Opportunities to experience a large selection of Saunders’ work haven’t been frequent. His paintings—often a cryptic concoction of fine line drawings and scribbled text, or objects glued to a canvas—have been known to the art world for decades, but large-scale exhibitions of his work have been few and far between. Until now.

Pittsburgh audiences will have that chance in Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden at Carnegie Museum of Art from March 22 through July 13. According to its curators, Flowers from a Black Garden is the most in-depth consideration of this 91-year-old artist’s oeuvre ever assembled. (Saunders is now retired, no longer making art, teaching, or giving interviews.)

It’s hard to pin down Saunders’ work because his paintings don’t really fit in, says Eric Crosby, who curated the exhibition for the Museum of Art with assistant curator Alyssa Velazquez. “They don’t conform to a specific movement or school of art that we might generally use to describe painting,” says Crosby.

For example, Layers of Being, a 1985 canvas that is part of the Museum of Art’s permanent collection, is chalkboard black, with colors splashed or smeared onto it in paint; there are notes stuck to it; calligraphic script written across it; a palette of color samples from a paint set stuck to the canvas; and equations and words scattered like a school blackboard’s residue. “He’s after a creative state where it’s hard to assign language to the process of painting,” Crosby notes.

Or, as Saunders himself has said, “I don’t want to know who I am. I paint  to try to access that.”

However, Crosby thinks there is at least one word that can help us enter into Saunders’ work.

“The word I always return to when I think about Saunders’ work is ‘love,’” says Crosby. “He has always related with such loving care to the visual languages of painting, those of his peers past and present. The way in which his work and personality—his very being—exude a love for the medium, and a love for those also engaged with it, is a very moving thing.”

There is love for painting as an art form. For example, in Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, American Painting from 1988, Saunders fixed the tools of his artistic practice—color tests and a stained plastic mixing tray for his pigments—against the black background for which he is well known. But just as often, that “love” takes the form of a passion for the expression that painting allows—endless color, variations of brushstrokes, and the vast collection of choices available to the artist.

“The word I always return to when I think about Saunders’ work is ‘love.’ … The way in which his work and personality—his very being—exude a love for the medium, and a love for those also engaged with it, is a very moving thing.”   

Eric Crosby, Henry J. Heinz II Director of Carnegie Museum of Art

“Some of us have a hard time connecting with abstract art,” says Crosby. “But the immediacy of Saunders’ work is very emotional. He gives us many points of entry into his paintings—love for the medium, love for those who spend time with his works, and a love for oneself.”

A Homecoming

Saunders is no stranger to Carnegie Museum of Art. It’s a connection that goes far deeper than his work in the museum’s permanent collection or exhibitions such as his 1996 Forum Gallery showing that reintroduced the artist to hometown art lovers.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1934, Saunders attended Schenley High School and, in the early 1950s, studied under Joseph Fitzpatrick, the museum’s legendary art educator who also taught Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and others. The experience left an indelible mark on Saunders that resonated throughout his career.

Nearly half a century later, when asked about artists or people that had influenced him, he was still citing it as the formative moment of his artistic life.

“I’m from Pittsburgh and they had a very unusual and outstanding art program for kids,” Saunders said in a lengthy sit-down interview with SFMoMA in 1994. “I’m part of a tradition, an educational process—and that is the city, and it’s the association with the city and its people.”

As a child, Saunders attended the famed Carnegie International, which is the longest-running North American exhibition of international contemporary art. It was there that a young pre-teenaged Saunders discovered Matisse, Picasso, and other master painters through their actual art rather than through books.

“On Saturdays, I had to walk through the museum—through the dinosaurs, through the birds—and a lot of what is in my art is what is recalled from that childhood detailing of the art experience.”

Raymond Saunders

Fitzpatrick’s Saturday-morning classes were reserved for the most artistically talented students in the Pittsburgh area, and there is no doubt Saunders was among them. By the age of 19, in 1953, Saunders had his debut solo exhibition at the Pittsburgh Playhouse Gallery in South Oakland. And while his post-university life was spent on the West Coast, Pittsburgh was never far from his heart, or his painting.

“On Saturdays, I had to walk through the museum—through the dinosaurs, through the birds—and a lot of what is in my art is what is recalled from that childhood detailing of the art experience,” he said in the 1994 interview. “There’s some retained thing that brings it into play—that’s been my life.”

