This is a private event for invitees only. Join us for an exclusive preview of the museum’s newest exhibition at 516 Sampsonia Way, and be the first to see Luke Stettner’s exhibition before it opens to the public!
Click here or email members@mattress.org to register for this event. Advance registration is required, and space is limited.
Drinks and light bites will be provided.
This event will take place at the museum’s 516 Sampsonia Annex located at 516 Sampsonia Way, Pittsburgh, PA 15212.
Join us for the opening of a new solo exhibition by artist-in-residence Luke Stettner.
Friday’s opening reception is a free event and will take place at 516 Sampsonia Way.
Stettner’s two-year exhibition State of the Sky, centers Pittsburgh’s histories of resource extraction, production, and distribution. Through a series of nine collaborations – many of which utilize archival research – the artist centers notions of time standardization and automation relative to contamination and environmental activism, industry and astronomy.
Collaborators on this project include: Mac Carbonell, Chris Domenick, Michelle Franco, Nicholas Kawa, Calista Lyon, Bryan Ortiz, Suzanne Silver, Ed Steck, Mike Stickrod. The artists extend their thanks to Miriam Meislik and the Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System for their generous contributions.
Refreshments will be available.
Please check in at the museum’s 516 Sampsonia Annex at 516 Sampsonia Way, Pittsburgh, PA 15212.
Limited parking is available in the museum’s parking lot located at 509 Jacksonia Street. Additional free parking is available on the streets surrounding the museum’s campus.
Mark your calendars--Giving Tuesday is November 28th, 2023! When you donate to the Mattress Factory your support directly funnels into our artistic, educational, and community programs.
As we gear up for 2024, six more artists await to begin a new creative journey with the Mattress Factory. Their residences and exhibitions will push, delight, challenge, inspire, and always be unexpected. This is only possible thanks to the support of our members and donors.
Your contribution impacts each of our exhibits, workshops, and community events, uplifting all who experience the art here.
We are on a mission to raise $50,000 this Giving Tuesday. Every gift we receive will amplify our support for these incredible artists, bringing forth artworks to our community.
We are excited to announce that this year, for every gift of $150 or more, you will receive one of our newly branded T-shirts! For every gift of $1,000 or more, donors will receive a limited-edition print signed by a Mattress Factory installing artist!
Click here to see our GiveBig Pittsburgh Page, and make sure to donate on TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 28!
Introducing Mattress Factory's new look.
It's not just a logo; it's a reflection of our unique museum layout embedded in the heart of our community. The dynamic color palette and range of shapes further emphasize our commitment to artistic expression.
Want some free merch with our new logo?! Reserve your ticket for Saturday, Dec. 2nd, or Sunday, Dec. 3rd, and receive a FREE Mattress Factory tote featuring our new brand (while supplies last).
‘Tis the season for holiday shopping! To show our appreciation for our members, the Mattress Factory is offering a 25% discount on members’ entire purchase in the MF Shop on December 3rd!
As another way to say thank you to our members, ALL members who visit on Member Shopping Day receive a FREE Mattress Factory tote featuring our new look (while supplies last).
Registration is not required. Come by during regular museum hours and visit the gift shop in our main building to shop and receive your FREE tote!
Mattress Factory welcomes Margret Cox for a live electronics performance, commissioned as part of Lydia Rosenberg’s exhibition, Do this while I wait, now on view at 1414 Monertey through December 2023.
The performance will start at 6:20 PM and will end at 7:30 PM.
Over the course of her exhibition, Rosenberg has worked with the Mattress Factory to produce a small series of programs that expand on the ideas around language and the layered lives of objects found in her installation. For this final event, Rosenberg invites artist Margaret Cox to present her work as part of this expanded dialogue. Cox’s performances are mesmerizing demonstrations of careful listening to the voices and frictions inherent in objects. While in Rosenberg's work material is undergoing constant transformation, in Cox’s work objects and materials are brought to life through their interactions with each other as the artist responds through improvisation and attention to encourage their self-expression.
Margaret Cox lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA. She is a really good listener. Her focus in electronic media while at Carnegie Mellon University and exposure to Pittsburgh’s experimental music scene fostered a lifetime interest in sounds. She enjoys noises, freezes, stutters and slips and has developed an enthusiasm for new instrumental techniques and the design of new instrument interfaces. In her performances, Margaret manipulates voice, field recordings, found sounds and electro-acoustic devices.
Mattress Factory is pleased to announce our International Open Call for artists-in-residence. Each artist will produce a solo exhibition of new work at the museum.
