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Reimagining Landscapes Opening up the World for Others Progress in the Pop DistrictThe skyscrapers that tower over New York City are among the most iconic in the world, creating a majestic skyline that began to take shape a century ago and defined a new kind of American landscape. These architectural titans—the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Center, and others—carry within them a powerful pair of invisible histories: those of the Pittsburgh steel that gives them structure and the Indigenous workers who touched the sky while building them.
In Marie Watt: LAND STITCHES WATER SKY, a solo exhibition that opened April 13 as the 88th installment in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum series, the sculptor Marie Watt unites the material and the labor that defined America’s great skylines to tell a story of her own. Two of the four new works that comprise the exhibition, Quilt (Legendary) and Quilt (Lost Thunder Chorus), weave together an assemblage of reclaimed steel I-beams, given new context but some still bearing the marks of the mills that forged them and their years of use. For Watt, a citizen of the Seneca Nation, they also carry the imprint of generations of “skywalkers,” the Haudenosaunee men who climbed hundreds of feet into the air to form beams like these into skyscrapers.
The exhibition is “a concise but powerful statement that ties together western Pennsylvania’s past and present-day engagement with steel from a contemporary Indigenous perspective,” says Liz Park, the museum’s Richard Armstrong Curator of Contemporary Art.
The two Quilts are joined by a pair of reclaimed wool blankets that run the entire length of the stone wall from the gallery space to the Scaife Lobby. Placeholder (Horizon) and Placeholder (Companion Species) are double-length blankets, sewn with Czech seed beads that read, respectively, “Transportation Object.” and “My Neighbor.” Watt was drawn to the “cinematic” grandeur of these oversized blankets, she says, and the way they seem to envelop a viewer seeking to understand and interpret the text she’s sewn onto them.
Blankets have been Watt’s medium of choice for two decades, stacked and sculpted into buildings of their own as they bend and stretch skyward. In the Seneca Nation, blankets are held in high esteem, often given away as a form of acknowledgment or to commemorate an important life event, she says. Blankets also receive us into the world and enclose us on our way out, she notes. Watt retains any stains or blemishes she finds in her blankets so they can bring their complete history to her works.
“Between birth and death we’re constantly imprinting on this humble cloth,” Watt says. “They’re storied objects.”
“My ancestors or your ancestors—people who have been involved in Pittsburgh’s steel industry—could have touched the I-beams that we’re working with today, which I think is really profound.”
–Marie Watt
So, too, are the steel beams used in Watt’s Quilts, one of which also contains a glass I-beam—a reference to another pivotal material from Pittsburgh’s past. Steel is the most recycled material in the world, carrying its “past lives” even as the metal is recast into something new, Park says. In Watt’s work, museum visitors will encounter those histories in a new form and reflect on the layers of meaning woven into her art.
“My ancestors or your ancestors—people who have been involved in Pittsburgh’s steel industry—could have touched the I-beams that we’re working with today, which I think is really profound,” Watt notes.
Watt, who is based in Portland, Oregon, held workshops with members of the Pittsburgh Poetry Collective and museum educators to develop a bank of words that speak to the past, present, and future of western Pennsylvania. Her collaborators, including a fifth grade class from Winchester Thurston School, then inscribed the words in their own hand on the I-beams in her Quilts, which were fabricated with help from Pittsburgh’s Poki Moto Studio. The use of language in the sculptures—words like “heirloom,” “gather,” and “ghosts”—reflects Watt’s interest in call-and-response, as she listens for what the past can tell us.
“What does it mean to call back to our ancestors and call forward to future generations and think about how we’re connected in this layered way?” Watt asks.
For Park, Watt’s exhibition, which is on view through September 22, is all the more meaningful because of how it echoes many pieces in the museum collection. The Quilts share a material and scale with the late Richard Serra’s Carnegie, a 40-foot tower installed as part of the 1985 Carnegie International. They also call to mind Louise Nevelson’s Tropical Garden’s Presence, a sculpture of painted aluminum located in Sculpture Court and viewable from the Forum Gallery. Watt’s artistic practice, Park notes, is in conversation with El Anatsui’s imposing Palettes of Ambition, a sculpture made of metal scraps and bottle caps that stands 16 feet tall and 32 feet wide in the museum’s Scaife Lobby. Like Watt’s blankets, Cameron Rowland’s Jim Crow puts on display an object fraught with a history of discrimination and persecution to be freshly considered.
“This exhibition will be a place to have conversations that are warm and generous and serious about what it means to consider this work from a number of different perspectives—Indigenous perspectives, the perspective of a worker, a child, an elder—and to do that through material language,” Park says. “This is an exhibition that has the capacity to really resonate outside of the walls of the museum.”
Major support for Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum series is provided by the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation. Additional support for this exhibition is provided by the Ruth Levine Memorial Fund. Carnegie Museum of Art’s exhibition program is supported by the Carnegie Museum of Art Exhibition Fund, The Fellows of Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Carnegie Collective.
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