Over the four years of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s support for Collecting Knowledge Pittsburgh, the History of Art and Architecture department is presenting a series of intensive week-long workshops designed to foster faculty and graduate student engagement with Pittsburgh’s rich collections for teaching, research and community engagement.
Race-ing the Museum
In May 2016, the first week-long workshop engaged intersection of race, collections and museums. Graduate students and faculty from different departments worked with curators and archivists from the Carnegie Museum of Art, Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Heinz History Center, the Allegheny City Historic Gallery, University Library System and the Art Lending Collection at the Braddock Carnegie Library.
Find out more here
Consuming Nature
In May 2017, Collecting Knowledge Pittsburgh presented the second week-long workshop of the initiative. Exploring human influence across the widest range of landscapes, the workshop drew upon Pittsburgh’s museums and collections to explore how such sources define and delimit the category of nature itself, and reckon the landscape as a resource to be expended.
Find out more here
Making Advances
From April 30 to May 4, 2018, this workshop explored the visual politics of sex, sexuality and gender through Pittsburgh’s museum and collections. The workshop built connections between historic materials and the challenges of the present, considering how artworks enable forms of looking and touching that seep into everyday life, and how artists and activists have imagined new kinds of bodies and identities.
Find out more here
Work Forces
Many of the city’s museums and archives manifest the vast wealth generated through the efforts of its workers, and sometimes were formed with their improvement in mind. From May 6 to May 10, 2019, this week-long, collection-based workshop sought to imagine new ways to engage with Pittsburgh’s artistic and archival manifestations of labor.
Find out more here