This opportunity is free and open to artists of any medium from anywhere in the world. A distinguished panel of Mattress Factory alumni artists will jury this call, continuing our commitment to centering artist voices. The Artist Review Panel consists of Jon Rubin, Harrison Kinnane Smith, and Julie Schenkelberg. The panel will review submissions and select artists for residencies and solo exhibitions at Mattress Factory in 2025 and 2026.
Mattress Factory alumni artists know better than anyone what our resources and capacity can accomplish and how special our community is. The panel offers a perspective unlike any other – one that is deeply familiar with the museum, engaged in many aspects of the contemporary art field, and invested in pushing our exhibitions program in new directions.
Our last International Open Call took place in late 2021 and saw over 1,200 applicants from which the 2023 and 2024 exhibiting artists were chosen. The artist alumni jurors were Vanessa German, Sohrab Kashani, Christopher Meerdo and Sarah Oppenheimer. The artists selected through the first cycle of International Open Call were, Asim Waqif, Andrea Peña, Akwasi Afrane, Azza El Siddique, and Eugene Macki.
During their residency, artists are free to explore wherever their process leads them while they live and work on Pittsburgh’s Northside. Mattress Factory supports each artist’s process from development through production, installation, and exhibition by providing the following:
*Material budgets are project specific and our artist honorarium are aligned with W.A.G.E. certification rates.
**The residency length depends on the needs of the artist.
International Open Call is open to artists of any medium from anywhere in the world. Artists are invited to submit a portfolio of work and supporting documentation, which will be juried by the Artist Review Panel.
Submissions close February 8th, 2024 at 11:59 PM, EST.
Founded in 1977, Mattress Factory is a contemporary art museum that showcases site-specific art created by artists-in-residence from around the world. Located in Pittsburgh's historic Northside, just minutes from Downtown Pittsburgh, the museum’s public campus includes two historic homes and a converted mattress warehouse. In addition to temporary exhibitions created by artists-in-residence, Mattress Factory also is home to long-term works by Greer Lankton, James Turrell, Winifred Lutz, Yayoi Kusama, and more.
Harrison Kinnane Smith is an artist whose work explores legal, economic, and racial systems of power. His work has been published by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and exhibited at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, where his Sed Valorem installation mobilized the commercial value of the museum to repay a Black, overtaxed homeowner in the museum’s North Side neighborhood. Smith’s projects have been covered by Hyperallergic, NPR, and Bloomberg CityLab. He was born in Pittsburgh and lives in LA.
Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates interventions into public life that re-imagine individual, group, and institutional behavior. He has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Mercosul Biennial; the Shanghai Biennial; the Carnegie International, The Lyon Biennale; the Solomon Guggenheim Museum; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; The Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico; The Rooseum, Sweden; as well as in backyards, living rooms, and street corners. Rubin’s work has been reported on internationally by outlets including ARTnews, The New York Times, The Associated Press, Public Art Review, Art Papers, The Boston Globe, La Repubblica, Al Jazeera, BBC World News, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Colorado Public Radio. Rubin is a Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
Julie Schenkelberg lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. Her practice is nomadic and she frequently relocates for months at a time, throughout places such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, NYC, Italy, Norway and more. She creates large-scale installations using discarded domestic and industrial materials. Her installations have been displayed at the Mattress Factory Museum, the Museum of Art and Design, NYC, UNTITLED Miami and art spaces throughout the midwest. She received a BA in Art History at the College of Wooster, OH, and MFA at the School of Visual Arts, NY, NY. Her work is influenced by her eighteen years of professional experience of working in the theater in NYC and elsewhere. Her mixed-media installations start with furniture, dishware, textiles, and marble, combined with concrete, resin, and construction materials, to transform notions of domesticity, and engage with the American Rust Belt's legacy of abandonment and decay. She regularly shows in Manhattan at Asya Geisberg Gallery in NY and has received four National Endowment for the Arts Grants for her work, the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, and a Harpo Foundation Grant. She has been awarded many residencies including Yaddo, Red Bull Arts in Detroit, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Art Omi, and Projekstom Normanns, Norway. Press includes Artforum, The New Yorker, PBS, Bloomberg, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Art F City, The Huffington Post, Beautiful Decay and Ground Magazine. She teaches at The Cleveland Institute of Art and The University of Akron.
ART & The Body invites you to a behind-the-scenes event in Andrea Peña's installation, States of Transmutation.
