Mattress Factory welcomes applications for Summer School: State of the Sky, an interdisciplinary arts-centered educational program to be held within the State of the Sky exhibition at Mattress Factory’s, 516 Sampsonia Way building. The program will encompass six bi-weekly seminars, twice weekly access to the exhibition’s solar darkroom, and a series of public events.
Summer School: State of the Sky will explore how documents housed within archives, libraries, and museums—repositories of knowledge and power—can be used to reimagine dominant narratives. Through the creative translation of documents–newspapers, photographs, data, and other archival materials, participants will explore ways to un-archive and recirculate marginalized, contested and unknown histories. The seminars will be guided by visual artists, poets, filmmakers, and anthropologists, providing a space to connect with diverse research methodologies, engage in creative experimentation, and foster critical discussions about cultural knowledge and memory. Participants will contribute to a collaborative ethos that values deskilling and reskilling—embracing unconventional methods and perspectives across disciplines. A different practitioner will lead each seminar, including, Michael Leong, Noah Theriault, Sobia Ahmad, and Nida Rehman, with the first and final meetings facilitated by the program organizers, Luke Stettner and Calista Lyon.
Alongside the seminars, participants will have twice weekly access to the exhibition’s unique solar darkroom, where participants can use documents to experiment with photograms—exposures made using the sun as a light source. The darkroom will encourage hands-on creative inquiry and will support participants’ personal research.
Two public film screenings, curated by Benny Shaffer and co-hosted by Pittsburgh Sound + Image will bookend the seminar, framing its duration with cinematic works that resonate with the State of the Sky exhibition and the Summer School’s themes.
We aim to support an enriching space for collaboration, creative growth, and critical exploration of documents as both information and working material. We welcome regional artists and non-artists alike, aiming to build a diverse cohort of practitioners from any background–humanities, activism and community work or the science and technology fields. Maybe you are a mid-career artist, a retired scientist, an early-career ethnographer or a current undergraduate student, all are welcome. Participants must be twenty-one years of age.
If you are accepted into the course, the seminar has a fee of $100.00. The fee will be used to supply photographic materials for the solar darkroom. The $100.00 payment is due two weeks prior to the first seminar session. Cancellations made up to one week before the first seminar session will result in a full refund. After that, refunds will not be available unless under special circumstances.
-The application deadline is Sunday, April 13, 2025 at 11:59 p.m. EST
-Applicants will be notified of acceptance by Friday, April 18, 2025
-Organizers, Luke Stettner and Calista Lyon, along with Mattress Factory staff will select twelve participants for Summer School: State of the Sky
Please contact Laurie Barnes, Mattress Factory Education Director, with questions at lbarnes@mattress.org.
Luke Stettner has held over a dozen solo exhibitions, including at Storm King (NY), The Kitchen (NYC), Stene Projects (Stockholm), and Kate Werble Gallery (NYC). His most ambitious exhibition to date, State of the Sky, is currently on view at the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh) through January 2026. His work has been featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Aperture, The Boston Globe, and The Columbus Dispatch. Stettner is a recent recipient of the Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award in Poetry and recently participated in the Greater Columbus Arts Council’s Artist Exchange in Dresden, Germany, where he researched his German Jewish roots and histories of upheaval.
Calista Lyon is an Australian photographer, artist and teacher. She is currently the Assistant Professor of Photography & Expanded Media at the University of Arkansas.
Benny Shaffer is an anthropologist, curator, and filmmaker who works at the intersection of socially engaged art and experimental cinema. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and Critical Media Practice from Harvard University, where he was a Film Study Center fellow, a member of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, and a curator of the Emergent Visions film series. He served as the co-director of Revolutions Per Minute Festival in Boston and is currently a board member of Pittsburgh Sound + Image.
We are extending our half-off Wednesday evening tickets into March!
Bring your muse (Or friend. Or family. Or someone you find nice!) out for an unforgettable evening at Mattress Factory.
That's two tickets for the price of one.
At $11 a ticket, you might even wine and dine after.
Purchase tickets online (select date/time) or at the museum.
March 5
March 12
March 19
March 26
Photo Credit: Viktoriia Kostiuk
Sunday, October 20 - Sunday, October 27
Mattress Factory offers the following benefits all week long:
25% off all memberships, including renewals, upgrades, and gift memberships using code THANKYOU25
25% off MF Shop + Café (an extra 10% discount!)
