A local gallery with a global reach, the Carlow University Art Gallery is the only art space in the Pittsburgh region dedicated to art and social justice. Our project is to embody the unique mission of Carlow through professionally curated exhibitions, to bridge campus and community, and to extend the teaching space through innovative public programming and experiential learning.
Through the gallery, Carlow students have the opportunity to work with professional artists, curators, and museum professionals (assist with installation, collection management, research and development of digital curation strategies).
The gallery, a Google Arts and Culture partner and part of Google’s Pittsburgh Project, serves as a center for dialogue and creativity for both the Carlow community and the greater Pittsburgh community.
Exhibitions
CURRENT EXHIBITION
the name the words the memory
Lena Chen & C. Ryu
November 2024 – April 2025
This project was generously funded by the Arts, Equity, & Education Fund™.
Transforming Carlow University’s gallery into a reading room, this exhibition by artistic collaborators Lena Chen and C. Ryu draws from Asian diasporic literature to reveal the impact of colonialism, conflict, and migration on our relationship to language.
Taking its title from a quote in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, the exhibition features passages from writers of Asian heritage, which are stitched and embroidered into brocade banners. The intricate pattern of the fabric obscures parts of the words, mimicking the ways in which migration can unsettle memory and render us unintelligible. Alongside the banners are two bookcases containing personal ephemera from the artists and copies of the referenced texts bookmarked on favorite pages. Inspired by East Asian ancestral altars, the bookcases invite visitors to treat the books with reverence while simultaneously presenting them as the literary inheritance of future generations.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a floor-to-ceiling banner entitled a gift from this mouth which deconstructs and reassembles existing texts from four women writers of the Asian diaspora to create a new poetic work. One side of the banner combines words by the living poets Cathy Park Hong and Diana Khoi Nguyen (“bad english is our collateral our lost heritage a gift”), while the other side blends texts from the deceased Meena Alexander and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (“exorcize from this mouth sweet vowels of flesh”). Highlighting connections across the past and present, the collage poem juxtaposes these writers to illuminate the beauty and conflict within the diasporic relationship to the English language.
Engaging with the library as a political and philosophical structure, Chen and Ryu have created a secluded reading nook with a curated library of books being acquired through the Special Collections at Carlow University Library. Visitors are welcome to sit on cushions custom-made by Anne Chen while browsing the texts, which include selections from local artists and writers such as Diana Khoi Nguyen (Ghost Of, Root Fractures) and Brent Nakamoto (Pittsburgh for Palestine). By expanding the university’s permanent collection of Asian diasporic literature, Chen and Ryu introduce new audiences to these authors while ensuring that future students will have access to these books.
Fabrication Credits
Altars: Joshua Challen Ice
Embroidery: LaLa Hats
Sewing (a gift from this mouth, Colonizers write about flowers): Elena Gim
Reading Cushions: Anne Chen
Bookmarks: Lily Chen
Fabrics for the banners were sourced from LeeHwa Wedding and Hanbok, Meehee Hanbok, and JS Fabrics.
This project has been developed with support from the Duolingo Community Arts Program, Silver Eye Center for Photography, and Pedantic Arts Residency.
Staged across two venues, this exhibition responds to Alejo Carpentier’s magical realist novel The Kingdom of This World, imagining how the extraordinary events of the Haitian Revolution globally resonate into the present day. At the Carlow University Art Gallery, artists respond with multimedia installations that collapse past into present. At the University of Pittsburgh Art Galleries, contemporary artists reimagine the mytho-historical figures and events from the novel. Together, these two sites link contemporary artwork, modern literature, and colonial history to reexamine the ties and tensions between Caribbean heritage and freedom.
The installation at the Carlow University Art Gallery includes artwork by Chesley Antoinette, Leah Gordon, Edouard Duval-Carrié, José García Cordero, William Vazquez, Scherezade Garcia, and Simryn Gill. It will be on view from October 2023 to March 2024.