The body is core to Andrea’s work. The evening will begin with a dance performance activation of the space by dance duo slowdanger. Following the performance, there will be a conversation considering queer studies and the industrial between Andrea Peña, Dr. Madeline Gannon, and Dr. Harrison Apple.
Tickets are $10. Members receive $5 off tickets.
Taylor knight and anna thompson are co-founding artistic directors of slowdanger, a multidisciplinary performance entity utilizing movement, found material, integrative technology, electronic instrumentation, and vocalization to produce performance work since 2013. Based out of Pittsburgh, PA slowdanger synergizes mediums, utilizing process based practice to delve into circular life patterning including effort, transformation, and death. They have been featured in/by Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” (2018), MoMA, The Kennedy Center, The Warhol Museum, Usine C, and more. They were 2022 awardees of the NPN Creation Fund and NEFA/National Dance Project to create their work, SUPERCELL which premiered in fall 2023 at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center and Kelly Strayhorn Theater.
Dr. Madeline Gannon is a multidisciplinary designer blending techniques in art, design, computer science, and robotics to forge new futures for human-robot relations. Also known as "The Robot Whisperer", Gannon specializes in convincing robots to do things they were never intended to do: from transforming giant industrial robots into living, breathing mechanical creatures, to taming hordes of autonomous machines to behave like a pack of animals.
Harrison Apple is co-director of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project and Associate Director of the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. They received their PhD from the University of Arizona Department of Gender and Women's Studies where they also worked with the School of Information and Computer Science. Their research focuses on community history and participatory archival practices drawing on interventions to the field of public history. Their most recent research and arts practice is the ongoing MS89 Community Archives Screening Series, a live and in-person only event series paying community members represented in the PQHP archives to guide viewers through their historic media and develop intergenerational relationships.
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 ‘&.’
Peña, a hybrid Latinx artist born in Bogotá, Colombia and residing in the territory of Tiohtiá:ke, Montreal, is known for her dynamic blend of choreography and industrial design. Her work explores the interplay between the human body and the constructed environment. At the heart of Peña’s new exhibition is a deep investigation into the world of hybridity, challenging and redefining our understanding of movement, material, and design.
Upon entering States of Transmutation, visitors will be greeted with curtains reminiscent of both butcher shops and laboratories, offering a surreal gateway into Peña's universe. The exhibit space reveals a cacophony of mutations - from the stark imagery of a steel table bent by a crane to the more delicate harmony of a self-rocking chair, every piece invokes profound contemplation on body, gender, and our human experience.
A central point of Peña's installation is an enigmatic "choreographic machine." Engineered with two slowly moving mechanical arms, this piece is not designed for perfection or flawless replication. Instead, it explores the concept of 'glitch' as an intentional error, questioning our perceptions of the body through its imperfections. Throughout the year long exhibition, visitors will witness a massive silicon piece manipulated by the machine, offering an abstract stand in for the human form and sparking dialogue between the human body and this mechanical presence. Occasionally the machine will be activated by live performers, becoming an interactive spectacle, moving bodies in real-time and highlighting the tension between human agency and technological constraints. The choreographic machine invites viewers to consider the delicate dance between human and technology, emphasizing Peña's exploration of rhythm, temporality, and the harmonious symphonies that emerge from their convergence.
Audio is integral to Peña's installation. In collaboration with composer Debbie Doe, visitors will experience sounds that sit at the intersection of body and machine – visceral, fleshy reverberations that echo through the space.
Visit with artist Andrea Peña to discuss her exhibition, States of Transmutation.
Meet with us over complimentary coffee and pastries on Saturday morning to take a tour of Andrea Peña’s installation States of Transmutation and learn more about her work and process blending choreography and industrial design at Mattress Factory.
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. Using silicone, aluminum, metal chain, rock, concrete, industrial hardware, and kinetic elements, Peña designs an environment that embraces notions of fluidity by challenging the way society considers the physical dimension of the body.
About Andrea Peña
A hybrid Latinx artist, Andrea Peña was originally born in Bogotá, Colombia and has carved her practice in the territory of Tiohti:áke, Montreal. As director of the multidisciplinary company AP&A (Andréa Peña & Artists), her practice as designer and choreographer, merges the body and materiality in performative, digital and sculptural works to create living arts universes. Andrea is recognized in Canada and internationally for her creations as critical, alternative and spatial universes that break with our notions and conceptions of a sensitive humanity, and engage in rich encounters between conceptual research and a highly physical and material approach.
Parking: Main Building parking lot (505 Jacksonia St, Pittsburgh, PA, 15212), free street parking is also available around the campus
Thank you to our generous sponsors!
