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

The Mattress Factory has not had a real mattress factory for a while.
Built on the hillside of the community on the north side of Pittsburgh Center, at the turn of the last century, it was used as a warehouse and showroom for Stearns & Foster until more than 1960
Today, it is one of the most unusual art museums in the country.
No place to draw or sculpture
Mattress, of course.
There are four stories now. . .
Well, it\'s about \"stories\" to some extent.
Take you to the installations where you don\'t want to go to the art museum.
Fourth time recently
Apart from the circus, for example, the floor show is called Damn everything, and its inspiration comes from E. E.
The poem by carmings says \"Damn everything is terrible, dull, immobile, unadventurous, turning inward, Damn everything will not enter this circle and will not enjoy it.
Artist Ben Sota, founder of The Zany Umbrella Circus, laid out a canvasdraped, room-
The size of the device, visitors can walk very low steel cables, hang themselves on the trapeze, and even roll on a huge metal acrobatic wheel.
Across the hall from Ryder Henry\'s diaspora, a futuristic city --in-miniature (
With a house small enough that you can hold it in your hand and open it to display its furniture, including a small mirror that will narrow the audience to the right proportion)
It looks like a space station that is retreating to the next galaxy.
On this level, there is a permanent exhibition in a locked room --
Sarah Oppenheimer\'s strange title 610-3356 —
Plywood molded
The sheath holes on the floor allow you to see directly the side of the building on the floor below.
For some reason, the birds do not fly in.
The museum locked the room so that the children would not fall out.
Other permanent exhibits include a pair of mirror polka from the grass.
Dotted room, giving unlimited concept new meaning to anyone who walks into the room;
Stunning and exquisite lighting sculptures by James Terrell;
The heartbreaking thing about Greer Lankton is that it\'s all about me, not you, in the re-
Creating her bedroom provides a window for the trans artist to fight addiction and anorexia.
All of this is the site-
Specific installation art, \"which means art related to the space in which it is located, which is the only thing you can find now in the mattress factory, although when the building started a new life in 1977, this is not the case.
\"We started a food company.
Barbara ludowski, founder of The Mattress Factory, recalled: \"There is vegetarian cooking on the first floor . \".
\"The man who just came.
Everyone says, \'You have great foresight, \'and so on. The hell I did.
This is an evolutionary process, initially built on a desire for oneself: a place to work, a place to live, a community that I can thrive as a person.
\"Others also thrive there, including a young artist whose work was included in the first batch of works on the site --
Specific installation: Michael olijnick, he is now
Curator of the museum
\"He always referred to himself as a nightmare dinner guest who never came home,\" Luderowski laughed . \".
Going home today means going upstairs. The two co-
The director shares a huge open living space on the top two floors of the museum and co-hosts an art complex that now includes artist residences and studios in the main building and several other buildings. One of them —a three-
Victorian townhouse along the street
Taken over by what Olijnyk calls \"miles of black yarn\" as a mark of memory, a huge townhouse --
Fill the various spider webs created in Berlin
Artist Chiharu Shiota.
Olijnyk explained: \"We wanted her to do the whole building, so the idea was in the whole building, so when visitors came, they were opening the door to door and finding the piece.
\"What they found was basically that the memory values of the three floats were blurred.
The installation made it difficult to focus on the items in the room: a bed, a pile of suitcases, a wedding dress floating in the middle
Air, extending from the wall to the wall through hundreds of angled, irregular yarns, all of which become blurred and blurred.
\"It took 10 days for 13 people,\" said olijnick in surprise.
\"When they said 10 days, we thought, \'no\' because it was very, very laborious to see them working in a room --intensive.
But they will start working early in the morning, sometimes until 2 in the morning, and then do the same thing the next day.
\"The effect of their efforts and the black gauze grid they created is that you can see this century --
Old House through the haze of memory. . .
Has a special resonance effect on a participant.
Olijnyk said: \"Someone came to visit us and he was actually born on the second floor.
When he walked down the steps
Did you see the three brass mailboxes? —
His mother moved into the building in 1932 and her name was still written in pencil on that brass mailbox.
\"The traces of memory, like many devices in the mattress factory, are a complex idea presented in a spare minimalist form.
This is in sharp contrast to the director\'s private residence, which is filled with thousands of items collected by two people --
Tchotchke Luderowski\'s-
Filling cabinet (
Including dozens of Mickey Mouse in 1930 (
Handmade characters created according to the pattern in fashion magazine)
Medieval Modern furniture in Olijnyk.
\"Living with him is a bit like spending Christmas all the time,\" said Luderowski . \".
He brought these babies home.
\"He cleverly arranged the treasures with the eyes of the curator.
Her baby tends to handcrafted . . .
Wearing livewith.
I can\'t afford topof-the-
She explained.
\"If I were a doll collector, you would pursue perfect clothes, perfect shoes, perfect mechanics, etc.
I like this mechanism and I don\'t care about the look.
I am looking for bargains, I am looking for broken stuff, I can fix it easily, it gives me that handson thing again.
Because Luderowski and Olijnyk are artists, not just art managers.
Enough to invest on the website.
They live above their own creations: this is a hive of artistic activity.
\"I like to be a peripheral part of the actual process,\" said Luderowski . \".
\"In terms of the impact of art on you, the process of thinking, flexibility and problem solving, and everything that is very important to me.
\"That\'s why the four floors below their apartment are dedicated to the art of collaboration and interaction, asking artists to respond to the space they get --
Whether it\'s a vague memory or a realityit-
Circus-
This requires visitors to see not only art, but also art.
\"One of the reasons why we decided to do the art of installation is that\" the art of the base \"is a limited thing and the installation does involve different mediums: some sounds, with wax, various materials and challenges to build the wombat. . .
Luderowski paused to enrich my life.
\"Fortunately, the lives of those who venture into the Pittsburgh mattress factory.