Send your films by June 21!
Visit 2mff.cmoa.org for your entry form
Culture Club: 2-Minute Film Festival
Play is creative. It means testing boundaries, and taking risks. In two minutes, just how playful can you be? Join us for the third installment of the 2-Minute Film Festival, “At Play.”
You are invited to submit your most creative, most innovative, briefest video engaging in some way with the notion of play. Films selected will be screened in Carnegie Museum of Art’s courtyard for this late-night Culture Club starting at 9:00 p.m. (festivities and some hands-on activities start at 7:30 p.m.) Each selected entry will be eligible for People’s Choice and Juror’s Choice prizes, and for the first time this year, films chosen for the festival screening will also be made available on the 2MFF website where visitors will be able to vote for their favorite prior to the event.
Submission deadline: June 21, 2013
Please see the Entry Form for more info, terms and conditions, and send your best 2-minute film to:
Philip Leers
2-Minute Film Festival
Carnegie Museum of Art
4400 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-4080
Get the Oh Snap! poster
$10, featuring 1,488 photos by you!
Video: The Art Connection
Filed under: Behind the Scenes, Contemporary Art, Decorative Arts & Design, Education, Fine Arts, Photography, Uncategorized, What's New
We just wanted to say thanks to everyone who came out on Sunday, April 14 to mark the opening of The Art Connection Annual Student Exhibition! Check out the video to see our student artists hard at work in the museum’s studios as they prepared for this year’s exhibition. Throughout the school year, students in grades 5–9 worked through the creative process with the help of teaching artists in the museum’s galleries and studios. Artworks in this year’s exhibition reflect the influence of recent exhibitions such as White Cube, Green Maze: New Art Landscapes, Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Art at the World’s Fairs, 1851–1939, and Cory Arcangel: Masters.
Wrapping up Oh Snap!
Oh Snap! combined 13 new photographs from our collection with nearly 1,500 photo submissions from the public.
Wrap Party, Lytro Workshop, and more—Saturday, May 4
First things first—submissions for Oh Snap! Your Take on our Photographs are now closed, but we are excited to celebrate the thoughtful and creative collaboration of the hundreds of participants in the project. Don’t miss the three closing events for Oh Snap!, with a special focus on new photographic technology. A Lytro workshop gives you the chance to try out a whole new kind of camera in our galleries. A public talk with industry insiders from Lytro and GigaPan examines how these new technologies will change the way we take pictures in the future. And at the wrap party you can see all the photos in the exhibition, share your views on our feedback wall, and get your own copy of the poster showing details from the works sent in by you (below). We hope to see you all there! The exhibition will still be on view in the Forum Gallery through May 12, but as the end of the project nears, it’s a good time to think back on how it all came together.
The limited-edition Oh Snap! poster (36.75 x 24 inches). ORDER
Process
“If you’re not innovating you’re stagnating” asserted Jeff DeGraf, founder and guru at the Innovatrium, a consulting firm/think tank in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Jeff was speaking to small teams of staff members from six American art museums, including Carnegie Museum of Art and the Warhol that had signed on for an 8-month project to explore what’s working and what’s not in art museums with the goal of injecting a spirit of innovation and experimentation into our organizations. Practically speaking, we all had our sights set on devising new ways of staying relevant to our communities, especially to our younger visitors. Oh Snap! is the most recent manifestation of the ongoing soul-searching and fresh thinking inspired by our Innovatrium experience. We’re feeling pretty good about how the project has turned out.
The Oh Snap! cross-departmental team brainstorming names for the project—sometimes you just have to get up on a table to get it done.
While Oh Snap! presents 13 works of art—all recently added to the museum’s photography collection—framed and hung on the walls of the museum’s Forum Gallery, the relationship to a traditional exhibition pretty much ends there. We’re calling it a “collaborative photography project,” and collaborative it is. The 13 photographs from the museum’s collection were selected by a cross-departmental team with the explicit goal of motivating the public to send to us photographs that are somehow inspired by one of the museum’s works. As new photographs came in from the public, we printed and hung them in the gallery next to the related museum work. Visitors could view the museum’s Oh Snap! selections either in the gallery or on the project’s website.
Working on the gallery model to figure out the best way to accommodate submissions from the public.