Food and drink for Coffee Dates are generously provided by Commonplace Coffee Mexican War Streets, Wise County Biscuits, and Bistro to Go.
Join Mattress Factory and Pittsburgh Glass Center for a special members-only program with artist Katie Bullock on Wednesday, March 13 from 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM. Bullock will give a live demo of her recent explorations with glass at the Pittsburgh Glass Center, followed by a talk.
This event is exclusively for members of Mattress Factory and members of Pittsburgh Glass Center.
Refreshments will be provided.
Location: Pittsburgh Glass Center, 5472 Penn Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15206
About Katie Bullock
Katie Bullock received her MFA from the Glass Department at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her BFA from the Painting and Drawing Department at Ohio State University. She catalogs and works with observed “everyday” moments and phenomena, driven by the complexity of truth that taking note can reveal. Recent solo exhibitions include As Seen From the Surface, Mattress Factory (March 2023), and Arguments Against the Existence of a Void, Albion College (December 2022). She currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with her partner and two cats.
About Pittsburgh Glass Center
Established in 2001, Pittsburgh Glass Center (PGC) is a nonprofit, public-access education center; an art gallery; a state-of-the-art glass studio; a community builder; and a hub for innovation and creativity. Anyone can take classes, explore the contemporary glass gallery, and watch the live hot glass demonstrations. World-renowned glass artists come here to both create and teach.
Visit with artist Marvin Touré from 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM to discuss his solo exhibition the blood is the water., on view at 1414 Monterey St. Touré will tour his exhibition with members, followed by a discussion between Touré and Exhibitions Director Danny Bracken surrounding the process of the exhibition coming together.
Drinks and light bites will be provided.
About Marvin Touré
Marvin Touré is an Ivorian-American interdisciplinary artist who uses fictional narratives and the objects of innocence as a vehicle to interrogate themes of love, loss, and memory. In 2014 he received a B.A. in New Media Arts with a minor in Architecture from Southern Polytechnic State University (now Kennesaw State University) in Marietta, Georgia. In 2016 he received an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from The School of Visual Arts in New York City. Marvin has also completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016), the Franconia Sculpture Park (2018), and SVA MFA Fine Arts’s Life on an Island on Governors Island, New York (2019).
His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at The AC Institute in New York City (2018), and Haul gallery in Brooklyn, New York (2019 & 2021). In 2020 he was awarded both a Black Artist Fund grant and the Peter S. Reed Foundation grant for Mixed Media/Sculpture. Marvin was also awarded one of two 20th anniversary commissions for the I-Park Foundation’s 2021 Site-Responsive Art Biennale (East Haddam, CT) and was named the inaugural artist-in-residence at Alma|Lewis located in Pittsburgh, PA.
Read more about the blood is the water. here.
Parking: Main Building parking lot (505 Jacksonia St, Pittsburgh, PA, 15212), free street parking is also available around the campus.
Length: 45 min
Where: Mattress Factory Lobby
We invite you to try a soup of movement, matter, colors and sound. An interactive spectacle designed to give a good shake to everyday life in a multi-sensory kind of way, that will make the whole family laugh while still giving them goosebumps. A wordless talk about freedom and the power of creativity in the 21st century disguised as a puppet show. Giant creatures, wannabe dance movements and group exercises come together with the sole purpose of navigating the complex labyrinth of the mind with a feather and tickling your soul.
Ratlet T. Pesquinche, also known mononymously as Ratlet, is a talk show host, media producer, and art collector. She is best known for her talk show and youtube channel, Ratlet’s Tomorrow Today, filmed inside of the television show and exhibition, How to Get to Make Believe, installed by artist Isla Hansen at the Mattress Factory museum’s Monterey building. Dubbed the Rodent Queen of Reality, Ratlet is the world’s only part-rat part-pig puppet patron of the arts. Influenced by luminaries in her fields, such as LeVar Burton, Terry Gross, Oprah Winfrey, Fred Rogers, Kermit The Frog, Barbara Luderowski, and the Vogels, Ratlet’s Tomorrow Today show sparks conversations with human artists, writers, makers, technologists, and neighbors to talk making play, making art, and making believe.
Poncilí Creación is a performance duo based in Puerto Rico that focuses on creating foam rubber sculptures to be brought to life. These sculptures, created to be manipulated by the human body or parts of it, with some as small as a coin and others as large as cars, are tools for creating whimsical power that stains reality. In their ritual/shows they attempt thru a series of unorthodox methods to convince the audience that everything is possible.
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 |
