Meet Andy CarnegieBot, your guide to summer adventure
June 9 marks the start of the 2018 Summer Adventure at all four Carnegie Museums. As members visit the museums, attend specially planned events (think fashion and ice cream!), and take part in museum scavenger hunts and digital trivia, you’ll earn stamps to boost your chances to win some pretty sweet Carnegie Museums swag—gift-shop prize bags, Carnegie Cash, even a Premium membership renewal— at summer’s end. And this year’s Summer Adventure has a twist: Andy CarnegieBot, a friendly interactive chatbot, will be your guide. Starting on June 9, use Facebook Messenger to scan the code in the above illustration or go to carnegiebot.org to get started. Each time you visit one of the museums or attend a Summer Adventure event, you’ll check in with Andy CarnegieBot using your phone. He’ll keep track of the stamps you collect, share information on upcoming events, serve up special “achievement” opportunities, and encourage you to show off your member swagger with fun museum trivia and quizzes.
Members are invited to a special Summer Adventure kickoff party on June 16—part of the grand opening weekend of the Science Center’s new PPG SCIENCE PAVILION™ (registration required)—and the summer fun wraps up on August 25 with an end-of-summer Trivia Night at the Museum of Natural History. See pages 54–55 for a list of some of the Summer Adventure activities.
Tapping into the secret lives of birds
American goldfinch (Spinus tristis)
Did you know that birds smaller than a robin can fly 214 miles in a single night? Or that a tiny warbler weighing less than a 50-cent piece can travel 750 miles in just 11 days? Avian researchers at Powdermill Nature Reserve are making surprising discoveries about bird migration by attaching transmitters to birds and monitoring them using a new Motus Wildlife Tracking System. As tagged birds fly within a 10-mile radius of antennas attached to automated receivers, they’re recorded. The data is then uploaded into a central database, allowing scientists to track the birds from South America to Canada without having to recapture them. This is promising news, says Luke DeGroote, Powdermill’s avian research coordinator. “Of the 10,000 birds banded by our team each year, only one or two are typically recaptured,” he notes. So far, of the 50 birds tagged at Powdermill using Motus transmitters, 40 percent have been detected across two continents by the 400 Motus stations. Using this location information, scientists can conduct vegetation surveys to learn what birds are eating and what they’re using as shelter along their migration routes, identify potential threats to the birds, and inform conservation decisions.
90
Is how many years young Andy Warhol would have turned this August 6. Join us at Andy’s Museum on August 4 to celebrate a native son and Pop icon with family-friendly activities.
Museum joy and the 2018 Carnegie International
“It’s been three years in the making,” said curator Ingrid Schaffner on April 11, when she finally got to announce her picks for the 2018 Carnegie International, the 57th edition, which runs October 13–March 25, 2019. By residence or birth, the 32 artists and artist collectives hail from Austria, the Bahamas, Cameroon, Cherokee Nation, Colombia, England, Germany, Ghana, India, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Korea, Kuwait, Lebanon, Navajo Nation, Nigeria, Nonuya Nation, Pakistan, Palestine, Scotland, Senegal, Switzerland, the United States, and Vietnam. What they all have in common, Schaffner says, is the opportunity to create “a series of encounters with contemporary art.” What she wants for Carnegie International visitors is “to explore what it means to be ‘international’ at this moment in time, and to experience museum joy.” Most of the works will be new commissions, she notes. Among the new and ambitious projects: an unprecedented collaboration between novelist Han Kang and filmmaker IM Heung-soon; an interpretation of rejected works from the history of the Carnegie International by Pittsburgh-based Lenka Clayton and Jon Rubin; and two decades after the work debuted in the 1999 Carnegie International, Kerry James Marshall will revisit his Rythm Mastr comic series. And, at long last, works by conceptual artist Mel Bochner, a Pittsburgh native best known for his text-based paintings, will be part of the International.
“Everything in this exhibition is about ideas. It’s not a common way of looking at images today.” – Louise Lippincott, curator of Visions of Order and Chaos: The Enlightened Eye at Carnegie Museum of Art, as quoted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A clubhouse for the littlest learners
Aspiring scientists age 6 and under have a new exhibit space to explore at Carnegie Science Center. The Little Learner Clubhouse, powered by PNC Grow Up Great®, is a nature-inspired hub for free-play and hands-on activities. “Children are born scientists, brimming with natural curiosity,” says Ron Baillie, co-director of Carnegie Science Center. And the new space taps that innate curiosity through a host of interactive experiences, including a water table, a fun place for making real-world connections to our rivers and other water sources; a tomato stand, where kids sort red and green tomatoes using conveyors and vacuum tubes; and the baby garden, a farm-themed area where the youngest curious crawlers explore plush vegetables and animal figures. The new exhibit was funded through a $1 million gift from the PNC Foundation as part of the Science Center’s SPARK! Campaign, which concluded in 2017.
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