Opening a gallery that was purposefully “unfinished” was an entirely new experience for us and signaled a new relationship we’re interested in pursuing with our audience, one in which our expertise comes together with the public’s curiosity and imagination to leave all of us a bit richer for the experience. We’re also recognizing that visitors increasingly are not limited to only those who come through our physical doors. As our physical gallery walls have changed over the past two months, our digital “gallery” has grown and changed as well. Photographs were only accepted through the website, making the web a crucial element in the project. When a submission made its way onto the wall, the sender received an email with a free pass to come see it. Submissions have been sent from locations remarkably distant from Pittsburgh, including Peru, Taiwan, France, Germany, and Finland. The project is helping us explore how Carnegie Museum of Art might build relationships through our collection and the ideas it inspires to individuals who might never have the opportunity to be our physical visitors.
Read Jeffrey Inscho’s Oh Snap! overview on Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0 blog.
Education staff reviewed all submissions as they came in, printing and posting them directly in the gallery.
Response
Two months ago we had a nearly empty gallery and have watched Oh Snap! take shape a little bit each day—growing and transforming thanks to public participation. So the first question of the project—would anyone find it compelling enough to send us their photographs—has been answered with nearly 1,500 submissions. But beyond seeing a full gallery, we are even more rewarded by what’s happening in the gallery and what participants are saying (quotes from the gallery comment book):
—“Being able to contribute to an exhibition was thrilling. I hope the Carnegie will do many more things like this! Overall, I think the project is Brilliant!”
—“I think it’s a great way to get the community engaged in what it means to make a photograph art.”
—“I love seeing the public’s perspective on these photographs.”
—“Brings art into our lives and our lives into art.”
—“I could spend all day here but I won’t ‘cause I’m going home to look for something I can submit.”
Ok, it’s pretty hard not to feel elated about comments like that! Many similar messages in the gallery comment book make it clear how appealing it is to be part of the experience. But more than just rallying the crowd, Oh Snap! has also motivated real looking, thinking, and responding to art. The project doesn’t ask for any photograph you want to send us, it invites the public to collaborate with us in interpreting—finding meaning—in specific works in our collection.
It seems that by literally “leaving room” on the gallery walls for the public’s photographs, visitors took up the challenge of seeing the museum’s works as catalysts provoking reflective thinking, inspiring comparison, and motivating action. In Oh Snap!, we actively welcomed those responses, sharing them with other visitors, and acknowledging that a museum experience is not one-directional. The project has produced a real and dynamic partnership between museum and public. That partnership inspires further impact as new visitors—whether contributors or not—linger in the gallery every day comparing museum photographs and public photographs, chatting actively with friends, speculating about connections, and marveling at the range of interpretations a single work of art might inspire.
Charlee Brodsky, Last Smokestacks at the Homestead Works, c. 1995, gelatin silver print, Gift of the artist, 2009.29.4 © 1995 Charlee Brodsky. By permission
Charlee Brodsky’s image, Last Smokestacks at the Homestead Works is one of the photographs from the museum’s collection selected for Oh Snap!; it is now surrounded by over 170 public photographs (examples below). Several of them capitalize on the image’s powerful composition—a broad flat plane of dirt punctuated by a single vertical element directly in the center of the scene. Many of these submitted photographs achieve a similar sense of order, calm, and solitude through similar arrangements of horizontals, verticals, and measured proportion. But others take a different approach. One submitted photograph offers no visual similarities to the museum’s work but instead shows the facade of Pittsburgh’s United Steelworkers Building, perhaps calling to mind the thousands of workers who once brought life to the site, the former Homestead Steel Works plant. I hear lots of gallery visitors wondering aloud about a photograph of a limp and lifeless bird and another of a dead fish stuck in an expanse of wet sand both of which, when placed near Charlee’s quiet image, take on a sense of poignancy. Then there is the picture of the glowing ball poised in the center of a well-mowed back yard. What might that one be about? These leaps in thought and imagination show just how much room for interpretation the project allowed. Thankfully, art endures because it keeps speaking to people about its own context but also in new and personally meaningful ways.
