Exhibition

2011 Pittsburgh Biennial

Duration

September 16, 2011 - December 11, 2011

Curator

Astria Suparak (Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University)

Artists

Justseeds, Lize Mogel, Sarah Ross, and Ryan Griffis, subRosa, Temporary Services, Transformazium

Co-organizers

Carnegie Museum of Art, Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh Filmmakers/Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (PF/PCA), and The Andy Warhol Museum

Setting a new precedent for city-wide collaboration among major art institutions, the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial is co-organized by Carnegie Museum of Art, Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, The Andy Warhol Museum, and Biennial founders Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Each of the five partner institutions will present a distinct exhibition of work by artists connected to the Pittsburgh region, reflecting each organization’s curatorial focus.

The Miller Gallery at CMU’s presentation, organized by gallery director Astria Suparak, features artists who work collaboratively, harmonizing individual perspectives, ideas, and talents. Embodying self-sufficiency within a cooperative spirit, the collectives and collaborators encourage us to reassess our assumptions and values, reveal the global in the local and the personal in the political, and imagine alternate realities and possible futures. The exhibition unveils four new installations and two recent projects, and includes sculpture, printmaking, painting, video, publications and workshops.

The artists in the Pittsburgh Biennial at the Miller Gallery at CMU choose to work with others, negotiating their individuality for the sake of the group or project. This collaborative approach echoes the long labor and union histories of the area, as well as the Biennial’s new partnership among local art organizations. This multigenerational selection of artists, who currently live in Pittsburgh or spent significant time here, also exhibit internationally, reflecting the connection Pittsburgh has to the global art world and broader discourses. The projects included here demonstrate the strength of collective voices in deciding the future of neighborhoods, cities, nations, and societies, and the importance of intimate conversations and compassionate listening.

Sarah Ross and Ryan Griffis of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon alumna Lize Mogel of New York debut Global Cities, Model Worlds, an installation that explores the spatial and social impacts of “mega events,” such as the Olympics and World’s Fairs. The host cities of these international spectacles seek to transform themselves into “global cities” through planning, architecture, and ideology. Locally, these events pave the way for redevelopment projects that can create new public resources such as parks, stadiums, or transportation infrastructure, but often result in significant displacement of residents or industry, reinforcing existing inequalities. This installation asks us to consider what would happen if a mega event came to Pittsburgh. Using evidence from dozens of site visits and more than a decade of research, Global Cities contrasts the promise of transformation with the on-the-ground realities of urban development.

Global Cities, Model Worlds, installation in Pittsburgh Biennial, Lize Mogel, Sarah Ross, and Ryan Griffis, 2011

Transformazium, comprised of Ruthie Stringer, Dana Bishop-Root, Leslie Stem, and Caledonia Curry, create an evolving installation with bricks from a condemned building they deconstructed near their home in North Braddock, an outer borough of Pittsburgh. During the course of the exhibition, collective members and gallery visitors will clean the bricks, visibly transforming waste to useable resources and underlining the economic viability and environmental sustainability of deconstruction, or “green demolition.” In neighborhoods that face high levels of property abandonment as well as persistent under-employment, deconstruction “makes room for the possibility to discover wealth in places of blight and energy in places of stagnation.” Transformazium’s relationship-based practice examines systems of values, with a mission to use the creative process to transform ideas into tangible social and economic benefits.

Detail from Tranformazium installation in Pittsburgh Biennial, 2011

Justseeds is a worker-owned cooperative of 26 printmakers in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, with members and a distribution center in Pittsburgh. For the Biennial they built a landscape overpopulated by billboards. The artists simultaneously subvert the hard-to-ignore, omnipresent advertising medium and playfully concede their didactic tendencies; instead of peddling products, the handmade billboards advocate for borderless nations, indigenous sovereignty, and immigrant rights. Justseeds believes in “the transformative power of personal expression in concert with collective action.”

Detail from Justseeds installation in Pittsburgh Biennial, 2011

subRosa, a collective whose core members are Hyla Willis of Pittsburgh and Faith Wilding of Providence, speculate on how feminism could affect the scientific world, as it has with art and other areas of culture. In their new installation Feminist Matter(s): Propositions and Undoings, they invoke cultural producers, experimenters, and processes that could be antecedents of this new way of thinking and working, including 4th century scientist and inventor Hypatia; Romantic poet William Blake; modernist writer Virginia Woolf; interior designers the Omega Workshop; para-surrealist painter and anarchist Remedios Varo; and groundbreaking geneticist Barbara McClintock. Inspired by Woolf’s antidote to the war-mentality brewed in boardrooms and command centers, subRosa re-envisions lab workbenches as a series of small tables for more intimate and conversational “tea-table thinking.”

Feminist Matter(s): Propositions and Undoings, (installation in Pittsburgh Biennial), subRosa, 2011

Temporary Services, composed of Carnegie Mellon alumnus Marc Fischer in Chicago, Salem Collo-Julin in Philadelphia, and Brett Bloom in Copenhagen, present two projects. Self-Reliance Library is a collection of recently published and out-of-print books and reference materials that the artists have found inspiring and hope will “provoke the reader, solve creative problems, or suggest imaginative directions for a range of creative practices.” Topics represented in the library include visionary architecture, nomadic living, self-publishing, everyday repair solutions, designs for alternate realities, survivalism, and skill-sharing. Personal Plastic is an ongoing project that explores the problem of plastic bags in our waste stream. Made from recycled bags, the banners feature quotes drawn from books in the accompanying library.

Self-Reliance Library with Personal Plastic, from Temporary Services installation in Pittsburgh Biennial, 2011

PARTNERING INSTITUTIONS

The Andy Warhol Museum
117 Sandusky Street on the North Shore.
Located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the place of Andy Warhol’s birth, The Warhol is one of the most comprehensive single-artist museums in the world. The Andy Warhol Museum is one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

The Carnegie Museum of Art
4400 Forbes Avenue in Oakland.
Carnegie Museum of Art was founded by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1895. One of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, it is nationally and internationally recognized for its distinguished collection of American and European works from the 16th century to the present.
The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue in Oakland (in the Purnell Center for the Arts).
The Miller Gallery is Carnegie Mellon University's contemporary art gallery, founded in 2000 by Regina Gouger Miller, artist, educator, businesswoman, and arts patron. The Miller Gallery produces exhibitions, projects, events and publications, with a focus on social issues.

Pittsburgh Center for the Arts
6300 Fifth Avenue in Shadyside.
Founded in 1945, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts is a non-profit community arts campus that offers arts education programs and contemporary art exhibitions, providing services and resources for individual artists throughout Western Pennsylvania. The Center is where the community can create, see, support, and learn about visual arts.

Pittsburgh Filmmakers
477 Melwood Avenue in Oakland.
Pittsburgh Filmmakers is one of the largest and oldest independent media arts centers in the country. Founded in 1971 to provide media-making tools to artists, Pittsburgh Filmmakers serves everyone from emerging artists to established artists to fellow non-profit organizations and students.