bullying and harassment in their small, rural high school east of Pittsburgh, the rising junior needs a respite.

“The Warhol prom means that I can be in a place where I am accepted; I get to feel safe in my community,” Kai says. “No one is judging me.”

School was not a place that Kai felt safe. One student, in particular, targeted them after they came out as a lesbian by throwing sharp objects and ramming school desks into their legs. They were called “dog” by classmates in the hallway; some even threw food at Kai when they walked through the hallways. One heartbreaking afternoon, students on a school bus woofed and hollered at them as they walked on board.

The Warhol prom means that I can be in a place where I am accepted; I get to feel safe in my community. No one is judging me.

Kai, prom attendee

The stress was debilitating, Kai says, and they sought mental health treatment. Next year, hoping to put distance between them and their harassers, Kai plans to attend high school at Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, an online public school. While LGBTQ+ youth like Kai are not predisposed to mental illness, they experience mental health issues at much higher rates than their cisgender, straight peers, including elevated risks for suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, depression, and anxiety, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Losing the right to be

An LGBTQ+ prom is a cultural Rorschach test of sorts—for some, it’s an example of progress, of the world becoming kinder to young people who exist outside the mainstream, but to others, the very existence of queer youth is a problem.

Since the start of 2023, more than 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced in state legislatures, including laws specifically targeting the rights of parents to provide gender-affirming care to their children and allowing schools to misgender transgender students and censor curriculums.

Though the politicians behind the bills stated they were protecting children, the proposed laws limit the care and support that can help LGBTQ+ young people flourish.

For Kai’s parents, Jody and Randy, it’s hard to reconcile some politicians’ insistence that they know what’s right for young people. They’ve witnessed the real-life consequences when their child has been singled out for being trans.

“We brought Kai to The Warhol prom because we want them to have experiences that don’t feel exclusionary. We want them to celebrate who they are,” says their mother, Jody.

For Kai’s father, the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation is antithetical to his upbringing.

“I just feel like, in America, our kids grow up hearing that they can be whatever they want, but now there’s a big asterisk saying, ‘You can be whatever you want, but don’t be gay,’ ” he says. “It’s stupid.”

A dandy Andy, indeed

The leadership and staff of all four Carnegie Museums are committed to cultivating and maintaining a welcoming environment. But The Warhol hosting an LGBTQ+ Youth Prom is especially fitting in light of Andy Warhol’s status as a queer icon, one of the most famous openly gay men of the 20th century.

“Warhol’s Silver Factory art studio served as a gathering place for New York City’s LGBTQ+ community—a safe space where anyone was free to explore their sexuality and gender expression,” says Grace Marston, an arts educator who designed the curriculum of the museum’s monthly Dandy Andy tours that spotlight Andy Warhol’s romantic relationships and queer identity in the context of the gay rights movement.

“Through his paintings, films, television shows, and Interview magazine, he provided platforms for queer creatives to express themselves,” she explains. “Warhol influenced many LGBTQ+ artists during his lifetime, and he continues to inspire today.”

The Warhol’s LGBTQ+ Youth Prom is a unique event that creates lasting memories, a sense of belonging, and the ability to participate in a significant coming-of-age milestone for attendees, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Mona Wiley, inclusion programs coordinator at The Warhol

The museum embraces and celebrates Warhol’s vanguard status through its regular programming and acquisitions. In addition to offering the monthly Dandy Andy tours and frequently presenting live, LGBTQ+-identified musical acts, the museum recently installed Anatomy of the Human by queer Nigerian American artist Mikael Owunna. The mural, funded by Citizens, is located across from the museum in Pop Park on East General Robinson Street, part of the museum’s newly launched multi-block Pop District.

Those queer-positive ethics are displayed at the LGBTQ+ Youth Prom. From the pride-flag garlands draped from the pillars surrounding the dance floor to the designated sensory-friendly room, the event is designed to create a space accessible to people of all identities and abilities.

