Founded way back in 1977, Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory is one of the most innovative – and underappreciated – museums in the US, established by artist Barbara Luderowski in, yes, a one-time mattress factory in the city’s run-down North Side (though it has since taken over other nearby buildings).
The gallery’s USP is offering artists-in-residence the chance to produce room-sized, site-specific installations and leave them there for a while – in some cases permanently – creating a remarkable and properly immersive collection. The gallery now has 17 permanent pieces, including three by James Turrell and two by Yayoi Kusama. In addition, the Factory has also had a regenerative impact on the local area, as an employer, an outreach educator and as a draw for visitors.
Over 600 artists have taken part in the Mattress Factory’s artists-in-residence programme to date, with between eight to twelve artists a year now settling in for anywhere between one week and two months. The gallery offers a back up team of plasterers, carpenters and metal workers to assist practitioners with their installations – as well as sourcing such idiosyncratic artist's materials such as miles of barbed wire, insect larvae and bags of human hair.
The current exhibition on view at the gallery’s nearby three-storey townhouse is Trace of Memory, by the Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. A super-complex web of black yarn spreading from room to room, it took 13 people ten long days to install, shrouding the house’s sparse furnishings in a strange, dreamy fog.
Anne Lindberg, one of the four artists taking part in the ‘Factory Installed’ exhibition in the main building, also uses thread – this time to suggest physiological systems such as heartbeats and respiration, as well as psychological states.
And should you visit, take time to check out Allan Wexler’s smart Bed/Sitting Room for an Artist in Residence: two back-to-back rooms which share two beds or sofas, or some configuration of the above, depending on how you roll them out.
The gallery’s USP is offering artists-in-residence the chance to produce room-sized, site-specific installations and leave them there for a while, and in some cases permanently. Pictured: Catso Red, by James Turrell, 1994
Trace of Memory, by the Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (pictured), is a super-complex web of black yarn spreading from room to room
Anne Lindberg is one of the four artists taking part in the current ‘Factory Installed’ exhibition; she also uses thread – this time to suggest physiological systems and psychological states. Pictured: shift lens, by Anne Lindberg, 2015
Life, Afterlife, by John Morris, 2015, is also on display as part of 'Factory Installed'
As is The Color of Temperance: Embodied Energy, by Julie Schenkelberg, 2015
Over 600 artists have taken part in the Mattress Factory’s artists-in-residence programme to date, with eight-to-12 artists a year now settling in for anywhere between one week and two months. Pictured: the Mattress Factory's shop
ADDRESS
Mattress Factory
500 Sampsonia Way
Pittsburgh, PA 15212-4444
-
Phaidon’s new Graphic Classics is a lavish greatest hits of graphic designGraphic Classics is a compendium of seven centuries of visual culture, from the everyday and ephemeral to visionary works that reshaped our world
-
Birley Chocolate hits the sweet ’n’ chic spot in London’s ChelseaThe new Birley Chocolate shop, a sibling to Birley Bakery, is a confection of colour as delicious as its finely crafted goods
-
Feel at home at Auberge, Château La Coste's new inn for culture loversAuberge La Coste sits at the heart of the art-filled estate, minutes away from the joyful town of Aix-en-Provence
-
Remote Antarctica research base now houses a striking new art installationIn Antarctica, Kyiv-based architecture studio Balbek Bureau has unveiled ‘Home. Memories’, a poignant art installation at the remote, penguin-inhabited Vernadsky Research Base
-
Ryoji Ikeda and Grönlund-Nisunen saturate Berlin gallery in sound, vision and visceral sensationAt Esther Schipper gallery Berlin, artists Ryoji Ikeda and Grönlund-Nisunen draw on the elemental forces of sound and light in a meditative and disorienting joint exhibition
-
Cecilia Vicuña’s ‘Brain Forest Quipu’ wins Best Art Installation in the 2023 Wallpaper* Design AwardsBrain Forest Quipu, Cecilia Vicuña's Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern, has been crowned 'Best Art Installation' in the 2023 Wallpaper* Design Awards
-
Michael Heizer’s Nevada ‘City’: the land art masterpiece that took 50 years to conceiveMichael Heizer’s City in the Nevada Desert (1972-2022) has been awarded ‘Best eighth wonder’ in the 2023 Wallpaper* design awards. We explore how this staggering example of land art came to be
-
Cerith Wyn Evans: ‘I love nothing more than neon in direct sunlight. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful’Cerith Wyn Evans reflects on his largest show in the UK to date, at Mostyn, Wales – a multisensory, neon-charged fantasia of mind, body and language
-
The best 7 Christmas installations in London for art loversAs London decks its halls for the festive season, explore our pick of the best Christmas installations for the art-, design- and fashion-minded
-
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Topology in Miami is powered by heartbeatsRafael Lozano-Hemmer brings heart and human connection to Miami Art Week 2022 with Pulse Topology, an interactive light installation at Superblue Miami in collaboration with BMW i
-
Textile artists: the pioneers of a new material worldThese contemporary textile artists are weaving together the rich tapestry of fibre art in new ways
