Photo: Joshua FranzosFor all their differences in structures, programs, and audiences, one of the values that unites the four Carnegie Museums is their commitment to building community. That starts with our internal community of curators, educators, researchers, exhibition creators, and visitor service staff who focus their myriad skills and backgrounds on a single task: employing the resources of the four Carnegie Museums in the service of the communities we serve within and beyond greater Pittsburgh. We even have a Department of Culture and Community whose staff works collaboratively, both internally and externally, to ensure that our museums are, indeed, welcoming to all.
Key to these efforts is the recognition that community takes many forms, as the stories in this issue of Carnegie amply convey.
For the past fifteen years at The Andy Warhol Museum, a pair of silkscreening workshops—Power Up and Radical Urban Silkscreen Team (RUST)—has been bringing teens together through the power of collaborative artmaking. And thanks to the Empowered Educators program at Carnegie Museum of Art, teachers are also finding community through art: For one evening a month, from January to May, as many as thirty educators meet at the museum to break bread, study and make art, and discuss their shared experiences and challenges.
“One of the values that unites the four Carnegie Museums is their commitment to building community.”
At Carnegie Science Center (soon to be renamed Kamin Science Center), a new Rapid Science Engagement Initiative serves as a resource for timely information about science-related news events, such as the reemergence of measles or the Canadian wildfires. When it’s most critical for the public to have reliable information, the Science Center is bringing together content experts to equip the members of the greater Pittsburgh community with the most current and useful information.
In a similar way, the Museum of Natural History’s R.W. Moriarty Science Seminar series invites the public into the museum to learn about new discoveries directly from the scientists who are making them. On September 8, the museum will welcome native Hawaiian Kia‘i Collier for a conversation about a fishpond restoration project in Maui that teaches important lessons in both stewarding the land and repairing communities. The museum’s curator of Anthropocene Studies, Nicole Heller, is working with Collier to study this revitalization project so we can all learn more about how indigenous science can expand our understanding of natural systems.
In this issue’s cover story on the Museum of Art’s upcoming Black Photojournalism exhibition, we’re reminded of the community building that remains a central aim of the museum’s stewardship of its Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive. The archive has become an unparalleled record of life in 20th-century Pittsburgh, thanks to the museum’s decades-long work to identify and update archival information, including the gathering of more than sixty oral histories.
Finally, longtime donor Dan Heit points to our Community Access program, launched four years ago, as an especially innovative and effective way to make the four Carnegie Museums more accessible to all. Thanks to Dan and so many donors like him, our Community Access Memberships have added thousands of teens, hundreds of families, and more than a hundred partner organizations to the museum community we work on building every day.
With best regards,
Steven Knapp
President and Chief Executive Officer
Carnegie Museums