The Kingdom of This World, Reimagined originally opened in 2019 at the Little Haiti Cultural Center Satellite Gallery in Miami, Florida, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Carpentier’s novel. It was also featured at the Pensacola Museum of Art at the the University of West Florida from September 2021 to January 2022.
This exhibition was curated by Lesley A. Wolff, Assistant Professor, Art & Design, University of Tampa.
Read more about the installation at the University of Pittsburgh Art Galleries by visiting the UAG website.
Additionally, a Digital Resources site has been created to exist alongside the physical exhibition. The site includes information on the exhibition and participating artists, as well as essays, recorded interviews, and a list of external resources. Learn more about the exhibition by visiting the site at KOTWexhibition.com.
Upcoming Exhibitions
Permissible Dose (2023) combines video, sculpture and custom fragrances to investigate visual, auditory, and olfactory experiences of living in proximity to industrial pollution. Referencing the common “rotten egg” smell of hydrogen sulfide emissions in Pittsburgh, a custom scent will be diffused intermittently in the gallery based on live, regional air-quality data.
The Pittsburgh metropolitan area is consistently ranked among the top 10 most-polluted regions in the United States based on measurements of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the air. Corporate polluters regularly pay millions of dollars in fines rather than meet air quality regulations or modernize old facilities. The region’s recently constructed Shell ethylene cracker plant, now the state’s second-biggest emitter of VOCs, released 95% of its annual emissions allowances in a single month before it began official operations in 2022. Fence-line communities have long been treated as an acceptable sacrifice and experience disproportionately high rates of asthma, cancer, and heart disease. Polluters instrumentalize feelings of hope and nostalgia to buy the support of declining industry towns, making promises of investment into local communities that are often exaggerated, broken or short lived. Facilities are run into the ground and abandoned while industry executives invest in “right-to-work” states downriver.
Permissible Dose was developed from conversations with grassroots activists and watchdogs monitoring Pittsburgh-area industrial sites. Obscuring Power (2023, 32:25 runtime), a short film in the exhibition, follows community “smoke readers” in Pittsburgh, PA. Smoke readers are concerned residents trained in the EPA’s Method 9 to monitor visual pollution emissions from industrial sites and report violations. Method 9 is a policy for regulating emissions with the human eye. Despite the proliferation of camera recording technology, it is still widely used to regulate visible emissions. Obscuring Power is a slow meditation on vision, certainty, and doubt. It combines footage and soundscapes of Pittsburgh industrial sites with glimpses of community monitoring efforts to consider contemporary compulsory risk and systems of power. Together, the film and installation explore the body as a porous sensor, alarm, and site of chemical and environmental entanglements. Student interns involved with the project: Aleah Ansari, Emi Leong, Carter Regan-Organist, Tia Napper, Taya McCullough, Ali Pirl, Holly Neckers, Zyannah Ziegler, Jane Windsheimer, Emma Richardson, Raelynn Hunter and Kayla Doty.
More information:
Permissible Dose, installation view, photos by Jacob Koestler
at the Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH, 2023
Hours of operation
The gallery is open to students, faculty, and staff any time the doors are open. Visitors can schedule a tour by making an appointment with curator, Amy Bowman-McElhone: abwmanmcelhone@carlow.edu. Please check our Instagram for updated gallery hours and events.
Art Gallery Staff
Grants received
Carlow University Art Gallery has been the recipient of the following grants:
2023
- CIC Humanities for the Public Good Sustaining Grant
2021
- Opportunity Fund: Recipient for the Culture of Care speaker and workshop series in partnership with Anthropology of Motherhood
- The William Talbot Hilllman Foundation: Recipient for the project “Center for Art and Social Justice Pilot Program” in partnership with The Documentary Works and Carlow’s Social Justice Institutes
- McAuley Ministries Foundation: Recipient for the project “Social Justice Justice Training Institutes Fellowship Program, Justice-Oriented Art Gallery Exhibitions and Intergroup Dialogue”
2020
- CIC Grant: Humanities for the Public Good: Recipient for the archival project and exhibition: International Poetry Form: The Power of Voice, Spring 2021
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