Some stats
Age breakdown of the nearly 600 contributors:
- Not indicated: 7%
- 18–24: 21%
- 25–34: 20%
- 35–54: 29%
- 55–64: 14%
- 65 and over: 8%
How contributors heard about the project:
- From a friend: 38%
- At the museum: 33%
- Online: 27%
- Print media: 2%
Public Talk: Lytro & GigaPan Photography: Technology + Art
Photography will never be the same! Before the Oh Snap! Wrap Party, come get the inside track on two new innovative photographic technologies, Lytro and GigaPan, and hear from Lytro Technical Staff Member Mugur Marculescu, and Mike Franz from GigaPan Systems. These experts are joined by local photographers Dylan Vitone and Charlee Brodsky in a discussion about technology and art moderated by Museum of Art director Lynn Zelevansky.
Call 412.622.3288 or register online. This event is a collaboration with the Hillman Photography Initiative.
Try one of these amazing cameras for yourself. Sign up for our Lytro Workshop earlier the same day (1–4 p.m.).
Want to just come celebrate Oh Snap! and all the great photos from the project? Don’t miss the free Wrap Party!
Haiku Happy Hour
“A good haiku is like a finger pointing at the moon; once you’ve seen it, you no longer need the finger.”
Ever wonder about haiku, where it came from and what it really is? Come on out to this week’s Culture Club on Thursday April 18 for happy hour (5:30–9 p.m.) and a gallery conversation (6– 7 p.m.). Listen to some classic and modern haiku, find out what haiku really are, and have some fun trying your hand writing a few of your own, based on the woodblocks and ivories in the new exhibition, “Japan is the Key…”: Collecting Prints and Ivories, 1900-1920. This stunning show is not to be missed for longtime fans as well as newcomers to the world of the Japanese art.
Don’t think you can write haiku? Here’s a writing prompt we’ll be using to evoke your inner haiku master:
- Write two lines about something beautiful in nature, using the prints or ivories in the show to give you ideas. Don’t worry about counting syllables yet.
- Write a third line that is a complete surprise, that is about something completely different from the first two lines.
- Look at the three lines together. Does the combination of these two seemingly unrelated parts suggest any surprising relationships? Does it give you any interesting ideas?
- Finally, tidy the poem up—see if there is anything you can emphasize, by adding or subtracting from the poem, to heighten the effect. If you wish, try to put it in a three-line, 5–7–5 format or, better still, simply three lines of short–long–short.
See, easy peasy… and if you think that you might need another prompt to get the haiku juices flowing, the evening’s happy hour should supply all that’s desired.
Here are some recent in-gallery responses from visitors to “Japan is the Key…”:
Don Wentworth is a Pittsburgh poet whose focus is on the revelatory nature of brief, haiku-like moments. His book, Past All Traps, was shortlisted for the Haiku Foundation’s 2011 Touchstone Distinguished Books Award.
Oh Snap! Wrap Party
Thanks to you, we’ve received over 1,400 amazing photos as part of Oh Snap! Your Take on Our Photographs. It’s time to party! Join us to celebrate this innovative project.
- See the exhibition and share your views on our feedback wall
- Screen print with Artists Image Resource using a selection of contributed images (bring your own light-colored shirt, bag, etc.)
- Tag your photo on our GigaPan panorama of the gallery
- Get your own limited-edition poster featuring images from every contributor ($10, sample below)
- Check out other new photography gear in our store (Lomo and Lytro, anyone?)
This event is a collaboration with the Hillman Photography Initiative.
Get your hands on a whole new kind of camera. Sign up for our Lytro Workshop, 1–4 p.m.
Learn about the future of photography from two gurus in the field. Check out the public talk Lytro & GigaPan Photography: Technology + Art before the party, 6:30–7:30 p.m.
Lytro Photography Workshop
Ready to venture into new photographic technology? Try out a Lytro camera, the first consumer camera that records the entire light field, allowing you to take living pictures that you can endlessly refocus after you take them. To help celebrate the amazing response to Oh Snap! Your Take on Our Photographs, Mugur Marculescu from Lytro’s Technical Staff will lead the workshop—including a photo walk where you’ll learn how to shoot with the Lytro and maximize its capabilities, and a computer lab session where you’ll learn how to upload, edit, and manipulate your images.
Call 412.622.3288 or register online. This event is a collaboration with the Hillman Photography Initiative.
Learn about the future of photography from two gurus in the field. Check out the public talk Lytro & GigaPan Photography: Technology + Art later the same day, 6:30–7:30 p.m.
Want to just come celebrate Oh Snap! and all the great photos from the project? Don’t miss the free Wrap Party that night!
Follow us on Instagram
@carnegiemuseum_art