The soundtrack of this year’s prom— the best singalong pop hits of the past few decades—is deftly spun by graduates of the museum’s Teen DJ Academy. The program, presented in partnership with Tech 25, is a five-week immersion taught by professional DJs, culminating in the chance to spin a live set at the LGBTQ+ Youth Prom. Some DJs are as young as 14; tonight is their first prom experience.

During the event’s first hour, there’s more loitering than dancing—a few brave souls timidly step toward the center of the dance floor and then retreat to the periphery after a song or two. Finally, the raucous really kicks off with the help of the B-52’s Love Shack, and the grooving bodies reach critical mass.

Although the night is by and for the promgoers, it’s meaningful for the adult volunteers in attendance as well. This is the second year that graphic artist and local business owner Jason LeViere has pitched in. While he can’t redo his junior and senior years of high school, he says witnessing these young adults’ joy and seeing them have a different experience than he did growing up is good for his heart.

“I love seeing that everyone is part of one big group just cheering each other on the dance floor. There were all these different cliques when I was in school, but it’s not like that here,” says LeViere, who is gay. “I sometimes didn’t attend dances because I couldn’t bring a guy. I actually ended up planning my prom. If I couldn’t really enjoy myself, I’d put my energy elsewhere.”

Here for a good time

Everything about The Warhol’s prom—from this year’s title, “Andy’s Exploding Plastic Prom,” to the food and activities—is guided by a youth committee that meets over a period of five months. This year’s rock ’n‘ roll theme was manifested in the decorate-your-own sunglasses, CDs, and vinyl records artmaking activities, and also the floral centerpieces in mini snare-drum pots dotting the reception tables.

The 2023 prom is the second one held by the museum since the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, and though the attendance numbers aren’t quite back to pre-pandemic levels, almost 200 youth representing 21 different schools attended this year’s prom. They hail from the Pittsburgh region and its surrounding counties: Ambridge, Beaver, Lawrence, and Butler; and while this year’s attendees represent a diverse range of genders and geographies, what’s striking is how they revel in sharing community and recognizing the value of each person.

Georgia says she came to prom because her girlfriend was DJing, and The Warhol provided a “safer space” than her school dance. “I have more freedom as a queer person here. I can express myself however I like and choose whoever I want to be with. I don’t have to limit myself just because that’s what I was taught.”

Getting over a bad breakup, Sadie’s friends convinced her to go to prom—it was time for her to finally have some fun. “Kids need safe places to express themselves,” Sadie says. “We can’t be forced into boxes. As a young bi-girl growing up in the church, I always had to fit specific roles. I had to be this perfect girl, and that’s not me. The Warhol is part of the wider community of people who are active in trying to forward human rights.”

Even though he served as the vice president of his school’s student gay-straight alliance, Niko Stripay still sought out connections at the LGBTQ+ Youth Prom. “Events like this one bring us together,” he says, adding, “It can hurt to feel like an outcast, and many of us do feel that way. Here we can belong with each other. It feels good.”

Connection and community

Kai offers more grace to the high schoolers who hurt them than most people could probably muster.

“I’m not entirely sure if politicians influenced the people who bullied me or if that’s just how they were raised,” Kai says. “I consider that those students had something in their life that affected them that made them act like that.”

Though Kai has struggled since coming out, they’ve always had the love and affirmation of their parents. And they’ve found their people—a community whose encouragement and acceptance provide the scaffolding to build a good life.

“The best part of being queer is the supportive friends you make along the way,” Kai says.

This is why The Warhol’s LGBTQ+ Youth Prom is essential programming for the museum—it creates a rare space for connection.

“Young people need a place where they can celebrate their true selves,” Wiley says. “That’s why the prom will continue.”

The night’s pinnacle for Kai was dancing the Electric Slide—a throwback they learned from their parents.

The pleasure of line dancing is the choreography—the unity in rhythm as the group moves in sync with the music. There’s a feeling of affinity. The same feeling you get when you’re in a roomful of people who may not know you but accept you for exactly who you are.  

