Rural, natural resource-dependent communities are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change—which is exactly the point of the new Climate and Rural Systems Partnership (CRSP) led by Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The museum recently received a $1.25 million grant from the National Science Foundation to bring together educators, scientists, and community leaders to develop climate-change learning networks in rural western Pennsylvania. “We often struggle to serve our rural audiences, and natural history content is so relevant to them,” says Laurie Giarratani, the museum’s director of education. “Climate-related threats like flooding, erosion, and crop damage are urgent issues that impact aspects of everyday life in rural areas, as well as activities like hunting and fishing.” The museum is partnering with the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments (UPCLOSE) and the Mercer County Conservation District to create hubs at the museum’s Powdermill Nature Reserve in Rector, Pa., and Munnell Run Farm in Mercer County, where the CRSP team will hold workshops and community gatherings. It’s a four-year project that builds on the museum’s successful Climate & Urban Systems Partnership (CUSP), which took the message to area city dwellers. Both programs support the museum’s strategic engagement on the Anthropocene.

“It was a culture that often made me feel isolated and ignored. In my engineering courses, I had no one to work with and no one to talk to. I guess it’s called marginalization. And that, above all things, was what I sincerely hoped that no one after me would have to experience.”
– Elayne Arrington, introducing the film Hidden Figures at The Rangos Giant Cinema. Arrington, a graduate of Homestead High School, was the first African American woman to graduate from Pitt’s School of Engineering in 1961 and the the first female aerospace engineer in the Foreign Technology Division of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in math and teach the subject at Pitt

50 years of LOVE for Planet Earth

Eric Dorfman, Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Daniel G. and Carole L. Kamin Director, was recently appointed to the Earth Day Network’s Global Advisory Committee for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in 2020. He joins an international group of environmental advocates, including former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson.

Who are tomorrow’s art curators?

In June, Carnegie Museum of Art announced the creation of the Margaret Powell Curatorial Fellowship, a full-time, two-year position to be awarded to recent college grads from historically underrepresented backgrounds in the art field. Its name honors the late Margaret Powell, a curatorial assistant in decorative arts and design at the museum who died of breast cancer this past January. The first fellow will join the curatorial team in 2020. Funding for the fellowship came from the Arts, Equity, & Education Fund, a Pittsburgh-based private family foundation. “A commitment to bringing new voices to the table is essential for museums to thrive in the 21st century,” says Eric Crosby, the museum’s Henry J. Heinz II Acting Director and Richard Armstrong Senior Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art. And that’s what the Margaret Powell Curatorial Fellowship is meant to achieve. That, and honoring a friend and colleague who left the art world she loved too soon.

Like so many performers, “Weird Al” Yankovic couldn’t visit Pittsburgh without a stop at The Warhol. He was sighted on July 7 before his sold-out “Strings Attached” gig at the Benedum Center

The post Seen + Heard: Fall 2019 appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Powdermill’s Andrea Kautz (left) and Darci Sanner, co-owner of Summer Smiles Honey Farm, populate one of eight new honeybee colonies at the Flight 93 National Memorial.

Most visitors to the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, will never see the eight new honeybee colonies on the park’s grounds, but the work of their resident pollinators will help ensure that healthy wildflowers will grow there for years to come. Installed this past May, the colonies are the product of a collaboration of the Friends of the Flight 93 National Memorial, Summer Smiles Honey Farm, and Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Powdermill Nature Reserve. In 2016, the Powdermill team began taking inventory of the bee species at the memorial site, and the Garden Club of Allegheny County chipped in to help replenish some of the native wildflowers. “The first step was determining what the bee community at Flight 93 looks like, and then seeing how our efforts of establishing additional bee foraging habitat will benefit it down the road,” says Powdermill research entomologist Andrea Kautz. “Now we can monitor the bee-plant interactions as part of our ongoing research into what has become a global shortage of pollinators.”

CMOA says “search this”

Carnegie Museum of Art boasts more than 32,000 visual art objects, and nearly 80,000 negatives by photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris. Now you can search most of the museum’s collection by way of its new digital collection site, which makes more than 88,500 works available online. The collection site features different, randomly selected works of art each time you visit. And in addition to searching by name and artist, visitors can search by creation or acquisition date, and what’s currently on view at the museum and in specific galleries. Check it out at collection.cmoa.org.

I love events at The Warhol. It’s an interactive museum and this is an interactive fashion show. Andy Warhol’s fascination with celebrity was heightened by the fashion designers who created their iconic looks. I, like Andy, collect these connections to history.
– Richard Parsakian of Eons Fashion Antique in Shadyside, as told to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette during the fashion show he helped organize in conjunction with The Warhol’s exhibition, Adman: Warhol Before Pop. Parsakian showcased nine looks of the 1950s from his personal archives.