That art experience reveals itself in the array of interests and images that Saunders combines in his work, but also more directly: In Joseph Fitzpatrick Was Our Teacher, from 1991, Saunders creates a palimpsestic canvas like a poster-covered city wall scattered with familiar Warholian subjects—Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley—as well as flyers and newspaper clippings from anti-war and anti-hunger protests.

In the same way that Saunders took in Picasso and Matisse alongside Renaissance and Impressionist art by wandering the halls of the museum, Crosby sees Flowers from a Black Garden as an opportunity for today’s audiences to encounter abstraction in a new way.

“When we think about the museum as a place where we can grow as individuals, grow our awareness of the world, art provides something immediate and visceral,” says Crosby. “And Saunders gives us that with intensity and passion. With each painting, you have such a sense of presence, of the artist and of yourself. It will be hard not to take that presence with you as you depart the museum—it can be an awakening to something just as it was for him.”

Black is a Color

Saunders’ career began to take off in the early 1960s. After earning degrees from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), in 1960 he left Pennsylvania for the last time and moved to Oakland, California, to earn his MFA. In the Bay Area, Saunders found his calling—a combination of his own deeply personal artistic practice and teaching art at California College of the Arts in Oakland and a few miles down the highway at Cal State, Hayward.

Soon after arriving in California, Saunders’ work was already displaying some of what would become his signature visual themes. His 1962 paintings Night Poetry and Winterscape show the artist beginning to work with a palette of blacks and grays, still life and landscape imagery peeking from behind rough brushstrokes and calligraphic lines; Something about Something is more colorful, with a trim of stenciled lettering. Within a few years, he was attaching objects and collages and writing in chalk on his large-scale paintings, like Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines.

But even among his colorful and object-laden assemblages, Saunders’ use of black became his signature. Within a few years, his canvases would become increasingly chalkboard-like, with matte black as their background and shades of black becoming dominant in many other works as well.

In 1967, the underground author and poet Ishmael Reed published an essay in Arts Magazine titled “The Black Artist: Calling a Spade a Spade.” Reed was aligned with the nascent Black Arts Movement and called for Black artists to make work that spoke directly to the Black experience in America, deriding those who didn’t as “retired humanists.” Saunders responded with an essay published in Arts Magazine and as a pamphlet called Black Is a Color.

In Black Is a Color, Saunders argues that to force all artists who are Black into the shoebox of “Black arts” is to do them (yet another) grave injustice; that he, for example, is Black and is an artist, but that these things aren’t always related to one another and shouldn’t have to be:

“I am not responsible for anyone’s entertainment. I am responsible for being as fully myself, as man and artist, as I possibly can be, while allowing myself to hope that in the effort some light, some love, some beauty may be shed upon the world, and perhaps some inequities put right.”

Saunders’ essay, in pursuit of a “wider reality of art, where color is the means and not the end,” proved influential. It arguably launched what became an in-print conversation over several years debating the meaning of “Black art.”

While Saunders says he has never wanted to “represent” Black culture with his art, Black identity has always been a key part of his work. Saunders often writes the names of Black artists on his canvases, as he does in the Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden painting. He’s also named pieces after Black icons Charlie Parker, Malcolm X, and Jack Johnson. Yet these paintings aren’t straightforward tributes: Malcolm X: Talking Pictures from 1994 doesn’t contain images of the civil rights leader; and while Jack Johnson (1971) is a portrait of the famed boxer—the first Black heavyweight champion of the world—he’s portrayed in an abstract field of oranges and reds, and relaxed in suit and tie rather than his more familiar fighting stance. This isn’t Jack Johnson, the boxer battling bigotry, but the retired success story.

It’s a complex attitude toward a question that is just as contemporary today as it was in 1967.

“It is a conversation that persists today: Should individual artists be expected to represent some essentialized idea of the experience of others?” says Crosby. “Saunders never provides easy answers.”

Being: An Artist

Saunders’ artwork does resonate with political and social questions—sometimes even directly.

In Black Men, Black Male, Made in the U.S.A. from 1994, images related to American racial and immigrant history (Sambo, the White Star Line) mix with Saunders’ abstract colors and painting-related ephemera. More often, however, references to Saunders’ politics are less overt. They are in the choices he makes, such as his black backgrounds or texts from protest fliers added to the canvas.