Also, don't miss our member raffle - FREE to enter for members! The winner will receive a basket that includes:
*Members must stop by the MF Shop in person to enter the raffle. Each member may enter one time.* RAFFLE ENDS 6PM SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27.
Thank you for being part of our community. Our members make art happen by supporting the artists, art, and education programs that push boundaries and create exceptional experiences for creatives and visitors alike. We can’t wait to celebrate with you during Member Appreciation Week!
Don't miss: A special event for Member Appreciation Week: Kusama: Infinity film screening and Kusama-inspired pumpkin painting activity on Thursday, October 24! Click here for more info and registration.
Mattress Factory is pleased to announce the return of our stellar ART & series! Thank you to our donors, members, and staff for providing the resources needed to welcome back one of Mattress Factory's most beloved programs.
ART & is an opportunity for Mattress Factory artists and the public to connect and explore the themes and ideas behind the work. ART & is an invitation for everyone to get to know the artist and elements that inspired their art. It is a space where the artist can dive deep into a subject that is integral to their work and share that exploration with you.
ART & features intimate evening programming centered around an exhibiting artist -- the ‘ART’-- paired with a theme or element connected to the artist’s process -- the ‘&.’
The first two ART &’s in the relaunch of the series are in January and February. Tickets for each ART & are $10. Members receive $5 off tickets.
The Mattress Factory presents three new distinct exhibitions in the Museum’s Monterey Annex from artists Lenka Clayton & Phillip Andrew Lewis, Lydia Rosenberg, and Katie Bullock.
These four artists – whose works form a cohesive yet unintentional connection – were selected by 2021 Regional Open Call Visiting Curator Denise Markonish, Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA.
Over the duration of collaborative duo Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis's The Museum Collects Itself, the trash generated by the normal operations of the Mattress Factory Museum will be redirected – stored, catalogued and displayed within the Monterey Annex Gallery – instead of being thrown away. The gallery will begin as a blank white space and will slowly fill up with the discarded materials of all aspects of institutional activities, which may include production waste from art installations, administrative office debris, deinstalled artworks, educational workshop materials, museum visitor detritus, obsolete office technology, among other things.
By collecting 10-months of trash with involvement from the entire staff of the museum, Clayton and Lewis make cultural waste evident while aestheticizing the discarded – sorting, baling, and piling into the gallery, as visitors traverse the material via diminishing pathways. After dunes of garbage and rubbish pile up to manifest in a behind the scenes “self-portrait” of the museum’s functionality, the gallery ends as it started: empty.
In Do this while I wait, Lydia Rosenberg presents a series of sculptures initially described in her ongoing project of writing a novel-as-sculpture. The project concentrates on the character of Annette, an artist who spends as much time making objects as she does listening to guided meditations, that in turn creates a narrative in which domestic cleaning objects are the key to decluttering her mental landscape.
At the Mattress Factory, Rosenberg exhibits the objects that fictional Annette has been making. The objects are hybrids, much like Annette: shredded books or cast crow’s feet become broom bristles, a lamp becomes formless, a pillowcase becomes a bucket, and ceramic spaghetti turns into a mop. These transmutations get at the heart of how we tend to care for objects rather than ourselves or other humans and how this is further complicated when the imaginary becomes material and vice versa.
For As Seen From the Surface, Katie Bullock brings her ongoing archive to life – projecting small videos interspersed with diagrammatic drawings brought from books and her videos/photographs, all in a geometric pattern. These galleries function as both observatory and library, offering the opportunity for Bullock to tell us her stories and to merge the personal with the universal.
Together the elements form a new cabinet of curiosities for the infinitesimal. There is symmetry in seeing the videos and drawings together as they tell a story of experience followed by the sometimes fruitless need to understand what just occurred. The shimmering graphite of the drawings catch the light, while the vellum’s transparency and buoyancy allow them to flutter as we pass by. This collection will grow throughout the life of the show to include experiences from Bullock’s time living in Pittsburgh.
The exhibitions will be on view through December 30, 2023.
Give artists the time, space and resources to create remarkable works of art that help us see our world in new ways.
| Mon - Tue: | Closed |
|---|---|
| Wed: | 11am – 8pm |
| Thu – Sun: | 11am – 6pm |
