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.
We are pleased to present this video interview conducted by Museum educator Alice with Factory Installed 2021 featured artists Luftwerk.
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In this interview, Luftwerk’s artistic duo of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero share insights into their body of work and collaborative process. Their conversations are accompanied by images of past pieces as well as by views of their installation Open Square at the Mattress Factory. Discussions highlight early works in which they transposed their scientific curiosity about elemental forces into aesthetic expression in their art. Continuing dialogues reference their use of inventive media for poetic visualization and interpretation of nature’s ever-changing states to create immersive installations. Further developments encompassed their transient architectural interventions for iconic landmark sites that evoked fugitive feelings of space and presence.
They go on to talk about the basis of their current work that reflects the consideration of color under differing light conditions as it affects our perception, as a vessel of meaning in our collective visual language. They speak of their intention to have created here a spatially dynamic installation, enhanced by sonic texture, that also incorporates our ability to understand colors subjectively, as sensual qualities within the content of our own unique consciousness. Within this work, they expressed the hope that sights and sounds would merge organically, transporting visitors into their own interiors and associative memories. Additionally, they cite artists whose use of color, light, and space remain inspirational for them, including artists whose works are in the Mattress Factory’s permanent collection. They also contemplate the value of having had the experience of achieving their vision for their installations here, which has given them fresh ideas for their next projects.
making home here presents installations from five Pittsburgh-based artists who explore concepts of home as a site of both belonging and dislocation. Working across a range of mediums, the artists mine personal and public histories to create immersive environments that encourage contemplation of what it means to make home, especially under unwelcoming or precarious conditions. The five artists -- Gavin Benjamin, Naomi Chambers, Justin Emmanuel Dumas, Njaimeh Njie, and Harrison Kinnane Smith – play off the domestic history of the Monterey Annex to examine liminality, familial and community bonds, and systemic racism (local and global) as it shapes our experiences of home.
Organized by Sean Beauford and Sylvia Rhor Samaniego
Visit the in-depth installation & artist pages by clicking the links below.
Gavin Andrew Benjamin, Living in Eden
With a series of 12 photographic panels, Gavin Andrew Benjamin examines the impact of colonialism, mass media and the lived environment on the identities of Black and immigrant people. The images - collaged with pages from home catalogs, news articles and self-portraiture - offer an introspective look into Benjamin’s experience as a Guyanese-born Pittsburgh resident, code-switching between domestic and public spaces.
Naomi Chambers, Black Community Survival Conference Tea Party Ice Cream Social Moonlit Cinema
Naomi Chambers draws upon the Black Panther Party’s Black Community Survival Conferences of the 1970s and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to imagine a modern convening where love, light, food and play are emphasized as necessities for the Black community to survive and to thrive. Chambers invites us to a wonderland of assemblage, paintings, sculpture and animation, and asks us to think about the ways we can come together to care for each other.
Justin Emmanuel Dumas, Good/Bones
In Good/Bones, Justin Emmanuel Dumas builds the interior and exterior of a home, centering the central threshold as a meditation on liminality. In this installation, Dumas considers the hero’s journey and the transformation that occurs between departure and return. By repurposing architectural remnants and manipulating a variety of materials, the artist asks us to look closer at the overlooked and to reconsider the use and histories of objects.
Njaimeh Njie, “Did you get everything?”
Njaimeh Njie’s two room installation transports visitors to the familiar setting of a living room and kitchen filled with relatives, overflowing with conversation and laughter. Moving boxes, suitcases, and walls showing where pictures used to live, allude to the precarity of housing for Black families in Pittsburgh. “Did you get everything?” prompts consideration for the memories, traditions and lessons we take with us when we leave our homes.
Harrison Kinnane Smith, Sed Valorem
Sed Valorem is a financial intervention in which Harrison Kinnane Smith arranged for the Mattress Factory to mortgage its property—a former home in a still residential neighborhood where the exhibition occurs—to reimburse a nearby Black homeowner for all excessive property taxes he will pay over the next 15 years as a result of racially discriminatory practices. Smith’s installation uses sculpture, video, photography and legal documents to demonstrate how Black homes are commercially devalued and subject to higher taxation.
The Mattress Factory is pleased to announce Pop-Aganda: Revolution & Iconography, an exhibition of new site-specific works from eight artists opening on April 16, 2022 in the Museum’s Main Building. Pop-Aganda is the fourth iteration of director, founder and curator Tavia La Follette’s ongoing Sites of Passage series – a global interchange for the migration of ideas across political and cultural borders.