When asked to talk about those resonances, Saunders responded that he couldn’t—because, even while social and political issues are present in his work, he didn’t intentionally “put” them in there. When prodded on that topic in the 1994 SFMoMA interview, he says:

“I would say, tell me about the other resonances, because I’m sure that’s my intention. There are a lot of things going on, I’m an American, I’m Black, I’m a painter, so all those things enter into what it is that becomes what I present.”

Crosby suggests that these “other resonances” aren’t just outside of racial and social questions, but also outside of language itself.

“Saunders, in his artwork, is trying to inhabit a creative space that exists before our interpretation—before we assign it language,” says Crosby.

He adds that Saunders is trying to get at something that exists only in the abstract—something that he expresses without the ability to say it.

“We often hear about how abstract expressionist artists spill their emotional states onto the canvas,” Crosby notes. “When we talk about Pop art, we riff on the infinite reproducibility of the photographic image. Saunders dialogues with both—but he refuses to let the work conform.

“He’s after something deeper.”

The post Layers of Being appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

I have long expected that anthropologists would find in some cavern frequented by early man a mysterious assemblage of objects tucked away in a stygian niche. These would be categorized according to standard procedure, as ceremonial objects, the catchall designation for all artifacts whose true function evades explanation. I can even forecast some of the items that would be represented in the horde, with exact composition somewhat varied by location—a piece of veined quartz, a concretion, several sea shells, an iron nodule, perhaps a gold nugget or piece of amber. And being ancient enough to remember traveler’s curiosa in corner whatnots in Victorian parlors, I can second-guess young anthropologists and assert that early man, like his descendants ever since, suffered from pack-ratting.

The collecting urge is most catholic and unrestrained in childhood. In many persons it becomes submerged during school years and pursuit of a living. Some individuals achieve wealth and then begin to amass the great personal collections of art, books, or whatever that eventually enhance entire galleries in great museums; others, less affluent, specialize in inexpensive or yet unappreciated materials—the rubbish collector who salvaged Toby jugs, the visionaries who saved samples of barbed wire, the much traveled scientist who saved air-sickness bags—intriguing examples could be multiplied geometrically. Finally, there is a much smaller group so infected by the collecting urge that they jump from childhood into professional collecting with scant concern for their future—they become curators, or keepers of collections, and eschew both high salaries and the chance of selling personally assembled collections at greatly appreciated values.

Curators, however, and some advanced amateurs, for whom collections are the prime focus of daily life, rather than an off-hours hobby, have the rewarding satisfaction of utilizing collections for a variety of scholarly and research purposes of inestimable value to society. Any large grouping of related but dissimilar objects, either products of nature or works of man, may impress the eye, but no collection achieves its ultimate potential until it is studied and interpreted by successive generations of scholars.

For many years, I had the personal delight of adding to the herpetological collections of Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and studying and publishing upon some aspects of these collections. Then I had the administrative responsibility for the museum as a whole and the new challenge of finding support for the orderly growth of all the collections and their utilization for research, exhibition, and education.

Now I am engaged as a volunteer in assembling a relatively new collection and also in preserving some remnants of the museum’s history. Unlike other collections of the museum, vast in scope and internationally recognized, both the collection of nature portraits and the archival materials have only incipient greatness. They have already proved useful in many ways—for public exhibitions here and in other institutions, for illustrations in publications, and as source material for articles and lectures. They will not become truly significant, however, until artists and illustrators feel that they must contribute examples of their work in order to be represented, and until donors give or bequeath paintings, photographs, or memorabilia that cry for the long-term custody and scholarly utilization that only a museum can provide.

Read the full article

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Photo: John Schisler

There’s a movie poster of Harrison Ford’s iconic character Indiana Jones fixed to Hope Gillespie’s office wall at Carnegie Science Center. It is there for professional inspiration as much as workplace decor. “I cannot overstate the influence Indiana Jones has had on my life,” says Gillespie, who is the museum experiences officer at the Science Center. The film franchise piqued her interest in archaeology—she holds a bachelor’s degree in archaeology from The George Washington University and a master’s degree in the discipline from University College London. But she also just loves the character’s catchphrase about artifacts—“It belongs in a museum”—that informs her work to this day. Since joining the Science Center in 2021, Gillespie has put her archaeology background to use by spending months researching upcoming exhibitions. Her work ranges from studying delicate waterlogged objects in TITANIC: The Artifact Exhibition, the blockbuster exhibition that closed in April, to researching the process of animation for The Science Behind Pixar, which opened May 25. Gillespie trains staff and produces supplementary materials to enhance exhibitions. She also spends a lot of time answering visitors’ questions, which is the part of her job she loves most. “I love teaching,” Gillespie says. “I didn’t think that informal education was my superpower until I started to do it.”  