The post Everybody’s welcome on this dance floor appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Photo: Renee Rosensteel

Even as a young child growing up in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Gina Winstead was aware of certain societal inequities. There were the friends in elementary school who couldn’t have her over to play because their parents objected to her interracial household. She could see the inequities at the shelters where her mother, a social worker, served and cared for Black women and children. There were the experiences of Winstead’s father, a successful Black business owner in Pittsburgh, who was regularly pulled over because he drove a nice Chrysler and ultimately decided he had to leave the city to thrive. Even accessing the Carnegie Museums, which are supposed to be for all Pittsburghers, seemed to be a bigger hurdle for people at the margins. “I had access because of my parents and their intentionality, but the kids I grew up around did not have that access,” Winstead says. She is now working with Carnegie Museums to change that. In July 2022, Winstead became the museums’ first vice president for inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA). Previously, they worked with 150 community partners on equity and diversity best practices as the assistant vice president of membership development and external relations at Vibrant Pittsburgh. Before that, they were the first-ever director of diversity and inclusion at the Pittsburgh Technology Council. In their current role, Winstead is examining how Carnegie Museums can better attract and retain diverse talent, be more welcoming to marginalized people, and more fully engage with underserved communities. “We can’t expect people to come in,” she says, “if we’re not going out.”

  Q: How did you get into this line of work in terms of making organizations more diverse, equitable, and accessible?

A: I grew up in an interracial household. My dad is Black, my mom is white. Growing up, I had a strong sense of social justice around racism. I also witnessed a lot of the roadblocks that my dad experienced professionally.

When I was working at the Pittsburgh Technology Council, I continuously came across employers who were asking me how they could find someone like me or if they could hire me. They knew that I had a different way of thinking and brought new innovation and new assets that they didn’t already have on staff, but they didn’t have a pipeline to finding talent like me. So I created the first role as the director of diversity and inclusion there.

Q: In joining a large legacy institution like Carnegie Museums, where do you begin?  

A: My first step has really been just listening: having individual meetings with all of the directors, having meetings with the senior leadership teams of every individual component, exploring and then doing a 180 from top to bottom, talking to some of the gallery associates, talking to our contract employees. Just really sleuthing around and being a detective and getting a pulse for what’s happening with culture.

Q: One of the tasks that you’re charged with is creating working relationships with community partners out in the region. What does that work look like? 

A: It’s showing up in the community. We can’t ask the community to look at us as a value when we haven’t looked at them as a value. I look forward to showing up in the community at events where we’re not asking for anything from them; we’re just presenting ourselves as wanting to learn more about the community. There was an event [recently] with the American Press Institute partnering with the Black Media Federation that I attended that really opened my eyes to some of the intersections of how we can do this work specific to sharing stories.

Q: Have career opportunities for people of color in Pittsburgh improved since you were a kid?

A: What has improved is that there are more Black women and brown women who are entering into the realm. I think that’s something that has improved. I think there are a few more resources, but there’s also been a massive depletion of investment. My dad was working in East Liberty and Garfield and the population that was there is not there now. We’ve experienced gentrification in some very harmful ways that has pushed out Black folks and other lower socioeconomic families into different communities that has made it harder for them to do work in the hub of Pittsburgh and downtown. There are still some very glaring challenges to doing this work. But I think we have much more intentionality around it.

Q: What surprised you since you began working for Carnegie Museums last July?

A: I was working with some pretty small non-profits in the past and I was working in tech, and they are able to implement changes really quickly. I think I have really slowed down a bit, and slowing down has provided me with the opportunity to really see the passion that’s here in every employee that’s working here. They love museums and they love their work, and they feel that they are having an impact that will likely last past their lifetime.  

The post Q+A: Gina Winstead appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

“Access to art for the underrepresented is critical, and the museum’s efforts to showcase diverse artists is a huge reason why we support the museum.” – Dena LaMar

It wasn’t hung in his house. It wasn’t mounted on a museum wall or in a gallery. It was on his television screen.

“It was something that I saw on The Cosby Show,” he says.

The 1980s hit family comedy was in its second season when, in January 1986, it aired an episode called “The Auction.” In the show, family matriarch Clair Huxtable wants to purchase a now famous Ellis Wilson piece called Funeral Procession, which in the fictional show she claims was created by her uncle. (Spoiler alert: She wins the auction).

