|
|
 |
June 22–September 29, 2002
The Heinz Architectural Center
The Pittsburgh neighborhood of Oakland is at a critical juncture in time. It is a thriving community, with major educational, cultural, and medical institutions, an identifiable commercial hub, a diverse residential population, and the oldest of the city's four grand parks. Yet the neighborhood shows many signs of wear. Institutional expansion has strained physical resources, compromising the quality of life for residents, employees, and visitors. Those invested in Oakland's future acknowledge that the widespread perception of Oakland as an unattractive place to live and work limits their ability to attract people to its assets. Recognition of these problems has inspired numerous proposals in the past several years: by one recent count, there are currently more than two dozen such plans, prepared by nearly as many institutions and organizations.
Designing Oakland presents a number of these plans, providing a context for their consideration by surveying the history of the neighborhood's physical structures and layout. In addition, the exhibition introduces concepts related to planning--the process in which an institution, government agency, community organization, or some other entity thoroughly analyzes existing conditions and then develops a plan to guide future development. The objects on view vary widely, and the scale of the projects ranges from individual buildings to large institutional plans. Designing Oakland opens a window onto this neighborhood, and invites visitors to use the ideas presented here to more carefully consider the future of their own communities.
Support for Designing Oakland has been provided by the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, Inc., and the Alexander C. & Tillie S. Speyer Foundation. The programs of the Heinz Architectural Center are made possible by the generous support of the Drue Heinz Trust. General support for the exhibition program at Carnegie Museum of Art is provided by grants from the Heinz Endowments and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Top
June 29–September 29, 2002
Forum Gallery
This eclectic group of works by eleven emerging international artists demonstrates that contemporary notions of portraiture can extend beyond an artist's likeness to explore wide-ranging areas of autobiography, fantasy, and ethnic as well as genetic identity.
Nikki S. Lee investigates her own identity by immersing herself in cultural scenes or lifestyles that are not her own. With her keen eye for social detail, Lee photographs herself adopting the codes and behaviors, both overt and subtle, of a particular segment of society in such series as The Hispanic Project and The Seniors Project. Beth Campbell, in her drawing series My Potential Future Based on Present Circumstances, begins with a single event in her life and charts a web of potential consequences that might ensue from different choices she might make. The resulting maze of text maps her psychological wanderings, marked equally by self-doubt and self-confidence. Maurizio Cattelan's Spermini (1997) consists of 150 painted, miniature, rubber masks of his own face, each one slightly different from the next. A hilarious riff on genetic engineering, the work also makes reference to the powerful metaphor of the mask--an object that hides rather than reveals identity. These three artists, with their eclectic approaches to self-revelation, are joined in the exhibition by John Bock, Edgar Bryan, Trisha Donnelly, Roe Ethridge, Saul Fletcher, Jim Lambie, Zak Smith, and Susan Smith-Pinelo.
Exhibitions in the Forum Gallery are supported by grants from The Heinz Endowments and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Top
|
|
|