Q: What brought you to the Science Center?
A: I grew up (in McDonald, Pennsylvania) going to the Science Center and the Carnegie Museums in Oakland. In college I became interested in museum studies. Then in 2021, they were expanding the department and needed to hire  two assistant managers.

I’m not a scientist. I will be the first person to admit that. But there’s something special about being able to communicate science to other people. Archaeology is the most science-y of the humanities, but it is also the most human of the sciences.

Q: What do you love about your job?   
A: I’ve had moments that have absolutely brought me to tears. You see a little kid and he wants to tell you everything he knows about the Titanic. You tell him something he didn’t know. He goes home and builds a love of maritime history. It creates a lifelong love of science and that’s what really makes it worth it. It’s not just kids; adults come in and they’re curious. The curious parts of people are often the best parts of people, and that’s what we get to see here. 

Q: What has been an unusually challenging exhibition for you?
A: The most challenging for me personally is Pixar. We’re super excited to have it, but it’s not collection-based. There aren’t many cases with objects in it; it’s all interactive. I am learning the science behind computer animation. I am starting at ground zero and basically building my way up to understanding animation. I get to become an expert on something different every six months, which I never thought I would like, but I do.

Q: What role did you play during the run of TITANIC: The Artifact Exhibition and what do you think about its immense popularity as the most visited exhibition in Carnegie Science Center history?
A: I was involved in almost every aspect of Titanic. I did research, trained docents, trained museum staff, and created tours. I worked on the floors. I spent almost every weekend in the Titanic exhibition, helping people go through and setting expectations. The No. 1 thing that sticks out to me: It’s heartbreaking and very emotionally heavy to do. You’re talking about people’s lives and the night they died.

Q: What has been your favorite exhibition, and how did it appeal to your archaeology background?
A: As an archaeologist, I loved the Vikings: Warriors of the North Sea exhibition. I especially loved the gold Aby crucifix. It brings a lot of iconography together. I think it represented everything that the Vikings exhibition wanted  you to know about Viking culture, which is how connected it was, how it was faith-based, and how those interactions really shaped what it became.

Vikings have kind of a cartoonish image. I think the entire point of that exhibition is to show that they were much more than that; not just murdering and pillaging and raiding. They were artists. They were more than these warriors. I think that’s very much the point of creating exhibits, specifically about culture that way—it’s to show how multifaceted they are.

Q: If you could choose a new exhibition on any topic for the Science Center, what would it be?
A: I am an archaeologist, but specifically the area I studied was Egyptology. If I love anything academicwise, it’s Egyptology. There are two really cool traveling exhibits out there. I would love a King Tut exhibit. There’s also a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit I would love to get.

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Photo: Joshua Franzos

I often speak of our mission to turn our museums “inside out” by looking beyond our walls into the communities we strive to serve in ever-more creative and meaningful ways. Reflecting on a remarkable spring and summer at Carnegie Museums, I was struck by all the ways in which our four museums are expressing that aspiration.

