News Worthy Summer 2017

High-flying changes on the North Shore

Photos: Doug Dehaven

They’ve stood atop Carnegie Science Center’s iconic building since the year 2000: 12-foot-high letters that clearly demarcate the popular North Shore attraction. Their removal was part of the construction necessary to make way for the Science Center’s new, four-story Science Pavilion to be built off the east side of its campus, facing Pittsburgh’s scenic Point. Scheduled to open in June 2018, it will house nine new science, technology, engineering, and math learning labs, a two-story traveling exhibit space, and a window-lined, fourth-floor event space with stunning views of downtown Pittsburgh.

Nature’s wake-up call

Forget the dreaded drone of the alarm clock. How about waking up to nature’s early-morning chorus of bird songs, compliments of the black-capped chickadee, the white-throated sparrow, and other natives of the northeastern United States? Launched in March 2017, Dawn Chorus is Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s free alarm-clock app that’s already been installed on more than 55,000 iOS and Android devices and recently updated to version 1.1. Among its upgrades: Users can now share the app’s colorful bird illustrations in iMessage. Museum staff worked with Carnegie Museums’ Innovation Studio to develop the wake-up app, which encourages users to personalize their serenade by pre-selecting up to five birds from a 20-bird lineup. It’s a creative ode to the bird research that goes on daily at Powdermill Nature Reserve, the museum’s environmental research center in the Laurel Highlands, and the work of its partner in bird conservation, BirdSafe Pittsburgh.

“The whole idea of vast time hit me when I was around 8 or 9 years old. It was like a light bulb going off—a revelation. I’ve never gotten over it, the sense of the past as something to be explored.” 
– Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx (right), who toured Carnegie Museum of Natural History on April 20 before speaking about her latest novel, Barkskins, at the closing event of Strange Times: Earth in the Age of the Human.

Patrick Moore named director of The Warhol

Photo: Abby Warhola

Patrick Moore says he was a student at Carnegie Mellon University when “I fell in love with Pittsburgh and, not long after, Warhol became my favorite artist.” Now, as the new director of The Andy Warhol Museum, he’s set on continuing to peel back the layers of the artist’s life and work. “We have the opportunity to present aspects of Andy Warhol that the world is still unaware of—his importance as a filmmaker, the depth of his religious faith, and his continuing influence on young artists.” Moore joined the museum in 2011 as director of development, and went on to serve as deputy director and managing director before being named interim director in 2016. Before joining The Warhol, the seasoned arts leader spent 10 years with the Alliance for the Arts in New York City, where he was the creator and project director of The Estate Project, a program that addressed the impact of the AIDS crisis on the national arts community through advocacy, preservation, and fundraising.

1,300

The number of specimens on display in the Museum of Natural History’s Hillman Hall of Minerals and Gems. The hall’s longtime benefactor, Henry Hillman, who graduated from Princeton University with a degree in geology, passed away on April 14.

Wulfenite from Sonora, Mexico

Story making in The Hill

Bradford Young photographing the Hill District.

Just off an Academy Award nomination for the sci-fi drama Arrival, artist and cinematographer Bradford Young is debuting a new, very personal work as part of Carnegie Museum of Art’s Hillman Photography Initiative Lightime project. His multi-channel video installation, REkOGNIZE, opening June 16 in the Scaife Galleries, looks at Pittsburgh’s tunnels not only as literal passageways into the city but also as metaphors for the Great Migration, the exodus of more than six million African-Americans from the rural South to cities across the Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1915 and 1970. His creative
inspiration for the work: the museum’s vast photo archives of photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris, and the Hill District itself. “I’m using Charles Teenie Harris’ lens as a mapping of the sort of ever-changing social and physical landscape of the Hill District,” Young says. “Tennie’s community-embedded photographic techniques give us a really beautiful glance into how the Hill District evolved.” The filmmaker made sure he spent time in today’s Hill District. “In my practice as an image maker in an art context, I’m committed to understanding the nuance and depth of black life,” he says. “That’s the environment that reared me, raised me, beat me down, and held me up. I’m committed to that.”