The KAWS x Warhol Exhibit at the Andy Warhol Museum

November 10, 2024

The first time I saw the KAWS x Warhol exhibit, I did a brief walk through with my layman companion, but the second time I was able to see it, I had a guided tour as part of the Warhol’s Teacher Open House. The KAWS x Warhol exhibit is a masterclass in how to achieve great things in the art world via commercial avenues. Warhol started out as an illustrator in advertising, while KAWS started out as an animator and graffiti artist. As a graffiti artist, KAWS would subvertise ads at bus stops. This means that he would activate the ad in his own style, frequently with cartoon heads featuring skulls and crossbones. Andy Warhol’s entry to the art world began with his Campbell Soup cans, and continued with screenprints of popular products, like Chanel perfumes.

Common themes in KAWS and Warhol’s work are the juxtaposition of characters, famous faces, and ideas, creating artwork that defies expectations and creates an emotional response in the viewer. Anxiety, despair, pleasure, and pain are all emotions at the heart of each artist’s work. Both artists adeptly play with our perceptions of pop culture and of art materials as a whole. Some of KAWS’ work consists of bronze sculptures, but are painted to make them look powder soft and plastic.

Nostalgia is also a key theme in each artist’s work. The characters and legends that we’ve grown up with, are treated affectionately and irreverently. From cereal boxes and advertisements to Sesame Street and the Simpsons, each new subject receives a creative treatment that plays with our perceptions of those characters and images. The Simpsons canvases are packaged like toys, back of the packages included, which can be seen in a row of mirrors behind the canvases. The whole show, while there are some dark undertones, is just fun – evidence of what a creative mind can do in a playground of images that surround us everyday, from the TV we watch to the groceries we buy to the ads we see walking around our city.

To conclude our tour, our tour guide asked us a question as food for thought: With so much anxiety, despair, and pain, is there salvation at the end for us? I wouldn’t go as far as to say salvation, but I would say that play, fun, creativity, and making things are great antidotes. If we returned to the things that brought us pleasure as children, like KAWS and Warhol do, that can provide some relief from the ugliness of the world.

A sculpture in front of a mural. The mural features a character with a skull and crossbone head lying facedown. The sculpture features two characters with skull and crossbone heads embracing.

The KAWS x Warhol Exhibit at the Andy Warhol Museum is a must-see show that runs until January 20th, 2025, so there’s still time! Be sure to start on the second floor, then head to the rest of the exhibit on the 4th floor. The museum is closed on Tuesdays, but open until 5pm all other days except for Friday, when it is open until 10pm. I hope you enjoy the show!

Adventures in Pittsburgh: Contemporary Craft and the Swoon Exhibition

October 16, 2020

Hello, friends! I hope all is well and that everyone is staying warm and dry wherever you happen to live. It is currently gently raining here, but on the particular day I was able to visit Contemporary Craft for the gorgeous Swoon/Caledonia Curry exhibition, The Heart Lives Through the Hands, it was a lovely sunny day.

I first fell in love with Swoon’s (Caledonia Curry’s artist name) work when I started to learn more about street art as I was researching it for a project for my students. Her work as a street artist consisted of life size portrait linocut or woodblock prints that were adhered to surfaces with wheat paste (which I still have not done with my own work and am thoroughly kicking myself right now). She continues to make life size portraits that are interwoven with imagery related to plant growth, anatomy, and interconnectivity. Her work is socially conscious as her influences Kaethe Kollwitz and Honore Daumier were. As we are all interconnected with the earth and universe, so are we connected through our actions as social beings, whether as a business owner who owns several steel mills, or as a steel worker who labors in those mills and supports their family. As the beautifully printed program states, “To regenerate our communities, to preserve and regenerate our ecosystems, we need to change how we think about everything. Portraiture may seem like an unlikely place to start. But Curry’s portraits point to healing, and the need to go through what is necessary to face a future that isn’t rosy, or even guaranteed.” (Katie Peyton Hofstadter wrote the program for the exhibit.)

Pittsburgh is considered a Rust Belt city, as its population has declined since the steel industry moved abroad. One of Swoon/Curry’s pieces, Braddock Steel, was inspired by a documentary called Struggles in Steel, which focuses on African-American steel workers and the racism they experience. One of the subjects of the film, Henderson Thomas, is the subject of the piece, with his arm draped around the piping of a steel factory montage, other workers performing their job duties in vignette below him. As Hofstadter writes, the concern here is that capitalism and its devotees, do not care about the workers they exploit or the environments they leave behind when they relocate to more profitable locales. While portraiture does not solve this problem, it does humanize the issue, and provide a glimpse of the member of the team we’re on, and the people we can stand up with. And Curry does that with her community engagement through her foundation, Heliotrope.