• Once again, in Carnegie Museum of Art’s third iteration of its Inside Out free summer concert series, we celebrated the region’s rich cultural landscape by inviting a diverse group of performers and DJs to fill its Sculpture Courtyard with music and dance on Thursday evenings and Saturday afternoons.
• The USS Requin has long served to connect the people of our region with the ways in which advancements in technology have served the vital interests of our nation.
• As you’ll read in this issue’s cover story, Requin serves as a daily reminder of human ingenuity, service, and sacrifice, which was evident at Carnegie Science Center’s annual Memorial Day ceremony.
• In a celebration of scientific innovation and collaborative economic development at its finest, on June 1 Carnegie Science Center, Astrobotic (the “Moon Company”), and the tri-state region’s Keystone Space Collaborative were joined by Mayor Ed Gainey and U.S. Rep. Summer Lee as they announced plans to develop a Space and Defense Innovation District on the city’s North Side.
• On Juneteenth (June 19), Carnegie Museums, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and the University of Pittsburgh announced an inclusive Call for Diverse Art that asks contributing writers, visual artists, and performers to envision what “a just and equitable Pittsburgh” would look like. Submissions can be made through early fall, with a public art showcase planned for 2024.
• On June 27, The Andy Warhol Museum unveiled its newest addition to The Pop District—Anatomy of the Human, a stunning mural by local artist Mikael Owunna. Citizens sponsored the installation and is supporting The Warhol Academy—the workforce development arm of The Pop District—with a $350,000 gift.
• In July, Carnegie Museum of Natural History announced it had received a $225,000 grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation to lead a regional education campaign on the dangers of invasive plant species—partnering with the local Audubon Society, Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, Pittsburgh Botanic Garden, and other groups.
• Finally, in August, we joined our friends at the Allegheny Regional Asset District (RAD) in celebrating The Andy Warhol Museum, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, and the Heinz History Center—each of which placed in the top-five of their respective categories in a USA Today survey of the country’s best museums. With the generous support of the Allegheny Regional Asset District, admissions to all three attractions were free for the entire month of August. 

These are the kinds of experiences, partnerships, and programs that make the four Carnegie Museums such vital contributors to the vitality of our region. 

With best regards for a peaceful and fruitful fall season,

Steven Knapp
President and Chief Executive Officer
Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh

The post President’s Note: Fall 2023 appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Photo: Joshua Franzos

Dippy’s international star status was all the doing of Andrew Carnegie, of course.  He was so proud of the discovery he had financed that he had his museum staff create nine full-size replicas of the fossil and sent them to nine capital cities around the world. London’s Dippy was the first—a gift from Andrew Carnegie to King Edward VII.

Starting with the first Carnegie International in 1896, Andrew Carnegie sought to make the world a smaller, more accessible, and better place through the cross-cultural exchange of both art and science.

But Carnegie was motivated by more than mere pride. Starting with the first Carnegie International in 1896, Andrew Carnegie sought to make the world a smaller, more accessible, and better place through the cross-cultural exchange of both art and science. Well over a century later, his Pittsburgh museums are still guided by that same aspiration.

On September 24, we celebrated the opening of the 58th Carnegie International, which reflects an even wider global reach than any of its predecessors. This was my first time witnessing the truly awe-inspiring work that goes into bringing the world to Pittsburgh for an International exhibition.  On top of all the logistical complications of contacting artists and transporting their works across oceans and boundaries, the Museum of Art curators this time faced the additional challenge of a world-wide pandemic!

Bringing the world together through art and science has never been more urgent.  Among his many interests, Carnegie was a passionate advocate for international peace, as demonstrated by his building the Peace Palace in The Hague, which is now the home of the International Court of Justice. His vision was shattered by the outbreak of the First World War, and too many wars have followed since then. 

This year, serendipity again brought both the Carnegie International and Diplodocus carnegii into the international spotlight—a fitting conjunction, as both remain beacons of the role that art and science can play in fostering international understanding and reminding us of our shared humanity.

Steven Knapp

President and Chief Executive Officer,
Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh

The post President’s Note: Winter 2022 appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

“I remember sitting down and wondering what I could make a sign with,” Curry recounts, slowly, wistfully. “I found this cardboard box and started ripping it up.”

It was August 17, 1963, and the tenants in her Homewood apartment building had banded together to protest its deteriorating conditions. Rumor had it The Pittsburgh Courier was sending ace photographer Teenie Harris to document the protest.

As for the young Mrs. Curry’s choice of words for her sign, she says, simply, “I was just trying to think of what I could write that would mean something. At the time, Squirrel Hill was THE place. You wouldn’t [as a Black person] be caught dead there. If you were in Squirrel Hill, you were either working or just passing through.

“I worked for someone there for a while, and I would think, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to live up here and have this nice house, and this nice garden?’” she says. “So, that’s why I wrote what I did—it just popped in my mind. God put it in my head, and I put it on the paper.”