Photo: Sean Carroll

An “OMG” research moment

Illustration by Paul Bowden

It takes a lot to impress John Wible, who has focused his decades-long scientific career on the origins of mammals. But when the Carnegie Museum of Natural History curator got his first glimpse of a beautifully preserved, 126-million-year-old fossil discovered in a quarry in China’s Inner Mongolia, he knew it was something special. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing,’” Wible recounted to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “It was amazingly complete. And there were skeletal parts of the body that were not known in other animals of that time period.” Wible was part of the team of international scientists that studied the fossil and, in June 2018, announced it was a completely new form of placental mammal relative, christening it Ambolestes zhoui. As with other fossils from Inner Mongolia, it had been discovered by splitting rocks—revealing a specimen with nearly all its bones preserved, including some bones that have never been found before in any mammal from the Age of Dinosaurs.

Prestigious support

Photo: Bryan Conley

Carnegie Museum of Art’s Eric Crosby is one of six recipients of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Spring 2018 Curatorial Research Fellowships. He received a grant of $50,000 to support travel, archival research, and other activities. Crosby, who is the museum’s Richard Armstrong Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, plans to use the funds to conduct research for a group exhibition on economic inequality in America that will feature work by more than 30 artists. Titled Working Thought, the exhibition will “engage a new network of artists, curators, writers, and thinkers from around the country right here in Pittsburgh,” Crosby notes.

12,380

That’s the number of Lego bricks used by artist Nathan Sawaya in his custom creation, Perspective on Three Sisters Bridges, inspired by Pittsburgh’s Roberto Clemente, Andy Warhol, and Rachel Carson bridges. The 46-by-67-by-45-inch sculpture is on view now as part of The Art of the Brick exhibition at Carnegie Science Center.

The post News Worthy: Fall 2018 appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

June 9 marks the start of the 2018 Summer Adventure at all four Carnegie Museums. As members visit the museums, attend specially planned events (think fashion and ice cream!), and take part in museum scavenger hunts and digital trivia, you’ll earn stamps to boost your chances to win some pretty sweet Carnegie Museums swag—gift-shop prize bags, Carnegie Cash, even a Premium membership renewal— at summer’s end. And this year’s Summer Adventure has a twist: Andy CarnegieBot, a friendly interactive chatbot, will be your guide. Starting on June 9, use Facebook Messenger to scan the code in the above illustration or go to carnegiebot.org to get started. Each time you visit one of the museums or attend a Summer Adventure event, you’ll check in with Andy CarnegieBot using your phone. He’ll keep track of the stamps you collect, share information on upcoming events, serve up special “achievement” opportunities, and encourage you to show off your member swagger with fun museum trivia and quizzes.

Members are invited to a special Summer Adventure kickoff party on June 16—part of the grand opening weekend of the Science Center’s new PPG SCIENCE PAVILION (registration required)—and the summer fun wraps up on August 25 with an end-of-summer Trivia Night at the Museum of Natural History. See pages 54–55 for a list of some of the Summer Adventure activities.

Tapping into the secret lives of birds

American goldfinch (Spinus tristis)

Did you know that birds smaller than a robin can fly 214 miles in a single night? Or that a tiny warbler weighing less than a 50-cent piece can travel 750 miles in just 11 days? Avian researchers at Powdermill Nature Reserve are making surprising discoveries about bird migration by attaching transmitters to birds and monitoring them using a new Motus Wildlife Tracking System. As tagged birds fly within a 10-mile radius of antennas attached to automated receivers, they’re recorded. The data is then uploaded into a central database, allowing scientists to track the birds from South America to Canada without having to recapture them. This is promising news, says Luke DeGroote, Powdermill’s avian research coordinator. “Of the 10,000 birds banded by our team each year, only one or two are typically recaptured,” he notes. So far, of the 50 birds tagged at Powdermill using Motus transmitters, 40 percent have been detected across two continents by the 400 Motus stations. Using this location information, scientists can conduct vegetation surveys to learn what birds are eating and what they’re using as shelter along their migration routes, identify potential threats to the birds, and inform conservation decisions.

90
Is how many years young Andy Warhol would have turned this August 6. Join us at Andy’s Museum on August 4 to celebrate a native son and Pop icon with family-friendly activities.

Museum joy and the 2018 Carnegie International

“It’s been three years in the making,” said curator Ingrid Schaffner on April 11, when she finally got to announce her picks for the 2018 Carnegie International, the 57th edition, which runs October 13–March 25, 2019. By residence or birth, the 32 artists and artist collectives hail from Austria, the Bahamas, Cameroon, Cherokee Nation, Colombia, England, Germany, Ghana, India, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Korea, Kuwait, Lebanon, Navajo Nation, Nigeria, Nonuya Nation, Pakistan, Palestine, Scotland, Senegal, Switzerland, the United States, and Vietnam. What they all have in common, Schaffner says, is the opportunity to create “a series of encounters with contemporary art.” What she wants for Carnegie International visitors is “to explore what it means to be ‘international’ at this moment in time, and to experience museum joy.” Most of the works will be new commissions, she notes. Among the new and ambitious projects: an unprecedented collaboration between novelist Han Kang and filmmaker IM Heung-soon; an interpretation of rejected works from the history of the Carnegie International by Pittsburgh-based Lenka Clayton and Jon Rubin; and two decades after the work debuted in the 1999 Carnegie International, Kerry James Marshall will revisit his Rythm Mastr comic series. And, at long last, works by conceptual artist Mel Bochner, a Pittsburgh native best known for his text-based paintings, will be part of the International.

