Video: The Art Connection

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…

Objects of Desire: Jon’s Pick

That mailbox. Oh man, that mailbox! If you’ve seen the mailbox that came hanging by my front door when we bought our house in Pittsburgh, you’d understand. Black-painted steel, with a bent newspaper rack and weird plastic emblem, I had to chip the former owner’s name and two sets of house numbers off of it with a razor blade. And it’s…

The Guerrilla Girls: What Are Museums For?

Japan is the Key

There is a lot of work that goes into preparing an exhibition, even the relatively small shows that go on view in Gallery One. Much of the work is not exactly glamorous—hours spent in libraries paging through deteriorating volumes covered in 100-year-old dust, or hours spent removing 100-year-old dust from a work of art—but it can still be very exciting…

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Pittsburgh and the World

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Time Exposed, 1991, Courtesy of the artist. The photographs on the left were placed inside the fountain which was allowed to freeze during the winter. From the 1991 Carnegie International. If you have the good fortune to visit the southern Japanese island of Naoshima—one of the six sites in our current exhibition at the Heinz Architectural Center,…

Installing the Presepio

Art handler Matt Cummings takes on the delicate task of installing figures in the middle of the scene for the Neapolitan presepio. Every year on the Monday—Wednesday prior to Thanksgiving, Carnegie Museum of Art staff installs the museum’s remarkable Neapolitan presepio. Beloved by Pittsburghers as an annual holiday tradition the presepio is an incredible multi-media work of art, created by 18th-century artisans in Naples….

Restoring the Urn of Life

George Barnard Grey’s Urn of Life, now on view in the Scaife Galleries. ORIGINS OF THE URN The Urn of Life (c. 1898–1900)  is the unfinished repository for the ashes of Anton Seidl, the Hungarian composer and conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Upon Seidl’s death, a group of the composer’s friends asked American sculptor George Grey Barnard to…

New Hire: Matt Hackler

What is your official title, and what are some of your general responsibilities? My official title is director of development, and I’m responsible for the museum’s fundraising. I create and execute plans for getting the dollars in the door that the museum will need to hold exhibitions, launch programs, and even run normal, everyday operations. This means developing proposals and…

Art of the Post-It

Visitors getting creative at the Natural History activity station BACKGROUND Carnegie Museum of Art shares its historic building with Carnegie Museum of Natural History. While these are two entirely distinct museums with separate staffs, boards, and programs, for many Pittsburghers the sprawling building we occupy is simply “The Museum” where one can see paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, prints, drawings, and contemporary…

New Hire: David D’Agostino

What is your official title, and what are some of your general responsibilities?  My official title is Multimedia Producer. It is my responsibility to document significant and seemingly insignificant time-based events, people, happenings, etc., that exist inside and outside the Carnegie Museum of Art, by means of digital and analog technology. It is then my job to archive, and edit…