Upcoming Artists

Shrine - Opening June 2022

Sample Work

Naomi Chambers is a Pittsburgh-based painter and assemblage artist; she also runs The Flower House, a Wilkinsburg community art studio and art center that responded to the needs of the Black community and families of Wilkinsburg by providing a space to create, learn and gather.

A force in the landscape of contemporary American art for the three decades, Cox is a photographer & mixed media artist. Cox’s gaze remains at a focused intensity, framing her characteristic self-portraits as poignant arguments on race, desire, religion, feminism and visual and cultural aesthetics.

Mary Martin is a Pittsburgh artist/ art educator. She is a member of Women of Visions, Inc., an arts collective of Black female artists. She exhibits nationally and collaborates on educational programming for various cultural institutions.

LaKeisha Wolf is an artisan & owner of a micro-enterprise centered on making and wellness. She's grown skills to uplift and center her own healing, as well as other Black women and Africana community, using nature, arts and culture. Resources are stones and natural elements, symbols & affirmations.

Alisha B. Wormsley is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Her work is about collective memory and the synchronicity of time, specifically through the stories of women of color. Wormsley’s work has been honored and supported with a number of awards and grants to support projects.

sarah huny young is an award-winning visual artist primarily documenting and exalting Black womanhood and queer communities through portraiture and video. Framing her muses as collaborators, she often shoots on-location across the country in personal, intimate spaces of the subject’s choosing.

Naomi Chambers

Renee Cox

Mary Martin

LaKeisha Wolf

Alisha B Wormsley

sarah huny young

Residency Program

The Mattress Factory is pleased to announce our 2022 Regional Open Call for artists. Make a submission at https://2022mattressfactoryregionalopencall.artcall.org/

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.