Charles “Teenie” Harris, Daisy Curry feeding bottle to seven month old Terrence and holding protest sign reading “Do your children live like this in Squirrel Hill? We are still human not animals,” in small bedroom, August 1963, Heinz Family Fund, Copyright:© Carnegie Museum of Art, Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive

Curry thought her quiet protest had ended there. She was busy raising a houseful of kids, moving out of the Brushton Avenue apartment building with her husband and six (soon to be seven) children not long after the protest. Ten years later, she would earn a nursing degree—she still vividly recalls her kids yelling, “That’s my mama!” at the graduation ceremony—and over the next 20 years she cared for patients at four state-run psychiatric hospitals.

“I never paid that day another thought,” Curry says.

She never knew The Pittsburgh Courier had published Teenie Harris’ photo of her along with a story about the protest. And she had no idea that, nearly six decades later, that same photo hung from the wall of her hometown art museum.

That is, until she got a phone call from Steve Zelicoff in December 2021. He was looking for the Daisy Curry pictured in the photograph at Carnegie Museum of Art. “I said, ‘Are you sure it’s me?’ I was shocked,” Curry recalls. “And then he described me in the photo, holding a baby.”

Zelicoff, a longtime docent at the Museum of Art, had looked at that image countless times. “I love this photograph. I use it on every one of my tours. It is so poignant, as is much of Teenie Harris’ work. He exposed so many issues that people of that time were facing.”

“Visitors come into the gallery and comment on this photo all the time,” says Charlene Foggie-Barnett, community archivist for the Teenie Harris Archives at Carnegie Museum of Art. “It’s one of the most powerful photos in the collection, and one of the most requested from outside publications.

“This is a wonderful example of how Teenie’s photos bring people together in such poignant ways,” she says, “and Steve’s kindness deserves to be acknowledged.”

Since acquiring the Teenie Harris Archives in 2001, the museum has been on a mission to identify as many of the photos’ subjects as possible and contact them for context. But when Zelicoff asked Foggie-Barnett about Daisy Curry, who is identified on the gallery label thanks to the article in The Pittsburgh Courier, he learned the museum had yet to find her. So Zelicoff took on the task.

The work of Teenie Harris, particularly the photographer’s images of life in the city’s Hill District, has always hit home for Zelicoff. “I spent a lot of my early childhood in the Hill District,” he says. “My parents were Polish immigrants and were raised in the Hill District. My mother’s sister still lived in the family home when I was growing up, and on Saturdays my mother would drop us off at the family house and we would run wild in the neighborhood. I loved those days.”

After some online searches, Zelicoff not only spoke with Curry by phone but visited her at her home in Duquesne, presenting her with a framed print of her 1963 photograph.

“Once I knew you were living nearby, I had to meet you!” Zelicoff exclaims to Curry as he and Foggie-Barnett give a tour of the museum’s Teenie Harris gallery to her and her husband, Lewis Simmons (her first husband passed away in 2001). Zelicoff had wanted to bring Curry to the Teenie Harris gallery since visiting her, and today it’s finally happening.

“This is a wonderful example of how Teenie’s photos bring people together in such poignant ways.”
-Charlene Foggie-Barnett, community archivist for the Teenie Harris archives at Carnegie Museum of Art

“This is what Teenie does best: teach the truth of how we lived as African Americans,” Foggie-Barnett says to the visiting couple. They move around the gallery, stopping at an image of a civil rights protest in downtown Pittsburgh. “And this is what it looks like to support a national civil rights movement here in Pittsburgh.”

But not all protests are large, and loud, and public, she adds. “They can be small, silent protests, in a Homewood apartment building, by someone like Daisy Curry.”

As they leave the Teenie Harris gallery and pass other docents, Zelicoff shouts, “This is Daisy Curry!” They all flock to meet her.

Still not so sure about her iconic status at the museum, Simpson shakes her head. “Never in my wildest dreams …”

The post The Story of Daisy Curry appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Luce, a museum preparator, carefully uses his bare hands to examine the hand-colored mezzotints depicting scenes overflowing with fresh flowers and fruit, destined for an upcoming Gallery One exhibition celebrating the humble genre of still life.

“Personally, I love older works,” Luce says as he evaluates the condition of the newly acquired prints. “Older paper quality—200 to 400 years old—is so good. When pasting on the back of it, you know how it will react, it’s predictable, and predictable is good.”

