Apply now! 2016 Summer Art Cooperative Applications Due May 1

If you're a high school student in Pittsburgh or the surrounding areas and would like to get involved with the Mattress Factory, consider joining the 2016 Summer Art Cooperative! The FREE program will run from July 6  - August 5, 2016, and will feature weekly workshops led by 10 local artists. In addition to workshops, Coop members will gain hands-on museum experience as they work together to plan an event, hear from museum staff about their careers, and more. Featuring teaching artists will include:

John Peña
Felicia Cooper
Jeff Weston
Lindsey Peck Scherloum
Rose Clancy
Henry Gepfer
Hudson Rush
Anna Bieberdorf

and more!

Applications for the Summer Art Cooperative are due Sunday, May 1 and can be emailed to Stephanie St. Aubin, or physically mailed to:

Mattress Factory
Attn: Stephanie St. Aubin
500 Sampsonia Way
Pittsburgh, PA 15212 

We hope you'll consider joining us for a summer of collaboration, creative practice and exploration! 

RECAP // Teen Summer Art Cooperative Program

This past summer 16 high school students spent three days a week at the museum participating in the inaugural year of the Mattress Factory's Summer Art Cooperative. We launched this program because we wanted to make the Mattress Factory a resource for students in the same way that we act as a resource for professional artists—a place where they can experiment, think big, and take their work to the next level.

The Summer Art Cooperative also addresses the ins and outs of being an artist- expanding our teens’ repertoire of techniques and methods, but also to help them figure out how to make art stay a part of their life as they transition into self-sufficiency and start thinking about their own career pathway. Basically, what we wanted to do with the Summer Art Cooperative is combine all of the “aha” moments that have helped to get us where we’re at—to pool our collective epiphanies together—so that pursuing a creative life doesn’t seem so impossible or financially unstable.

The students in this program had the opportunity to meet with ten different working artists and creative folks in the Pittsburgh community. The goals was to expose students to a variety of new mediums, new definitions of being an artists and the various ways to live a creative life. The students had workshops with John Peña (an artist featured in our recent Artists in Residence exhibition), Frederick Arnold, owner of a local record label, Caiti Sullivan, a master fermenter + pickler, Kevin Clancy, taught a workshop on inflatable utopias, Michael Koliner taught students about cob and hosted a workshop called “Mud Dance!” and more. Students also met with most of the Mattress Factory staff to truly understand what happens behind-the-scenes. From the first day of the program the students also had the challenge of planning their own event. The group decided that they wanted to host their own art exhibition featuring work by all of the Cooperative members on the theme of Identity.

The final celebration and showcase was a huge success. The Cooperative students organized and played experimental music made out of game boy loops and synth samples, showed an installations that included fake blood, fake birthday cakes, a smoking slime ball, an inflatable tetrahydron, and much much more. There was tons and tons of pizza and so many family and friends came out to support the students and celebrate all their handwork. It was an awesome summer and we can’t wait to see what our artists do next.

If you are interested in teen programming at the Mattress Factory, be sure to check out our new TEEN ART COOPERATIVE program. We will meet on Thursdays from 4-6pm at the museum. Applications are due Sunday, September 20th and space is limited! If you are interested in finding out more about the Teen Art Cooperative come to our info session on Tuesday, September 15th from 3:30-6pm. For questions and more information e-mail stephanie@mattress.org.

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.