Upcoming Artists

November 2023

March 2024

Sample Work

suzanne drawing time, 16 mm film still, Suzanne Silver and Luke Stettner
mike rinsing nettle, 35 mm film still, Mike Stickrod and Luke Stettner
clock creek at highbanks, 16 mm film still, Suzanne Silver and Luke Stettner
2019
Paranoia’s Midnight
2021
Peachwood Circle & Other Southern Gothics
2020
BIG CRY
2018
Aeromorphiscope
2017-2020
Hand Tools (or Tools for No Master)
2022
Tools to Dismantle My Self
2019
Satanic Panic Series
2021
Satanic Panic Series
2019
Satanic Panic Series
For his project at 516 Sampsonia, Luke Stettner will engage in a series of nine initial collaborations. Each embedded work contends with the force of the sun – as an agent of growth, keeping time, distortion.
Collaborations include a solar darkroom built directly into the space, where images will be printed using the sun as their sole light source (with Calista Lyon). An adjacent room holding a stained-glass skylight created using dozens of UV filters will be embedded in the ceiling (with Mike Stickrod).
As the exhibition unfolds, more collaborators will be incorporated. These acts of cooperation and observation – between artists, but also with museum staff and goers, who will be engaged in the ongoing making of the work – are at once the exhibition’s strategy and its message.
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. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at The AC Institute in NYC (2018), and Haul gallery in Brooklyn (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.
Marvin joined Protohaven (Wilkinsburg, PA) and the University of Pittsburgh's Architectural Studies program in the fall of 2022 as a Teaching Fellow and Architecture Instructor, respectively.
Isla Hansen is a Pittsburgh-based artist making objects, tools, toys, sculptures, performances, systems, interactive installations, animations, workshops, and videos that address the ways in which bodies connect to technologies in the world around us.
Isla’s work sets in motion new and sometimes crude means of image-making in order to break down processes of technological mediation and draw attention to the soft or clunky reality of our human bodies.
She combines soft and hard materials, digital fabrication, real time media, and techniques from online DIY culture to blur consumer-producer boundaries and challenge the way in which industrial forms of production displace visible forms of human labor.
Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, is a Sudamerican, Chilean-born visual artist who works primarily with collage, installation, and murals. Their work draws on images, objects, and narratives associated with childhood and explores gender, sexuality, and class.
A recipient of multiple FONDART Grants (Cultural and Arts Development Fund of the Government of Chile), Schliebener Muñoz also received grants from DIRAC (Board of Cultural Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Relations of Chile) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (New York, NY).
In addition, Schliebener Muñoz has extensive teaching experience, from early childhood education to undergraduate education, on topics ranging from philosophy and art theory to art instruction in schools, studios, and museum settings.
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Luke Stettner
Marvin Touré
Isla Hansen
Catalina Schliebener Muñoz

Residency Program

The Mattress Factory’s artistic program is focused on the commission, presentation and collection of new site-specific installations that are developed in residency. Each installation is conceived for and executed in the space in which the public sees it. The work is integrated into the site and depends on its relationship to the setting for its final effect.

Since 1977, the Mattress Factory has provided space and resources for more than 750 artists to make site-specific works. Each year, eight to twelve new works open to the public and continue on public view for four to six months. At the end of the exhibition period, works are removed, and the galleries are returned to their original condition.

Residencies range from one week to two months, with an average of three to four weeks. The artists determine the length of time they wish to work, and the schedule is designed to provide maximum on-site staff support for each artist. Professional carpenters, plasterers and metal-workers participate in the installation process as needed, and the curatorial staff locates materials -- bags of human hair, miles of barbed wire, tons of paraffin wax, insect larvae -- whatever the artist needs. The staff locates equipment to fill artists’ requests, such as cooling a space to below freezing temperatures, or lining a room with LED screens.

There are currently no open calls.