The Andy Warhol Museum’s second floor rotating exhibition gallery is brimming with paintings, installations, video art, sculpture and more, all created by students in the Carnegie Mellon University School of Fine Arts MFA program.
This first-of-its-kind exhibit, “Holding Still, Holding On,” features a fascinating range of mediums from five distinct artistic voices.
The exhibit opens to the public Friday and runs through April 21.
Frankmarlin, Izsys Archer, Tingting Cheng, Chantal Feitosa-Desouza and Max Tristan Watkins are the five artists pioneering this new partnership with CMU, the school that Andy Warhol himself attended back when it was the Carnegie Institute of Technology.
“This is an amazing collaboration with the Warhol Museum for the third year thesis exhibition. We have a group of five graduating third year students. They’ve been working towards their written and visual thesis for basically the past year and a half. I’m incredibly proud of everybody. I’m grateful for the collaboration with the Warhol,” said Kattie Hubbard, director of the MFA program at CMU.
Max Tristan Watkins’ paintings are made from goat skin vellum, the material from which books in Europe were made for centuries before paper became available, according to the artist. “Where books and bodies collide with each other is what I’m most interested in, so this animal-slash-paper hybrid is a symbol for me,” he said.
Watkins also made touchable artists’ books.
“They’re basically books about books, and about me and my relationship with books,” he said. “I have an obsession with obsession, and with research as almost a performance or a character, so these books kind of make a self-portrait of me as someone obsessed with books to the point that I start to make them.”
His second space in the gallery juxtaposes ideas of traditional importance — frames made of wood or placards made of brass — with absurdity.
“All of the paintings here are copies from real medieval or early modern books, but I’ve tried to crop them and present them in a way that highlights these strange, violent parable moments, or I’ve removed something terrible from the scene,” Watkins said.
Chantal Feitosa-Desouza’s 10-minute film project focuses on once-public buildings that have closed or transformed for some other purpose, namely Schenley High School, which was Pittsburgh’s first public high school (and the alma mater of Andy Warhol) but was shuttered in 2008 and turned into luxury apartments.
“That got me to learn a lot about the overall landscape of public education in Pittsburgh and how there have been different echoes and waves of school closures over the past 20-25 years,” she said.
She used her project to tell the story of Schenley High School’s closure through the people who were affected by it. She incorporated several interviews, as well as editing techniques and sound effects that evoke a school environment.
“It creates this sensation of what gets left behind. We still feel the essence of what it used to be,” she said.
Her space in the exhibit also features take-away pamphlets to educate viewers more about the teachers’ perspective.
She said she came away with a deep disappointment in the lack of investment in public education in recent decades.
“Just the overall distrust and dissatisfaction with how value is placed in some facets of city developments and not others,” she said.
Tingting Cheng has paintings and video in the exhibition. She used a number of materials — often upcycled — to create her physical work.
Her paintings look at the intersection between marking the world with violence and pop culture, and the materials add to the digital nature of her work.
“I have a really good professor in CMU robotics who donated all this robo trash for me,” she said. “I really like to watch all those hunter-gatherer cultures, I thought for me I was like a digital hunter-gatherer. I move a lot. I come from a place that has a river culture very much like Pittsburgh, but also it used to be an industrial city and now it’s like a post-industrial city,” she said.
She also made a series of large vinyl envelopes that she said are much like trading cards.
“It’s really interesting to me to make a large trading card. … For this piece, they can touch it and they can see all this information,” she said.
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Her work examines pop culture, propaganda, technology, colonialism, rituals and the intersection of all of those things. It also includes an element of the philosophy of animism updated for a modern, digital world.
Frankmarlin went into this show looking at the shared emotional moments of humanity.
“I focus on the moments of joy, the moments of sadness, the moments of grief that we collectively experience,” he said.
He found inspiration in family photo albums for sculptures and images that he created for the show. He made aluminum and cast iron pieces at Carrie Blast Furnace in Swissvale, as well.
Much of Frankmarlin’s work in the exhibit has to do with grief — he used an embalming table for one piece and dried flowers from funeral homes have been integrated into his work.
“The first time I carried a load from the funeral home to the studio, I sobbed in my car because I could just feel everybody’s sadness in the flowers with me,” he said. “It was very emotional.”
Even the process of making the sculpture installations at Carrie Blast Furnace felt funereal.
“You’re burying these materials in sand and then you’re casting them again, so you’re burying them and resurrecting them,” Frankmarlin said. “It’s a very interesting experience.”
He sourced the embalming table from a thrift store in Buffalo. “I felt like it was a really important piece to think about what the body experiences, especially as a Black person living in this country. I feel like we have a lot of different emotional experiences when it comes to being around colonial structures,” he said.
Izsys Archer’s installation is centered by the first sculpture she’s ever made.
“There are some major components that I feel like ground the work. This work is really thinking through what it feels like to be me in my studio, but also what it feels like to be a plus-size Black woman living in America,” she said.
One of the prints in her installation is of Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark, a psychologist who, along with her husband, conducted the “doll tests” in the 1940s to study the effects of segregation on children in the United States.
Other collected works in Archer’s work center on her family, history and Black women.
“It’s about accumulation, it’s about movement, it’s about love,” she said.
She also made the wallpaper behind the installation — a combination of a wallpaper that she has been using since her time as an undergraduate for installations and a blanket that her mother gave her.
“Through time, there’s a gash that formed in the blanket, so I included that. This is like a physical digital representation of those materials,” she said.
Katelyn Briski, associate registrar of exhibitions and loans at the Andy Warhol Museum, acted as the liaison between the students and the museum throughout the process of setting up “Holding Still, Holding On.”
She tried to prepare the five students as much as possible for the process of creating and curating exhibitions of their work throughout their future careers.
“A lot of older professional artists that you run into don’t understand this process, so I hope that they learned as much as they could from it,” Briski said.
“Holding Still, Holding On” will run at the Andy Warhol Museum on the North Side through April 21. To learn more, visit warhol.org.