Seeing a Black family engage with art on a deeply personal level changed something in Marty. He discovered that a piece of art could “speak” to people. It’s an experience that he and his wife, Dena, have both shared and hope to foster for younger generations of Black youth through their contributions to Carnegie Museum of Art.

They’ve collected art for decades, but began engaging more deeply with the Museum of Art  in the last couple of years since Dena joined the museum’s advisory board. In that capacity, she has advocated for a data-driven approach to increase diversity throughout the museum—be it hiring policies or exhibitions—and supported initiatives like the summer Inside Out series.

 Promoting diversity and representation in institutions is something the couple does professionally, as well. Dena is the global chief diversity, equity & inclusion officer for Advance Auto Parts, and Marty promotes and creates economic enhancement and equity in Atlanta, where he is senior vice president of economic development for Invest Atlanta, the city’s economic development authority.

Their involvement with the Museum of Art has allowed them to combine two of their passions—advocating for inclusion and art. Their daughter, Kennedy, has also been involved through an internship at the museum in the summer of 2019, where she assisted the director of community engagement in the planning of educational programming to grow membership and foster networking with the museum. 

Similar to Marty, Dena didn’t discover her passion for art through museums. Growing up in Atlanta, she would travel every summer to coastal South Carolina to see extended family. It was on one of these trips to Charleston when she visited Gallery Chuma in the city’s historic district and discovered two local artists—Leroy Campbell and Jonathan Green—whose work explores the region’s Gullah culture, which Dena shares through her South Carolina family. The LaMars have since become avid collectors of Campbell and Green and have their artwork hanging throughout their Pittsburgh home.

Dena enjoys the museum’s Teenie Harris collection and is excited that the museum is showcasing more diverse artists in its exhibits. But she says there’s still work to be done to create more opportunities for younger diverse audiences to have their own personal moments with art. She hopes those moments will happen and spark at a young age.  

“A traditional museum can be very intimidating to people who didn’t grow up with art in the home or access to museums,” she says. “I think it is important for the museum’s programming to reflect the community, for the museum to engage with the community, and do more to bring more people in.  Access to art for the underrepresented is critical, and the museum’s efforts to showcase diverse artists is a huge reason why we support the museum.”

Marty agrees. And he wants younger kids to make those connections even earlier than he did when, one night, he happened to be watching a television show that changed his perception of art.

“I would love to be able to cut the learning curve for a young Black kid, who could say, ‘Hey, I learned about art and have had an appreciation for its power early. I know about Leroy Campbell, Jonathan Green, and Sharif Bey … I know about all kinds of artists, and some even look like me!”  

The post Connecting Through Art appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Perry teachers say that many of their students have never visited the Science Center. North Side families have a lot of other competing opportunities for how to spend their time, they say, and Perry staff don’t necessarily have the resources to figure out how to tap into all that the Science Center has to offer.

But that’s changing. Rather than rely on Perry students to come to the Science Center, the Science Center is going to Perry. 

“For so long, as museums, we’ve seen ourselves as the people holding the information that we then disseminate to the schools or visitors coming to see us,” says Shannon Gaussa, workforce and community readiness program coordinator at the Science Center. “Now museums are rethinking all of this. We see that our communities have different needs, they have different knowledge bases. They have so many strengths that we can build on.”

An ambitious effort led by educational advocate A+ Schools is working to transform Perry into one of the city’s top high schools by partnering with community organizations like the Science Center. The effort was born out of the One Northside initiative, which is supported by the Buhl Foundation and being guided by a steering committee of partners from Pittsburgh Public Schools, the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers, and the Pittsburgh Promise.

“For so long, as museums, we’ve seen ourselves as the people holding the information that we then disseminate to the schools or visitors coming to see us. Now museums are rethinking all of this. We see that our communities have different needs, they have different knowledge bases. They have so many strengths that we can build on.”

–Shannon Gaussa, Workforce And Community Readiness Program Coordinator At Carnegie Science Center

The Science Center is one of four North Side community partners that have been meeting biweekly with Perry staff over the past year to figure out how best to incorporate STEAM—Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math—learning into lessons for 9th and 10th grade students at Perry, while introducing potential career paths to students who may have never considered them. Dozens more organizations partner with Perry to offer mentoring and other educational programs.

