Mattress Factory is pleased to announce its International Open Call for artists-in-residence. Each artist will produce a solo exhibition of new work at the museum.
Submissions will be accepted from January 4 until February 8, 2024.
The opportunity is free and open to artists of any medium from anywhere in the world. A distinguished panel of Mattress Factory alumni artists will jury the call, continuing their commitment to centering artists’ voices. The Artist Review Panel comprises Jon Rubin, Harrison Kinnane Smith, and Julie Schenkelberg. The panel will review submissions and select artists for residencies and solo exhibitions at Mattress Factory in 2025 and 2026.
Mattress Factory alum artists know better than anyone what their resources and capacity can accomplish and how special the community is. The panel offers a perspective unlike any other – one that is deeply familiar with the museum, engaged in many aspects of the contemporary art field, and invested in pushing exhibition programs in new directions.
The last International Open Call took place in late 2021 and saw over 1,200 applicants from which the 2023 and 2024 exhibiting artists were chosen. The artist alum jurors were Vanessa German, Sohrab Kashani, Christopher Meerdo, and Sarah Oppenheimer. The artists selected through the first cycle of the International Open Call were Asim Waqif, Andrea Peña, Akwasi Afrane, Azza El Siddique, and Eugene Macki.
During their residency, artists can explore wherever their process leads them while they live and work on Pittsburgh’s Northside.
Mattress Factory supports each artist’s process from development through production, installation, and exhibition by providing the following:
- Artist honorarium*
- Production and materials budget*
- Transportation to and from Pittsburgh
- Accommodation in Mattress Factory residence**
- Per diem during on-site installation
- Fabrication and production support
*Project-specific material budgets and artist honorarium align with W.A.G.E. certification rates.
**The residency length depends on the needs of the artist.
Eligibility and Submissions
International Open Call is open to artists of any medium from anywhere. Artists are invited to submit a portfolio of work and supporting documentation, which will be juried by the Artist Review Panel.
- A 2-page CV
- Short bio (200 words)
- Artist Statement (200 words)
- Up to 10 media files for consideration
- Do not include project proposals
Submissions close February 8, 2024, at 11:59 PM EST.
Founded in 1977, Mattress Factory is a contemporary art museum that showcases site-specific art created by artists-in-residence from around the world. Located in Pittsburgh’s historic Northside, just minutes from Downtown Pittsburgh, the museum’s public campus includes two historic homes and a converted mattress warehouse. In addition to temporary exhibitions created by artists-in-residence, Mattress Factory is home to long-term works by Greer Lankton, James Turrell, Winifred Lutz, Yayoi Kusama, and more.
The Artist Review Panel:
Harrison Kinnane Smith is an artist whose work explores legal, economic, and racial systems of power. His work has been published by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and exhibited at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, where his Sed Valorem installation mobilized the commercial value of the museum to repay a Black, overtaxed homeowner in the museum’s North Side neighborhood. Hyperallergic, NPR, and Bloomberg CityLab have covered Smith’s projects. He was born in Pittsburgh and lives in LA.
Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates interventions into public life that re-imagine individual, group, and institutional behavior. He has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Mercosul Biennial; the Shanghai Biennial; the Carnegie International, The Lyon Biennale; the Solomon Guggenheim Museum; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; The Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico; The Rooseum, Sweden; as well as in backyards, living rooms, and street corners. Rubin’s work has been reported on internationally by outlets including ARTnews, The New York Times, The Associated Press, Public Art Review, Art Papers, The Boston Globe, La Repubblica, Al Jazeera, BBC World News, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Colorado Public Radio. Rubin is a Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
Julie Schenkelberg lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. Her practice is nomadic, and she frequently relocates for months throughout places such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, NYC, Italy, Norway, and more. She creates large-scale installations using discarded domestic and industrial materials. Her installations have been displayed at the Mattress Factory Museum, the Museum of Art and Design, NYC, UNTITLED Miami, and art spaces throughout the Midwest. She received a BA in Art History at the College of Wooster, OH, and an MFA at the School of Visual Arts, NY, NY. Her work is influenced by her eighteen years of professional experience in the theater in NYC and elsewhere. Her mixed-media installations start with furniture, dishware, textiles, and marble, combined with concrete, resin, and construction materials to transform notions of domesticity and engage with the American Rust Belt’s legacy of abandonment and decay. She regularly shows in Manhattan at the Asya Geisberg Gallery in NY. She has received four National Endowment for the Arts Grants for her work, the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, and a Harpo Foundation Grant. She has been awarded many residencies, including Yaddo, Red Bull Arts in Detroit, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Art Omi, and Projekstom Normanns, Norway. Press includes Artforum, The New Yorker, PBS, Bloomberg, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Art F City, The Huffington Post, Beautiful Decay and Ground Magazine. She teaches at The Cleveland Institute of Art and The University of Akron.
