Find Unforgettable Art In A Most Unlikely Place: A Pittsburgh Mattress Factory

 

    

 

The Mattress Factory hasn't been an actual mattress factory for a while now. Built on a hillside in the Central Northside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, back at the turn of the last century, it was used as a warehouse and showroom for Stearns & Foster until the 1960s.

 

Today, it's one of the country's more unusual art museums. Filled not with paintings or sculptures — and certainly not with mattresses — it is now, four stories of ... well, of "stories" in a way. Installations that take you places you don't expect to go in an art museum.

 

A recent fourth-floor exhibit called Damn everything but the circus, for instance, was inspired by an E.E. Cummings poem that reads "damn everything that is grim, dull, motionless, unrisking, inward turning, damn everything that won't get into the circle, that won't enjoy." Artist and Zany Umbrella Circus founder Ben Sota arranged a canvas-draped, room-sized installation where visitors could walk a very low tightrope, drape themselves on a trapeze, even roll around in one of those giant metal acrobat wheels.

 

Across the hall is Ryder Henry's Diaspora, a futuristic city-in-miniature (with one house small enough that you could hold it in your hand, that opened to reveal its furnishings including a tiny mirror that reduced the viewer to the right scale) and what looked like a space station receding toward the next galaxy.

 

    

 

Also on this level, in a locked room, there's a permanent exhibit — Sarah Oppenheimer's oddly titled 610-3356 — a molded plywood-sheathed hole in the floor that lets you see straight out the side of the building one floor below. For some reason, birds don't fly in. The museum keeps the room locked so kids won't fall out.

 

    

 

Other permanent exhibits include Yayoi Kusama's pair of mirrored, polka-dotted rooms that give new meaning to the notion of infinity for anyone who steps inside them; the hauntingly exquisite light sculptures of James Turrell; and Greer Lankton's heartbreaking It's all about ME, Not You, which, in re-creating her bedroom, offers a window into this transgender artist's struggles with addiction and anorexia.

 

All of these are examples of "site-specific installation art," meaning art that's tied to the space it's in, and it's the only thing you'll find at The Mattress Factory now, though that was not true when the building began its new life in 1977.

 

"We opened a food co-op on the first floor, with vegetarian cooking," remembers Mattress Factory founder Barbara Luderowski. "People just came. Everybody says, 'You had great vision' and so on. The hell I did. It was an evolutionary process, built originally on desire for myself: a place to work, a place to live, and a community in which I could thrive as a person."

 

Others thrived there, too, including a young artist whose work was included in the first crop of site-specific installations: Michael Olijnyk, who's now co-director of the museum.

 

Click here to read the full article.