“Everything in this exhibition is about ideas. It’s not a common way of looking at images today.” – Louise Lippincott, curator of Visions of Order and Chaos: The Enlightened Eye at Carnegie Museum of Art, as quoted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A clubhouse for the littlest learners

Aspiring scientists age 6 and under have a new exhibit space to explore at Carnegie Science Center. The Little Learner Clubhouse, powered by PNC Grow Up Great®, is a nature-inspired hub for free-play and hands-on activities. “Children are born scientists, brimming with natural curiosity,” says Ron Baillie, co-director of Carnegie Science Center. And the new space taps that innate curiosity through a host of interactive experiences, including a water table, a fun place for making real-world connections to our rivers and other water sources; a tomato stand, where kids sort red and green tomatoes using conveyors and vacuum tubes; and the baby garden, a farm-themed area where the youngest curious crawlers explore plush vegetables and animal figures. The new exhibit was funded through a $1 million gift from the PNC Foundation as part of the Science Center’s SPARK! Campaign, which concluded in 2017.

The post News Worthy appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Photos: Doug Dehaven

They’ve stood atop Carnegie Science Center’s iconic building since the year 2000: 12-foot-high letters that clearly demarcate the popular North Shore attraction. Their removal was part of the construction necessary to make way for the Science Center’s new, four-story Science Pavilion to be built off the east side of its campus, facing Pittsburgh’s scenic Point. Scheduled to open in June 2018, it will house nine new science, technology, engineering, and math learning labs, a two-story traveling exhibit space, and a window-lined, fourth-floor event space with stunning views of downtown Pittsburgh.

Nature’s wake-up call

Forget the dreaded drone of the alarm clock. How about waking up to nature’s early-morning chorus of bird songs, compliments of the black-capped chickadee, the white-throated sparrow, and other natives of the northeastern United States? Launched in March 2017, Dawn Chorus is Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s free alarm-clock app that’s already been installed on more than 55,000 iOS and Android devices and recently updated to version 1.1. Among its upgrades: Users can now share the app’s colorful bird illustrations in iMessage. Museum staff worked with Carnegie Museums’ Innovation Studio to develop the wake-up app, which encourages users to personalize their serenade by pre-selecting up to five birds from a 20-bird lineup. It’s a creative ode to the bird research that goes on daily at Powdermill Nature Reserve, the museum’s environmental research center in the Laurel Highlands, and the work of its partner in bird conservation, BirdSafe Pittsburgh.

“The whole idea of vast time hit me when I was around 8 or 9 years old. It was like a light bulb going off—a revelation. I’ve never gotten over it, the sense of the past as something to be explored.” 
– Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx (right), who toured Carnegie Museum of Natural History on April 20 before speaking about her latest novel, Barkskins, at the closing event of Strange Times: Earth in the Age of the Human.

Patrick Moore named director of The Warhol

Photo: Abby Warhola

Patrick Moore says he was a student at Carnegie Mellon University when “I fell in love with Pittsburgh and, not long after, Warhol became my favorite artist.” Now, as the new director of The Andy Warhol Museum, he’s set on continuing to peel back the layers of the artist’s life and work. “We have the opportunity to present aspects of Andy Warhol that the world is still unaware of—his importance as a filmmaker, the depth of his religious faith, and his continuing influence on young artists.” Moore joined the museum in 2011 as director of development, and went on to serve as deputy director and managing director before being named interim director in 2016. Before joining The Warhol, the seasoned arts leader spent 10 years with the Alliance for the Arts in New York City, where he was the creator and project director of The Estate Project, a program that addressed the impact of the AIDS crisis on the national arts community through advocacy, preservation, and fundraising.

1,300

The number of specimens on display in the Museum of Natural History’s Hillman Hall of Minerals and Gems. The hall’s longtime benefactor, Henry Hillman, who graduated from Princeton University with a degree in geology, passed away on April 14.

Wulfenite from Sonora, Mexico

Story making in The Hill

Bradford Young photographing the Hill District.

Just off an Academy Award nomination for the sci-fi drama Arrival, artist and cinematographer Bradford Young is debuting a new, very personal work as part of Carnegie Museum of Art’s Hillman Photography Initiative Lightime project. His multi-channel video installation, REkOGNIZE, opening June 16 in the Scaife Galleries, looks at Pittsburgh’s tunnels not only as literal passageways into the city but also as metaphors for the Great Migration, the exodus of more than six million African-Americans from the rural South to cities across the Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1915 and 1970. His creative
inspiration for the work: the museum’s vast photo archives of photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris, and the Hill District itself. “I’m using Charles Teenie Harris’ lens as a mapping of the sort of ever-changing social and physical landscape of the Hill District,” Young says. “Tennie’s community-embedded photographic techniques give us a really beautiful glance into how the Hill District evolved.” The filmmaker made sure he spent time in today’s Hill District. “In my practice as an image maker in an art context, I’m committed to understanding the nuance and depth of black life,” he says. “That’s the environment that reared me, raised me, beat me down, and held me up. I’m committed to that.”

The post News Worthy Summer 2017 appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.