Curry was invited to Braddock, PA, an old steel town near Pittsburgh (connected to Pittsburgh?), by then-mayor John Fetterman (now Lt. Gov, go JF!) to do something with an abandoned church that had been damaged by fire. She acquired it and, long story short, over the course of ten years, Curry’s Swoon Studio worked with art collective Transformazium, Braddock Youth Project, and Braddock Tiles to provide job skills to community youth in making tiles for the church’s roof. While the roof was never completed, the catalyst of art sparked a sense of community and relationships that were vital to the success of many of the young adults they worked with. The tiles they made are on display in the show, as well as an explanation of the project. As Curry said in an interview quoted in the program, “I take myself, my drawings, and this little bundle of creative forces that is me, and I try to make a chemical reaction with the world.” And that she did with Braddock Tiles, and the city of Braddock. Her work hangs in the local Carnegie Library and the Community Center, which I am going to try to see.

So, that’s the back story. Don’t you want to see the show? Street artist/kickass artist in general/community activator/helper? She’s doing wonderful things and her artwork is equally beautiful, all worthy of spending time with. There are 15 pieces in the show, most hung on the walls, but two towering over us all in the middle of the gallery floor. I won’t describe them because I don’t want to tell you what to expect, but my favorites were the ones that spoke energetic life and quiet joy, with touches of color acting as highlights, and biomorphic forms interacting with geometric ones. It’s definitely worth the visit to Contemporary Craft.

To visit Contemporary Craft, they are at a new location in the Upper Lawrenceville neighborhood on the corner of 57th and Butler Street. There are two differently abled parking spots in the front of the gallery, but more ample street parking is available on 57th Street by the playground. Admission is FREE, my lovelies! For COVID reasons, however, you need to reserve a timed ticket and wear a mask. Contemporary Craft has some great shows. I first discovered them when I initially moved to PA five years ago, at a show that featured artists and crafters who had been touched by mental health issues. Swoon/Curry also had a piece in that show, which was a marvelous surprise. They are a museum that focuses on bringing contemporary craft to the public, engaging the community, supporting artists, representing all the perspectives, and “filling in critical gaps in public education.” There is a lil studio space for the kiddos as well, because families welcome:) You can find out more about visiting Contemporary Craft here.

My next adventure in Pittsburgh will be virtual: Vanessa German’s one-woman show, hypersensitive, featured by the Pittsburgh Playwright Theatre Company. You may recall I was able to see Vanessa German’s artist talk when she came to speak at IUP when I was in grad school and she blew my mind. She opened with a monologue performance that was amazing, then proceed to amaze further with her talk. I cried. She is also socially conscious and spreads her message of love in her community by placing I love you signs throughout her neighborhood encouraging people not to shoot each other. I am very excited to see it, and if you would like to purchase tickets ($25) for her virtual performance, you can visit here. I am telling you, it. will. be. worth. it.

That is all my friends. I hope you have a wonderful weekend, and stay safe.

Adventures in Pittsburgh: The Mattress Factory

October 2, 2020

Hello dear friends!

Today I would like to tell you all about my visit to The Mattress Factory, a museum dedicated to the art of installation in the Northside neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

I actually went to the wrong location first because all the streets were closed around the main campus of the Mattress Factory. I had requested a window of 1:30pm (COVID procedure) to arrive and I was supposed to check in at the front desk, but I went to their Monterrey Annex first. The Mattress Factory owns three buildings in the same block, their main campus on Sampsonia Way, their Monterrey Annex on the corner of Monterrey Street, and their Sampsonia Annex, which is pretty much right next door to the main building.

So, I will describe my visit as it went, rather than how it was supposed to go. When I first entered the Monterrey Annex, I walked in on the joy of several taxidermied wild animals having a dinner party: a bear, a porcupine, an owl, and a gray fox, if memory serves. Their table was set with all the good things wild animals such as them would like to eat. On the walls of magenta paint were patterns created with various insects, which were much more fabulous than “patterns of various insects” can describe. In the drawers of card catalogs lined up on shelves at the lower half of the walls, were various tableaus continuing the theme of taxidermy and nature explosion that adorned the walls. Think Joseph Stella on steroids and if he were commissioned to create tableaus for a natural history museum. The installation is called The Museum of Everything (2020) by Jennifer Angus and it is a visual delight that should not be missed. There are other installations in the Monterrey Annex, but they didn’t speak to me as loudly as The Museum of Everything and my favorite ones in the main campus and the Sampsonia Annex.