The path that this partnership has taken has been neither straight nor easy. It involves years of preparation and planning sessions with at least three dozen people, not to mention plenty of surprises and setbacks, including keeping the ball rolling through a pandemic. But it is an initiative that Perry teachers, Science Center educators, and other partner institutions hope will bring them, inch by inch, to the peak of academic success.

“We’re trying to keep it positive and make sure the kids are living up to the best of their abilities and see the potential that they have,” says Ashley Simpson, a Perry Biology teacher, one of 18 Perry educators involved. “Sometimes that’s a struggle, but you try to get the kids to see that they can succeed and you try to increase their confidence and that growth mindset in order to get to where they need to be.”

Partnering On Steam

Teacher participation in the Perry Initiative is voluntary. Simpson jumped at the opportunity.

She joined planning meetings at the end of the last school year and worked with the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild on a weeklong mini-unit taught in September. Using detailed templates custom-designed by a digital teaching artist at Manchester, students created their own original biomes and a creature suited to living there. The unit concluded with a trip to the Guild’s offices, where students used Adobe software to create playing cards of their creatures.

Simpson doesn’t expect it will inspire all her students to go into gaming design; she just wants to get the kids engaged in the outcomes of STEAM learning, such as the ability to problem-solve and work in teams.

Educators at Carnegie Science Center’s Center for STEM Education and Career Development (STEM means Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) say they’re hoping to help students build lifelong problem-solving skills and curiosity.

“This partnership is a success if we see that they’re grasping STEM skills that can be applied to all areas of life—practicing failing and trying again, getting curious,” says Gaussa, who spearheaded the partnership with Perry. “We’re also focused on developing an awareness of the many STEM careers out there and the diverse paths to getting into those careers.”

STEM education is an interdisciplinary teaching philosophy heavily focused on real-world problem-solving. It’s an approach that has been promoted by educational experts to prepare younger generations for careers in an increasingly complicated and technical world. Informal science education like that offered at the Science Center has an important role to play, according to the National Research Council.

STEM concepts have long been part of the Science Center’s programming. Science Center educators develop resources for classroom teachers and host early childhood education classes on-site, public workshops, summer camp programming, and community events. Their “spiraled approach” is to instill basic STEM concepts in children before they reach kindergarten, and then build on those experiences as they get older.

But STEM education at the Science Center also happens out in the community, such as the partnership with Perry. 

For the past few years, Perry has been working with A+ Schools on a multi-pronged school improvement program. The initiative includes partnerships with North Side organizations on STEAM education that could introduce students to potential career paths. The COVID-19 pandemic and leadership changes at Perry slowed progress, but by fall 2021, the program was finally ready to bring these neighborhood organizations on board.

“Once you put students in this hands-on and real-world experience, they are fully engaged,” says Amie White, chief operating officer of A+ Schools. “That’s what this is all about. Not just trying to box students into one way of learning, or one way of exploring what career options they want to have.”

Building Trust

Building relationships within communities requires trust, and trust doesn’t come quickly.

February 2022 was the first time the Science Center could engage with Perry students in person. That’s when the plan on paper met the realities of the classroom.

Gaussa and a Science Center colleague planned a weeklong introduction to STEM for ninth grade students. Attendance and engagement were lower than they expected; only 25 of the 40 students expected showed up, and then just three students overall knew what the STEM acronym meant. After a few days, Gaussa pivoted to focusing on getting to know the students more personally.

The school facility itself, an imposing century-old Classical Revival style building, is well kept and the classrooms are outfitted with large touch-screen monitors, lab equipment, and other technology useful for STEM lessons. The teachers and tools were there, but challenges remained. 

All of Perry’s nearly 400 students qualify for free lunch, a measure of poverty, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And Pennsylvania Department of Education data shows that Perry’s performance measures are below other high schools in Pittsburgh and across the state. In the 2020-21 academic year, just 6.7 percent of students were considered proficient or advanced in mathematics, compared to 37.3 percent statewide. Only 27.7 percent of Perry students attended classes regularly. The statewide average is 85.8 percent.