La Follette works with artists who investigate new channels of artistic communication. For this exhibition, after three research trips in 2018 and 2019, La Follette selected eight multidisciplinary, social practice-oriented artists based in the US and in Russia.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
USA-BASED
LIZ COHEN is a Colombian American artist best known for her project BODYWORK, in which she transformed an aging East German Trabant into an American El Camino lowrider, and herself into a car customizer and bikini model. In her more recent work, BODY MAGIC, Cohen depicts herself alongside middle-aged lowrider icon, Dazza del Rio, channeling the spirit of a young Lisa Lyon as she was photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe. Cohen’s work has been characterized as examining labor, resistance, and radical self-expression.
http://www.lizcohenstudio.com
SONYA KELLIHER-COMBS was raised in the Northwest Alaska community of Nome. Her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree is from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Master of Fine Arts is from Arizona State University. Through her mixed media painting, sculpture and installation Kelliher-Combs offers a chronicle of the ongoing struggle for self-definition and identity in the Alaskan context. Her combination of shared iconography with intensely personal imagery demonstrates the generative power that each vocabulary has over the other. Similarly, her use of synthetic, organic, customary and modern materials moves beyond oppositions between Western/Native culture, self/other and man/nature, to examine their interrelationships and interdependence. Kelliher-Combs' process dialogues the relationship of her work to skin, the surface by which an individual is mediated in culture.
Kelliher-Combs’ work has been shown in numerous individual and group exhibitions in Alaska, the United States and internationally, including the national exhibition Changing Hands 2: Art without Reservation and SITELINES: Much Wider Than a Line. She is a recipient of the prestigious United States Arts Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Fellowship, Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, Rasmuson Fellowship and is a recipient of the 2005 Anchorage Mayors Arts Award and 2010 Alaska Governor’s Individual Artist Award. Her work is included in the collections of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Anchorage Museum, University of Alaska Museum of the North, The National Museum of the American Indian and the Whitney Museum of American Art. As an Alaska Native artist and advocate, she has served on the Alaska Native Arts Foundation Board, Alaska State Council on the Arts Visual Arts Advisory, and the Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Arts Board.
http://www.sonyakellihercombs.com
BEKEZELA MGUNI is a queer Trinidadian artist, librarian, birth worker and educator. She is the founder of the Black Unicorn Library and Archives Project, a Black feminist community library. Bekezela is a member of BOOM Concepts, a community space and gallery dedicated to supporting artists and creative entrepreneurs, and serves as the Education Program Director at Dreams of Hope for queer youth arts and leadership.
http://www.bekezelamguni.com
EMILY NEWMAN, born in Singapore and raised in the UK, is currently based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She received her MFA from CalArts and has shown internationally—including at the Taylor De Cordoba gallery in Los Angeles, the Anna Akhmatova Museum and at Manifesta 10 in St Petersburg, and the Klaus Von Nitchtssagend Gallery in New York. Her work has been critically reviewed in publications such as Art Review, The Los Angeles Times and Artforum Intl. She received a Fulbright to go to Russia in 2005 and spent the next decade in and around St Petersburg teaching at The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and at St Petersburg University, where she formed a fledgeling program in Contemporary Art at Smolny College and TOKAMAK, a structured residency for artists on the Finnish island of Suomenlinna that lasted eight years. Today she teaches art full time at Catalyst Academy, an elementary school in the Larimer neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where she continues to look for ways to empower children to make sense of their lived contexts through visual expression. Her works on show at the Mattress Factory draw from the years she spent in Russia and explore methods of attaining self-knowledge through model-building and historical-reconstructions-gone-wrong with children and their families.
http://www.emilynewmanartist.com
RUSSIA-BASED
“UNTITLED”: For their safety, the artist has redacted their name and will be referred to as “Untitled.”
LERA LERNER is a performance and installation artist, an art researcher, curator, founder of the Imaginary Museum of Displaced Persons, and co-curator of the international festival of public art Art Prospect.
Lera practices socially engaged art using an interdisciplinary approach and different media in helping to establish a dialogue between different social groups of people. She works together with homeless people, migrants, people with mental disabilities, museum workers, orphans, scientists, plants, people with postwar trauma, mushrooms and even tumors.
Lera graduated from the Pro Arte Program for contemporary artists (2015) and completed the MA program in Biology at the Faculty of Biology of St. Petersburg State University (2012).
