ALL-NEW // Audio Guides!

Have you ever been exploring the museum and found yourself saying: I wonder how they made that, or I wonder what the inspiration behind that work was? Some of these answers may surprise you, and with our brand new audio guides, the Mattress Factory is offering you the chance to dig deeper into your favorite installations, and even into some behind-the-scenes commentary on the museum itself.

Simply go to mattress.org and click this image at the top of the page when it scrolls by, or click the Audio Guides icon on the bottom right corner of the home page. This will send you to the Mattress Factory's Soundcloud page, where you can listen to one of our museum educators walk you through the artist, materials, and vision behind the making of any installation of your choice currently on display. You can also listen to MF Co-Director Michael Olyjnik talk about everything from how Sarah Oppenheimer managed to build her hole in the floor, to the history of each of the buildings that now belong to the Mattress Factory, to the Mattress Factory's artist-centric mission and the seemingly endless variety of materials used to facilitate the vision and work of artists throughout the years.

Audio Guides can be listened to while exploring the museum, with complementary headphones at the door or with headphones of your own, or after you've visited and had the chance to experience the works for yourself. We hope you enjoy this round of guides, and there will be more to come with future exhibitions!

ALL-NEW // "Screenings 2015"

This is the third installment of Screenings, an installation of spontaneous film sketches inspired by the Mattress Factory's Gestures series. In this ongoing exhibition series, artists have been invited to create a new work specifically for the Mattress Factory's lobby projection screen. Each artist was asked to provide a quick and gestural "sketch" and encouraged to experiment outside their normal way of working. The second screening of 2015 will be Alexi Morrissey's Pirate Copy, which will run from March 13 - April 2 in the Mattress Factory Lobby.


ALEXI MORRISSEY
Pirate Copy
2015
Running Time: 38 minutes

Alexi Morrissey (b. 1971) is an American artist working in sculpture, performance and installation art. He has exhibited nationally and internationally working both as an auteur and a collaborator executing projects with individuals, collectives, institutions and governments. These concerns have led him to interrogate the commonplace notions of function, public space, history, language and the pervasive construct of narrative. He has done tele-present performance art with young prisoners, lectured on the history of planetary robotics and made sculptures that talk to the dead. He lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA.

ALL-NEW // "Screenings 2015"

This is the third installment of Screenings, an installation of spontaneous film sketches inspired by the Mattress Factory's Gestures series. In this ongoing exhibition series, artists have been invited to create a new work specifically for the Mattress Factory's lobby projection screen. Each artist was asked to provide a quick and gestural "sketch" and encouraged to experiment outside their normal way of working. The first screening of 2015 will be Jen Gooch's Conviction, which will run from February 20 - March 12 in the Mattress Factory Lobby.

JENN GOOCH
Conviction
2015
Running Time: 35 minutes

FROM THE ARTIST // The last few years my art and music practice has come to incorporate dance. Recently I began studying early American rhythmic dance styles, precursors to tap dance and clogging, like buck and flatfoot. These late 19th-early 20th century Southern and Mountain styles immediately reminded me of the way churchgoers would "dance in the spirit" throughout my upbringing in a Pentecostal church in Texas. The cheerful, driving rhythm of these early folk styles are not unlike the clap-on-the-upbeat, tambourine-fueled gospel of my childhood. While secular dance and "worldly" music were prohibited, church members were still encouraged to explore dance's cathartic qualities, though warned to avoid sexualized movements – "dancing in the flesh." This line between the spirit and the flesh, sacred versus secular, is a common struggle in the history of gospel as it grapples to deny and contend with its inseparable evil twin, the blues (and its offspring, rock and roll, soul, etc.).

Jenn Gooch is a multi-media artist and musician from Texas, living and working in Pittsburgh, PA. Her web-based community project One Cold Hand received international press, including USA Today and NPR. She recently ran a tailoring and textile studio, WERK, where she began Gender-Neutral Learn-to-Sew, a free workshop made possible in part part by a Seed Award from The Sprout Fund. Jenn is a multi-instrumental musician and singer/songwriter who dances flatfoot and fiddles with her band, Gift Horse. She received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University.

ALL-NEW // Teen Cooperative Program Offered!

Although the temperature is still in the single digits outside, here in the MF Education Department we can’t stop thinking about summer! Community Art Lab classes are almost full and we just finished selecting the teaching artists who will be involved with our completely revamped summer teen program, SUMMER ART COOPERATIVE.

Kevin Clancy's inflatable space.

The SUMMER ART CO-OP is an all-new program focused on collaboration, creative practice and exploration. It’s modeled after our artist in residence program and gives teens the support and space they need to develop new ideas, experiment with materials and collaborate with each other.

Teens will work together over the course of a month to plan their own event, while also spending time in the galleries, utilizing the museum’s resources and gaining exposure to local artists, independent thinkers, and all-around creative people through a series of workshops and skill shares. 

Drawing done by Nate McDonough.

Our hope for the program is that it is a little radical, kind of kooky and potentially-life changing—showcasing some of the infinite number of ways there are to exist as a creative person in the world. We think the idea of a starving artist needs a revamp, and our goal is to bring in folks who have figured out how to sustain their creative practices in ways that feel genuine, exciting and earnest to share their expertise with our students.


Want to learn about inflatable utopian spaces? You’ll get to meet Kevin Clancy and learn more about how to create portable social spaces. Want to know how to organize an alley-cat (or what an alley-cat is!)? Meet Anna-Lena Kempen who knows all about bike-related fun, events and art. Thinking about how to run a community engaged screen-printing shop? You’ll get to make some prints with Leslie Stem. What about how to cut records and make a communal mix tape? Learn all about it with Frederick Arnold. How pickles are made? We’ll make our own with Caiti Sullivan. How to make your comics look killer? Do some drawing with Nate McDonough. That and a lot more in store for our teens this summer.

Photo by Carson Davis Brown.

SUMMER ART CO-OP is FREE but you have to apply.

Please contact sarah@mattress.org with any questions or to submit an application.