“Once you put students in this hands-on and real-world experience, they are fully engaged. That’s what this is all about. Not just trying to box students into one way of learning, or one way of exploring what career options they want to have.”

–Amie White, Chief Operating Officer Of A+ Schools

On a typical day, Perry geometry teacher Kay Ramgopal says she’ll get two-thirds of students on her roster. And those who do attend regularly are often exhausted due to responsibilities outside of school, such as holding down a night job or caring for siblings, adding to the challenges of focusing on academics during the day. 

“I look at them and say, ‘How do you do it?’” Ramgopal marvels.

Supporting and engaging with teachers like Ramgopal will be key to meeting these challenges, Gaussa says.

“One of the big strengths I see in the Perry community is the teachers, the relationships they have with their students, and the trust that they have,” says Gaussa. 

Instead of offering prepackaged lessons, the Science Center and other community partners are working directly with teachers to custom-fit STEM lessons to the specific circumstances of each classroom.

Ramgopal first met Gaussa and Luci Finucan, a STEM educator at the Science Center, in July to workshop ideas for lessons.

Cartesian coordinates—a grid of two intersecting lines, with a horizontal x-axis and vertical y-axis—is an essential concept that Ramgopal needs to teach to her 10th- grade geometry students. Finucan had an idea to teach the concept through games of Twister and Battleship. Ramgopal agreed to go forward with it.

Ramgopal recalls Finucan’s excitement about working with coordinates in a new way. “That was when we were looking at my syllabus to see where everything would fit in.”

Having received the thumbs up from Ramgopal, Finucan and Gaussa then fleshed out the lesson, hammering out specifics with Ramgopal over Zoom a week before. By late September, they were ready. 

Coordinated Fun

The day of the lesson was unseasonably warm, in the mid-80s, so the windows were open. As students filed in for their final block of the day, they sat along the perimeter in search of a cool breeze.

Eight students were present when class began—less than half of those on the roster. Ramgopal says the composition of the class changes regularly. She calls home for students who she hasn’t seen in a while.

These sophomores are of the same cohort that Science Center staff visited back in February when they were ninth graders. Still, it was the first time that Finucan and her Science Center colleague Maggie Fonner, who would be co-teaching the lesson, were meeting them.

Sensing a post-lunch lull, Finucan and Fonner made quick introductions and jumped right into the games.

First was Twister. Three students who volunteered went to their separate coordinate grids, which were laid out on the floor with masking tape. As Fonner spun a wheel and called out the coordinates—“Left foot, X on five!” “Right foot, Y, two!”—each student stretched across the floor to reach it. 

Gradually, the rest of the students began to engage, watching the action in the center of the floor. One group of boys cheered on a classmate, a wiry boy just a shade over 5 feet tall, as he reached a right arm between pretzel-twisted legs to become the eventual winner. His prize—a science-themed sticker of his choice. 

Battleship proved more involved. Using the same grids taped to the floor, the class went about playing the classic Milton Bradley war strategy game, with Post-it notes stuck along coordinates like the “pegs” of the ships.

The class was split into two teams, with one team going into a separate room to set up their “game board.” They used hand-held radios to call in strikes on their opponent. 

Rounds of back and forth followed before the Twister winner, on the advice of two teammates making an informed guess based on their previous misses, called in “three, negative one.”

“That’s a hit!” came the reply over the radio.

They began “seeing the board,” with each called-in coordinate finding its target. Good- natured trash talking ensued. After about a half-hour, a clear winner was emerging. But then time ran out. Class was over.

Before leaving, the students had one final task—to indicate their feelings about the lesson. Each student was given a colored magnet and asked to plot their response on a grid by the door. Along the x-axis was “I know a lot about coordinates.” The y-axis was “I’m having fun at school today!”

The responses along the x-axis were all over the place, but along the y-axis, the magnets were concentrated at the top—they had fun.