Lots of her projects are collaborative and international. She worked with colleagues and with the support from Manifesta biennale, Grafikens Hus and LAVA-Dansproduktion in Sweden, CEC ArtsLink in the US, Ars Electronica in Linz, Pro Helvetia Swiss art consul in Moscow, Red Square Festival in Berlin, Agents of Change: Mediating Minorities in Finland, Kone foundation in Finland, Consulate General of Italy in St. Petersburg, Institut français de Russie.
http://www.cargocollective.com/leralerner
VERONIKA RUDYEVA-RYAZANTSEVA was born in Krasnoyarsk in 1981. Graduated from art school. Surikov, Krasnoyarsk, after, the department of monumental painting of the St. Petersburg State Art Academy named after. Stieglitz 2001 - 2007. From 2005 - 2008 continued her studies at the Institute of Contemporary Art "Pro Arte". The artist explores issues of identification, posthumanism, the connection between the past and the present. The heroes of the works become symbols: time, place, generation, event. In her exhibition activity she works with different media, combining video, painting, installation and drawing. Participant of numerous Russian and foreign exhibitions, at such venues, as "Winzavod" in Moscow, the Russian Museum, the art center "Korjaamo" in Helsinki, the Ethnographic Museum in Stuttgart, etc. Nominee for the shortlist of the Kuryokhin Prize for 2012. Picturesque and graphic works are in private Russian collections, such as the collection of the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg and abroad.Video-work "Cleansing with snow" purchased in the collection of the National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow.
The artist lives and works in St. Petersburg.
http://www.veronikarrudye.wixsite.com/mysite
SYANDA YAPTIK is a versatile master of applied homemade anti-magic throughout the world. Syanda grew up in Northern Artic Russia and is from the Nenets Tribe. She often uses family memory as resources for her projects. Her work is performative. She is inspired by memories of family, often building performative actions that are somatic, producing a moving symbol of these stories/memories—to help express the connection she feels to family.
http://www.galinayaptik.wordpress.com/проекты/
Greer Lankton (1958-1996) was an American artist whose work is autobiographical and revealing of her obsessions. Lankton's dolls and environments possess a disarming mix of innocence and decadence, hope and pathos. She said her work was "all about me," reflecting her life as an artist, as a transgender person and a drug addict. But beyond this, and as an outsider, Lankton eloquently explored and questioned the norms of gender and sexuality, as well as the powerful imagery of popular culture and consumerism. Her work has been described by critic Holland Cotter as "art of a superbly disciplined and unusually distressing beauty."
Lankton in her studio, 1982.
The Mattress Factory’s permanent collection includes Lankton's final work, It's all about ME, Not You and the Greer Lankton Archive. It’s all about ME, Not You was first shown in 1996. Unfortunately, Greer passed away after the exhibit opening, and the piece was put in storage when the show closed. Thanks to the generosity of the Lankton family, it was donated to the Mattress Factory for permanent display on October 9, 2009.
It’s all about ME, Not You, 1996
In July 2014, Greer Lankton’s family donated to the Mattress Factory a gift of art, personal papers, photographs and related material, which they had saved throughout her life and which they had recovered after her death in 1996. An unfiltered view into the life and work of one of the most significant artists to have taken part in the revolutionary art scene in New York City’s East Village during the 1980s, the collection of thousands of items includes drawings and paintings, sculptures, sketchbooks, photographs, correspondence, personal journals, press clippings and more.
Lankton’s installation It’s all about ME, Not You, along with the 2014 gift of art and archival material, comprise the largest concentration of the artist’s work and related material anywhere. The rich collection allows for new study, interpretation and appreciation of Lankton’s work and the artistic environments in which she participated.
The Mattress Factory, in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh, has completed 7 months of a 24-month project to digitize and make accessible 14,153 archival items, including artwork, ephemera, periodicals, photographs, photo albums, slides and negatives, journals, and correspondence documenting the life and work of Lankton. The project will result in item-level catalog records and a finding aid to the digitized collection, available through the museum’s online archive.
To date the project has digitized 5904 items and described 3989 along with the creation of comprehensive research guides, indexes, thesauri, presentations and social media posts, made possible by our Greer Lankton Archive Research Fellows’ incredible research. This work continues to shine a light into aspects of Lankton’s career and working processes.
Newly digitized images such as this from c.1979 give an insight into the morphological aspects of Lanktons sculpture, which are drawn from her interest in acting, performance, ballet, and the contorted movements of gymnasts.