As the person who has matted and framed nearly every work on paper on view in the galleries over the last three decades (and then removed the frame for storage purposes), Luce knows his paper. Preparators forgo the use of disposable nitrile gloves when handling these light-sensitive treasures, he explains, because the physical touch tells them a lot about a material that has many variations—a paper’s weight, level of transparency, how absorbent it may be. “I’m at the point now where just by handling a piece, I know what will happen with it,” says Luce, who is also an artist and sculptor.

This knowing is key, as each object in the museum’s collection presents its own challenges when caring for it. While frame sizes at the museum have largely been standardized for cost and efficiency purposes, Luce regularly customizes mattes using acid-free board. To attach the works to the backing board, he uses the time-proven method of making Japanese tissue hinges. With wheat starch paste at the ready for adhesion, Luce shows an onlooker how the homemade papers are made out of fiber, making it vital to determine the direction of the grain first because it will determine the strength of the hinge.

Luce moves slowly and deliberately as he goes about his work in the museum’s matting room—a beautiful and functional workshop largely of his own making. A talented furniture maker, he built and installed the cabinets and repurposed the track lighting originally used in an installation from a past Carnegie International. It’s in this space that he’s also crafted from plexiglass hundreds of mounts used to display books of all kinds in the galleries. Because the mounts are designed to be both book and page specific—made to the exact shape of a particular opened book’s spine—they’re labor intensive. Especially because if one thing is certain in the museum world, Luce says with a laugh, it’s that “curators always change their mind.”

The rural New York state native who moved to Pittsburgh in 1975 to attend the former Ivy School of Professional Art on the North Side (where he hung out with fellow student and eventual art star Keith Haring) would certainly know. Counting his work on the upcoming still life exhibition, he’s contributed to an extraordinary 380 exhibitions, including eight Carnegie Internationals. Preparing for his August 2 retirement, when newly hired preparator Malia Dyson will take over his duties, Luce recalls the one time he matted, framed, installed, and de-installed a small show—including the mounting and removal of the wall labels—all by himself. For another installation, he and a small team framed 3,000 pieces of 8.5-by-11-inch type pages that they also had to keep in sequential order while hanging the work in a tile fashion from floor to ceiling.

Asked what he makes of his creative and lasting contributions, in his unassuming way, Luce says, simply, “It’s pretty cool.”

The post Sights Unseen: In the Frame appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Lyle’s flying fox (Pteropus lylei)

Spooky and special: There are more than 1,400 species of bats, and they can be found on every continent except Antarctica. Only three species suck blood. Most eat insects—some bats can eat up to 2,000 insects each night, saving many crops from being destroyed and reducing the need for pesticides. About 30 percent of bat species eat fruit, pollen, or nectar. Bananas, dates, coconuts, vanilla, and avocados all depend on bats for pollination.

U.S. agriculture has become 48 times more toxic to honeybees, and likely other insects, over the past 25 years, a study published in the journal PLOS One warns. The cause, the study asserts, is almost entirely the widespread use of a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, which when absorbed by plants are incorporated into all of their tissues—stems, leaves, pollen, nectar, and sap. This sharp rise in toxicity appears to match the acute declines in bees, butterflies, and other pollinators, leading some experts to caution of an impending “insect apocalypse.”

Flying makes people do weird things—science says so. A growing body of research shows that engine noise, cabin pressure, and stress can trigger physical and emotional changes that alter human behavior. Fliers cry more at movies in the air. High noise levels lower our ability to taste sweet things and draw us to other flavors, say researchers at Cornell. One of those flavors is umami, a savory taste category sated by tomatoes. Though tomato juice is a relatively unpopular drink on the ground, when the beverage cart rolls around in the air it’s in high demand.

Low-income students who are highly engaged in the arts are twice as likely to graduate from college as their peers with no arts education, according to research by the National Endowment for the Arts.

A traditional Irish turnip jack-o’-lantern from the early 20th century. Photographed at the National Museum of Ireland–Country Life.

The jack-o’-lantern tradition dates back centuries, when people in Ireland decorated turnips, beets, and potatoes to frighten away a mythical character named Stingy Jack. Irish immigrants brought the tradition to America, home of the pumpkin, and the popular fruit became an integral part of Halloween.