It Takes Time

Science Center educators taught the coordinates lesson to four more groups over two days. It represented two months of work for a single 80-minute lesson. Ramgopal considers it a success.

“The coordinates are one particular skill, which is like the base in geometry. If you don’t know how to plot points, then you’re not going into polygons, you’re not going to be able to draw shapes, you’re not going to know areas,” Ramgopal says. “It just rolls over into other places.”

The creative lesson plan also served as a foundation from which the relationship between the Science Center and the Perry community can grow. Science Center educators are coming back for another weeklong mini-unit with the current Perry ninth graders in the spring, just as they did the previous school year.

The hope is to have Science Center educators return each semester and interact with students throughout their high school experience, following ninth graders through their graduation, and maybe beyond. Each interaction deepens the relationship.

Progress is incremental. White is quick to point out that efforts to turn Perry into a top-performing school began five years ago when the initiative was first funded by the Buhl Foundation. 

“It’s been slow and steady progress because we want to set it up for success,” White says. “I think that’s where things go south really quickly for program implementation in schools, because people want to do something, they fund it for a year or two, and they say, ‘OK, what did you accomplish?’ And it’s not that easy.”

The post Succeeding together appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Brian Wongchaowart was a curious teenager trying to figure out who he was when he fell hard for art. Familiar with Carnegie Museum of Art from visits with his parents and on school field trips, he walked there often from his nearby high school, and it quickly became a favorite hangout and “thinking tool.”

“I developed a true emotional relationship with the museum when visiting was no longer an activity imposed on me by adults. Exploring it was a way for me to get to know myself, and to think through at least a slice of the intellectual and cultural history of Western thought,” says Brian, who was born in Thailand and moved to Pittsburgh with his family when he was young.

He was 14 when he attended his first Carnegie International, an exhibition of international contemporary art staged by the museum every three to five years since 1896, and it was an eye-opening experience for him.

“What was most impactful for me was it showed how many ways there are to look at the world around us,” recalls Brian, who today is a senior software engineer for Google Shopping.

A work that stays with him from that 1999 exhibition is Alex Katz’s vivid orange and yellow painting, Autumn, which is now part of the museum’s permanent collection. The way Katz fuses representation and abstraction was new to Brian; still today, he considers the work a fascinating experiment in both the senses and perception.

Remarkably, when he was still that inquisitive teenager discovering Katz and a larger world through art, Brian promised himself that, when he was able, he’d give back to the museum. It’s a promise he’s kept, as a member, donor, and most recently as an advisory board member. Brian continues to be a regular museum visitor and thinker, and says his philanthropy intersects with museum priorities and his own interests. He’s a Fellow and a supporter of the Carnegie International, and recently he significantly increased his support for the museum’s signature exhibition. He also helped make possible the current Sharif Bey: Excavations exhibition and the museum’s new Collection Handbook.

“I encourage people to think of themselves not only as consumers of culture, but as philanthropists, regardless of the level in which they’re giving,” Brian notes. “Annual membership is such an important form of support, as well as an invitation to participate in the process of culture and education. We are all participants in this great experiment that Andrew Carnegie initiated 125 years ago, in which he thought that if we build this cultural institution, it will be deeply loved and cared for by the city.”

With a professional background in data management for retail sales, including e-commerce and direct-to-consumer sales, Brian is also interested in helping the museum think about its role as a digital platform on par with being a physical space for art.

“There’s no reason why your relationship with a work of art should only develop when you are in front of it, physically,” Brian says, a sentiment that all museums have had to reckon with during the COVID-19 pandemic. “In the long term, digital interfaces will enable people to have an engagement with the museum on a much more frequent basis—weekly or even daily. And it could be a 32-second experience as much as a 30-minute experience. We need content that fits seamlessly into the way that people want to consume it.”

In the end, says Brian, it’s all about connection—to works of art and each other.

“I think the fundamental goal for us as a museum engaging the community is to start a conversation—something the education team is so adept at—and help people see that art is not something that’s finished when it leaves the artist’s studio. Art is an ongoing process of trying to understand one another; by making sense of what a single material object means, we’re thinking through what it means to be one human being among 7 or 8 billion others.”

