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.
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.
Mguni uses text, found objects, flowers, video, and print media to carve out space for Black presence and to offer affirmation in a world that continues its violent attempts to erase, devalue, and disappear Black people.
"Under the table" is a reflection on the inner and outer, about man and power, about the fact that history is always happening, constantly and we are also participants and observers of what is happening.
A video shows hands gradually teasing out wool.
This installation explores the practice of video and the possibilities of the three-dimensional.
A charity dinner held at the Mattress Factory is filmed according to the conventions of reality television.
The artist lays out a path and offers us a poetical meta-history that exhibits a visceral vision of the world.
Reality becomes a strategy for living, and the observation point becomes a destination.
Give artists the time, space and resources to create remarkable works of art that help us see our world in new ways.