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Last year, Carnegie Museums welcomed a record number of visitors—well over 1 million. Maybe that’s because, thanks to your generous support, the museums are constantly redefining what it means to engage and inspire people of all ages. Inspiration doesn’t just happen when families and school groups visit the museums. It also occurs at any number of adults-oriented programs that are expanding the Carnegie Museums community in often surprising ways.

As many as 2,000 grown-up explorers show up for each of Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s After Dark events—to have fun and socialize, tour the galleries, and interact with museum scientists and educators. Many haven’t been inside a museum in years, or ever; and programs like Jurassic Park After Dark and Potterfest After Dark are changing that. “People are laughing in our halls. People are dancing in our halls,” says Mallory Sickle, the museum’s assistant director of lifelong learning. “For a natural history museum, that’s radical.” At Carnegie Science Center, monthly 21+ Nights are accomplishing the same radical end goal: bringing more first-time adult visitors into the Science Center, and back again.

So, too, are the Museum of Art’s Third Thursday events, which lean a little younger at 18 and over and feature everything from silent discos, to art making, to unconventional gallery tours. And as part of the Carnegie International, 57th Edition, the museum also created an opportunity of a lifetime for more than 1,600 aspiring artists: the chance to be a part of 35 drawing sessions led by International artists.

All told last year, nearly 30,000 people participated in Carnegie Museums’ adult programs, planned and executed in collaboration with community partners who bring their own unique perspectives. Christine Davis, for one, approves: “What an experience, practicing yoga in the Great Hall!”

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For years, I was a casual visitor and ardent Carnegie Museums fangirl, proudly brandishing my Dual membership card. I’d pop in with a friend on a Saturday. This was the “greatest hits” version of museum attendance: visit a few biomes, check out some human epochs, wave to the Protoceratops (the best dinosaur), and walk out the door. I treated the museums as “a given”: It was a given that I could walk into a marble palace full of dinosaurs, priceless artworks, and ancient artifacts. At a certain point, those givens began to accumulate for me, because I realized that from seminars to summer camps, the museums were more than a low-cost edutainment option. It was then that I knew I needed to move the museums from being a given to instituting my own process of giving.

I started moving from given to giving by committing to monthly contributions, and I became a Guild-level member. This was also around the time when I received my dream job as a freshman literature teacher. A student’s freshman year stands as a survey into a larger literary world.

During my first few years, I spent just about every waking moment preparing and researching. Of course, on just about any given Saturday, I visited Carnegie Museums in Oakland. And though I did stop by the Protoceratops (again: the best dinosaur), my time became work time. Sure, my museum fangirl status had its perks. Because I loved the museums, because I did visit for my own delight, I knew the collections, and I knew where they could help me and thus help my students. Truly, the museums stood as a given for so long that I forgot about their status as a learning institution until I was curating knowledge for the next generation.

In my classroom, I pride myself on my depth of knowledge for each of my units. In the fall, it’s A Study in Scarlet, investigating and deducing with Sherlock and Watson. As Christmas rolls around, it’s short fiction by Truman Capote and Isak Dinesen, stories of patched-quilt families, disparate scraps of worn and warm people forming something lasting. I pinball between William Shakespeare’s Verona and Harper Lee’s Alabama in the spring, and when summer starts to swelter, I land on the shores of Ithaca along with Odysseus, finally done after an unexpected and relentless journey.

Fiction, it must be known, does not exist in a vacuum. It is instead the product of the time period each author experienced. It is difficult, for example, to understand Sherlock Holmes’ London in A Study in Scarlet without understanding its key for-hire transportation method (the hansom cab). And it’s impossible to understand the widespread privation in To Kill a Mockingbird (how is it that a lawyer and his children are poor?) without understanding the Great Depression.

The museums, more than any other institutions of continued learning, give me an education that knits together the continuous thread of scientific theory and thought, the natural environment and human history. The museums answer my whys and hows better than any digital assistant or search engine. The museums are my second home, my favorite classroom.

Though I am a public schoolteacher and not of the class of prodigiously pocketbooked philanthropists who founded my museums, I am still a key donor to an organization that gives me far more than any of the endless givens ever could. My museums give me keys to give back to future generations. And that’s why I’ll keep giving, and why I hope maybe you will, too.

To learn more about giving opportunities at Carnegie Museums, contact Liz McFarlin-Marciak at mcfarlinmarciakl@carnegiemuseums.org or 412.622.8859.

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