To learn more about giving opportunities at Carnegie Museums, contact Beth Brown at brownb@carnegiemuseums.org or 412.622.8859.

The post Connecting through Art appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Regina, who has a bachelor’s degree in theater from California State University, Fresno, found her way to drag in 2016 by way of burlesque. She developed a fierce persona named after the Celtic goddess of war who fights for equality and body acceptance. “I created my drag character out of all the things I always wanted to be,” she says. “Then I realized I already am all of those things.”

As an instructor and mentor for the second iteration of The Andy Warhol Museum’s School of Drag, a five-week summer course that offers teens the chance to explore the art of gender-based performance, Regina helped facilitate similar discoveries among the participants. In addition to working with the teens to craft stage personas, she and co-facilitator Akasha L Van-Cartier taught costuming, stage presence, and choreography, all along the way helping the young people connect to drag’s historic and cultural roots. The twist this year, due to the pandemic, was helping them forge these connections from their own homes via Zoom.

Over five weeks, high school senior Branch crafted a stage persona that reflects their identity as a non-binary person who loves the steampunk aesthetic (think Victorian era with an industrial edge). For their final performance, Branch donned dramatic black ostrich feather epaulets to turn cartwheels and drop into splits as the Worriers’ pop-punk musical anthem to gender nonbinary pronouns, They/Them/Theirs, pulsed from the speakers in The Warhol theater. “Drag is a way to present what I am interested in without being judged by my peers,” Branch said during a virtual public panel discussion exploring the impact of the program.

“All teens are deeply engaged in figuring out who they are,” says Shannon Thompson, inclusion programs coordinator at the museum. “Any sort of artistic practice is a vehicle to discover how you see yourself. If you are playing a character, that begs the questions: Who am I and how am I distinguished from this character, or how am I like this character?”

The course grew out of The Warhol’s LGBTQ+ Youth Prom and was inspired by a similar program at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson. For Thompson, these experiences fit squarely into the museum’s mission. “The Warhol isn’t a monument to a famous dead guy,” she says. “It’s a place that reflects the fact that the artist built a vibrant LGBTQ+ culture around himself, and we can harness that energy and give youth a sense of ownership in the space.”

“All teens are deeply engaged in figuring out who they are. Any sort of artistic practice is a vehicle to discover how you see yourself.”  – Shannon Thompson, inclusion programs coordinator at the WARHOL

Last year, a rotating crew of guest teachers taught the inaugural class of nine School of Drag students. The teens who made it to the final performance were greeted by a cheering, sold-out crowd. This year, five students filmed performances for an online viewing party. Even without the energy of an in-person audience, the excitement was palpable.

The teens adapted easily to the online format. It helped that Regina and Van-Cartier are both experienced educators. Van-Cartier first donned drag 21 years ago in order to raise money for various causes. Now he’s part of Drag Queen Story Hour, a library program that hosts performers reading children’s books.

Because it translated well virtually, this year’s course focused a lot on makeup—an important part of the art form. “As a drag queen, I explore art and telling a story,” says performer E! The Dragnificent, who discovered drag in fifth grade, completed last year’s program as a first-year high school student, and was a guest teacher this year. “I tell that story on my face.

“As a trans female, I represent my femininity every day,” says E! “When I’m doing drag with the big wigs and makeup, my femininity is on a whole other level.”

Van-Cartier and Regina also wanted to help students understand drag’s history and rightful place in LGBTQ+ activism. Instead of coming up with a lesson plan, they started by asking the teens what they already knew. They were shocked by the students’ knowledge. “These are some of the most intelligent people I have met in a long time,” Van-Cartier says. “This generation is not to be slapped off!”

Both were also impressed by how open the teens were to a diversity of drag styles and their dedication to greater acceptance for all members of the LGBTQ+ community. Branch reflects, “Maybe my individual performance doesn’t mean anything, but the fact that I help cultivate a culture of acceptance and creativity is enough for me.”

School of Drag is made possible with support from American Eagle Outfitters Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and Jim Spencer and Michael Lin.

The post Teens Find Self-Expression in Drag appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.