Letters from Lankton to her parents in 1973 show us that the interest in contortion began early in Lankton’s life as she attended gymnastics camp and did ballet classes as a teenager. Becoming enthralled by the movements, particularly of the female gymnasts and dancers, these are replicated in her later sculpture, drawing, installation and self-portraits as seen above with her dolls c.1982.
Once completed, this project will contribute significant content and context to understanding Lankton’s art. It will also allow for a broader historization of Lankton and her contemporaries and new scholarly study relating to issues of gender identity and tolerance.
See here for information on a series of events in collaboration between the Mattress Factory and the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, marking the launch of the Greer Lankton Digital Archive online in April 2022.
This first release in the video series features gospel act Rashad McPherson activating the installation with a medley of original songs from his new album Forward.
Watch the performance that premiered on Thursday, December 10 on YouTube, Facebook or Twitter.
Feeling The Spirit In The Dark is an assemblage of wonder and personal truths that focus on the metamorphoses of Black men, especially within a society that denies these men their erotic and reconciliatory potential. His work seeks to consider the interior, both his own, as well as, other Black men through emphasizing photography, sculpture, and filmmaking to examine the fantastic as it relates and complicates personal autobiography and self-making. When asked about his artistic practice, the artist emphasizes, “I aim to make artwork that moves beyond a focus on the bodies of black men but into the deepness of our psyches where identities are formed and black manhood can be imagined as an indeterminate and unfixed space.”
The exhibition title is inspired by Aretha Franklin’s song "Spirit in the Dark" from her 1970 album with the same name and “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark: Expanding Notions of the Sacred in the African-American Gay Community” by E. Patrick Johnson. In his essay, Johnson wrote that Franklin’s music “blurs the boundaries between the sacred and the secular – both through its lyrics and musical composition.”
Other videos in the series will be released on January 7, January 21, and February 11, 2021. All events will stream at 7 PM on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram @mattressfactory @shikeith.
ABOUT SHIKEITH
Shikeith was born in 1989 in Philadelphia, PA, and currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA. He received his MFA in Sculpture from The Yale School of Art, after earning his BA in Integrative Arts from The Pennsylvania State University. His work investigates the experiences of black men within and around concepts of psychic space. His work has recently been featured in institutional solo exhibitions, including the Alexander Brest Museum & Gallery, Jacksonville University, Jacksonville, FL; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; and The Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA. In 2019, Shikeith received a Painters & Sculptors Grant from The Joan Mitchell Foundation. This year he was awarded the 2020 Art Matters Foundation Grant and was selected for the 2020 – 2021 Leslie Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship.
ABOUT RASHAD MCPHERSON
Rashad McPherson is a performer, composer and arranger living in NY, NY. McPherson studied music at Berklee College of Music (Boston, MA) and graduated in 2009. Though Rashad took time away from his artistry to pursue master’s degrees, in 2018 he was re-introduced to New York City’s independent artist scene when he co-headlined a performance at Rockwood Music Hall (New York, NY). Since, he has also performed at Mercury Lounge, National Sawdust, The Schomburg Center, The Groove, Ginny’s Supper Club, and regularly hosts an open mic in Harlem, NY. Though McPherson began his recording career as a Gospel Music recording artist, the music that he is preparing to release is socio-politically conscious and inspirational. Both singles from his third album Forward are available now everywhere digital music is sold or streamed.
The Mattress Factory is proud to partner with artist and filmmaker Shikeith to launch a video series featuring collaborators who contributed to his exhibition Feeling The Spirit In The Dark, currently on view in the Museum’s Monterey Annex. Scheduled performers include Rashad McPherson, Trapcry and Corey Staggers.
The second release featuring saxophonist and producer Corey Staggers will stream on Thursday, January 7 at 7 PM on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram @mattressfactory @shikeith.
Feeling The Spirit In The Dark is an assemblage of wonder and personal truths that focus on the metamorphoses of Black men, especially within a society that denies these men their erotic and reconciliatory potential. His work seeks to consider the interior, both his own, as well as, other Black men through emphasizing photography, sculpture, and filmmaking to examine the fantastic as it relates and complicates personal autobiography and self-making. When asked about his artistic practice, the artist emphasizes, “I aim to make artwork that moves beyond a focus on the bodies of black men but into the deepness of our psyches where identities are formed and black manhood can be imagined as an indeterminate and unfixed space.”
The exhibition title is inspired by Aretha Franklin’s song "Spirit in the Dark" from her 1970 album with the same name and “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark: Expanding Notions of the Sacred in the African-American Gay Community” by E. Patrick Johnson. In his essay, Johnson wrote that Franklin’s music “blurs the boundaries between the sacred and the secular – both through its lyrics and musical composition.”