On to the main building! When you check in, the gift shop is on your right, and through the gift shop is the cafe, which I did not visit and now am sad about it. The gift shop has so many cool things, it was hard to leave without buying anything, but I live in a studio apartment and I just don’t have the room for new acquisitions.

So! They recommend that you ride the elevator to the fourth floor and work your way down on the stairs. Upon entering the fourth floor, you see the installation All is Not Forgotten (2019) by Patrick Robideau. In this installation, you see glimpses of a house as though you were walking through someone’s vague memory. They can’t remember all of it, and the memory exists in shadow, but you can see select fragments. There’s a creepy hallway to walk down and see more glimpses of the memory, but you can’t experience the physicality of it for yourself. Great way to start our tour.

The next installation, you can actually experience in person, live and in living color. The Other Apartment (2019) by Sohrab Kashani and John Rubin is a complete reproduction of Kashani’s apartment in Iran, down to the toy Supermen he has on his bookshelves, his posters on the wall, and his bedcovers. Because of the travel ban, Kashani is unable to visit the USA, so they brought his home to us. Also because of COVID and quarantine, he lives in isolation, so he brought a variety of experts on various topics to him—and us. Through video chats, he learns how to pop and lock, how to sing, and how to practice martial arts. Or, rather his super alter ego does. Very neat. You never think about how the objects in your home tell the story of who you are, but as you selected them to express your interests and personality, of course they do.

On the third floor, the wonderful sculptor Yayoi Kusama has two connecting installations, Repetitive Vision (1996) and Infinity Dots Mirrored Room (1996). Both super fun as you can see yourself in the mirrors, and as we all enjoy looking at our reflections like little birds, very enjoyable. But the coolest part is that both installations and figures—and you—seem to go on forever, obliterating your reality and your special identity into many realities and identities. According to the artist (from the Mattress Factory’s website), “A mirror is a device which obliterates everything including myself and others in the light of another world or a gallant apparatus which creates nothingness.” Not to disagree with the artist’s original intentions, but I don’t feel nothingness; I feel that there are many of me in other dimensions doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. We’re all visiting the Infinity Dots Mirrored Room in all of our dimensions, which I think is a really cool feeling. It’s like, “Hey to all of the me’s that I can see right now. We’re doing our art admiration thing and enjoying ourselves. Carry on!”

I will now skip to the Sampsonia Annex, which had three floors dedicated to A Second Home (2016) by Dennis Maher. I sadly (or maybe not sadly, since I was able to experience it with an open mind) missed the placard at the beginning describing the artist’s intention due to it being behind a door. However, I went into the installation on the first floor, and it was an over the top explosion of architectural details like peaks of roofs, or stairs, or columns or so many other things I can’t even name them! The first floor kinda left me cold. I’m not that into architecture. But I do appreciate over-the-top. The second floor, however, had more architectural explosion, and also a piano soundtrack to accompany the objects of home piled on top of one another as you wove your way through the floor to the second floor. The piano soundtrack felt…a little off. When I reached the third floor, the off quality of the piano combined with the projections to create a feeling of unease. In one of the rooms a recording of a person repeating a series of words including “home” and “mom” added to the atmosphere of general uneasiness. At this point I was impressed because I was actually feeling the atmosphere and finally understanding what was behind all the architectural fragments covering every surface available.

Then I exited through a black curtain to a stairwell and the crisp fall air. I did go back in and read the placard describing the piece. (From the placard) “A Second Home transforms the Mattress Factory row house at 516 Sampsonia Way into a mysterious wonderland that cleaves, intermingles, and collages a house’s physical and metaphysical counterparts.” If I see one more storyline in a show or movie about how someone doesn’t want to leave their home that’s in the path of impending destruction and doom because it’s their HOME, I will set myself on fire. (Arrested Development reference.) But I see where the storyline comes from, and where Maher gets his metaphysical quality for A Second Home. A home is more than its parts. Your home is your sacred space where you rest your head, the place where you can really be you because you and your home are just for you and your family. Full of love—or conflict. It absorbs your energy and gives you energy. It’s also the thing that gets haunted when you die a tragic death. Is the haunting because you died tragically, or is it because you don’t want to leave your home or have anyone else moving in?

That concludes my adventure for today. I didn’t realize it at the time, but of course the theme that unites most of the installations is the concept of home. Duh. I can’t stress how cool The Mattress Factory is enough. Totally worth the price of admission tenfold. If you have a chance to visit the Pittsburgh area, it would be a shame to miss it! You can learn more about The Mattress Factory here .

Take care of yourself, and I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.