The Mattress Factory is an artist-centered museum, international residency program and renowned producer and presenter of installation art. We say “yes” to artists, offering time and space to dream and realize projects in our hometown, Pittsburgh, PA. We invite audiences from around the world and around the corner to step inside, immerse and connect with the artistic process.
Equal parts architectural intervention, minimalist earthwork, and meditative environment, the installation encourages reflection on the invisible forces that bind us together.
Waqif invites viewers into a collaborative dynamic and playful installation that challenges our ideas on authorship and the preciousness of artwork, pushing against the formality we come to expect from typical museum experiences.
In "States of Transmutation," Andrea Peña melds sculpture, choreography, and sound into a “universe” that explores the tension of a posthuman epoch from a queer and embodied perspective.
My project is writing a novel as a physical act of making, a novel-as-sculpture. How is a book made? What are the materials? I am using this fiction space to experiment with the exchange between the making of things and the act of describing them.
Bullock brings an ongoing archive of videos interspersed with diagrammatic drawings to life – offering the opportunity to tell us her stories and to merge the personal with the universal.
Ground, a rectangular form of white drywall, acts as a reflection of the effects that light, air and time have on the space in which it is installed.
This is a place for Black women and femmes, especially the m/others, the queers, the outcasts, the sex workers, the misunderstood, and the overlooked, to be at careless play, at deserved rest, deep in thought, and rooted in joy with their mothers.
Chan sets into motion a system for gathering and sharing the ephemeral, idiosyncratic dreams of the collective, transforming them into artwork with the participants, and asking visitors to reflect on their own dream memories.
It’s necessary to be reminded of how deep our connection is with this Earth and environment, as it truly represents a mother who provides all you need to grow, learn, and maximize your life-force purposefully.
With their help and participation, Newman sought to show how Russian parents and grandparents explained Communism and the Cold War to children, in both her St. Petersburg neighborhood and Pittsburgh’s Russian diaspora.
Male and female spiders coexisting on a precarious web.
Appropriating three discarded booths from a popular North Side bar and installing them at 1414 Monterey, the artists have set up memory games and small video sequences on the tables.
A selection of objects is set out in a museum case and suggestively arranged to evoke a cabinet of curiosities, a surreal realm or perhaps an art object in itself.
A story just short enough to be read in the gallery but is intended to be carried home by the visitor.
Give artists the time, space and resources to create remarkable works of art that help us see our world in new ways.