Other videos in the series will be released on January 21 (this date will be hosted by the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and the August Wilson House and requires registration at https://www.crowdcast.io/e/piihqelp/register), and February 11, 2021. The four-part video series began on Thursday, December 10 with a performance that featured gospel act Rashad McPherson activating the installation with a medley of original songs from his new album Forward. Watch the performance on YouTube, Facebook or Twitter.
ABOUT SHIKEITH
Shikeith was born in 1989 in Philadelphia, PA, and currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA. He received his MFA in Sculpture from The Yale School of Art, after earning his BA in Integrative Arts from The Pennsylvania State University. His work investigates the experiences of black men within and around concepts of psychic space. His work has recently been featured in institutional solo exhibitions, including the Alexander Brest Museum & Gallery, Jacksonville University, Jacksonville, FL; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; and The Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA. In 2019, Shikeith received a Painters & Sculptors Grant from The Joan Mitchell Foundation. This year he was awarded the 2020 Art Matters Foundation Grant and was selected for the 2020 – 2021 Leslie Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship.
ABOUT COREY STAGGERS
New Haven, CT, saxophonist and producer Corey Staggers mixes improvisation with some of pop culture’s most well-known songs. Staggers will be releasing multiple projects in 2021 with jazz, hip hop, instrumental and all-around good vibes.
How does an arts organization survive and thrive through COVID-19?
At Mattress Factory we're focused on supporting artists in the creation of new art and finding new ways to connect our community with art. What was planned as a short site visit turned in an extended period of art and exploration for Andréa Stanislav who sheltered-in-place with us.
Our doors are closed again to the public, and we are making the most of that time. A new group of artists are working in residence to create new installations that will open in early 2021 (Luftwerk, Meir Tati, Sarawut Chutiwongpeti, Andréa Stanislav, Jeffrey Augustine Songco). Shikeith is creating and presenting new streaming video content that extends his installation Feeling The Spirit In The Dark to an online audience.
Our 2021 resolution? To stay flexible. To stay creative. To keep artists and community at the heart of our work.
When the world reopens, we will be here with incredible art you can get into.
Mattress Factory is thrilled to see Shikeith and Feeling The Spirit In The Dark included by NBC News as a top show to see in 2021. From the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh to museums in New York, Denmark and London, museums are featuring queer artists of color.
In Feeling The Spirit In The Dark, Shikeith brings together four surreal, uncanny installations that explore the psychological impact of light, darkness, touch, and space on the Black body and soul. Tracing the history of Black people through sound, especially the Blues, Jazz, Gospel, and R&B, and movement in the wake and weight of the ship, Shikeith tells the narrative of the afterlife of slavery and what haunts Black queer, male-embodied people in society.
Purchase tickets for a COVID-safe visit or explore Feeling The Spirit In The Dark online.
Read "Queer Artists of Color Dominate 2021's Must See LGBTQ Art Shows" by Dan Allen, NBCNews.com.
A New Tomorrow That Starts Today draws inspiration from the comic-book world, while also using a B-movie and sci-fi aesthetic language. A mutant, in comics and sci-fi literature is a human that received a certain power or physical characteristic as a result of a mutation. It is a superpower or an eccentric appearance that transforms this person into a sort of super-human.
In recent interviews with David Rullo of Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, artist-in-residence Meir Tati and Mattress Factory exhibitions manager Danny Bracken, discuss the process of creating Tati's performance and installation. Read "Israeli Artist Meir Tati Exhibits at Mattress Factory" by David Rullo, jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com.
When you become a monthly sustaining donor to the Mattress Factory, you ensure that artists like Meir Tati have the support and flexibility that them to make their ideas reality.
Jeffrey Augustine Songco explores what it takes to be the ultimate American in his Mattress Factory installation, Society of 23's Trophy Game Room. Spoiler alert, “you have to be good-looking, good at sports and good at presenting yourself in sound bytes on television.” Songco began exploring identity through the development of the brotherhood of Society of 23 while he was a student at Carnegie Mellon University.
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Purchase tickets for a COVID-safe visit or explore Society of 23's Trophy Game Room online.
Read ""In Jeffrey Augustine Songco’s America, You Can Be Both A Bro And A Queen"" by Brienne Walsh, Forbes.com.
Give artists the time, space and resources to create remarkable works of art that help us see our world in new ways.
