Summer School: State of the Sky, collaboration with Luke Stettner
Interdisciplinary Arts-Centered Education Program
Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
June 17 - August 26, 2025
Summer School: State of the Sky is an upcoming experimental education program to be held within the State of the Sky exhibition at Mattress Factory’s, 516 Sampsonia Way building in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The program will encompass six bi-weekly seminars, twice weekly access to the exhibition’s solar darkroom, and a series of public events. Designed for artists and non-artists alike, we aim to build a diverse cohort of practitioners.
Summer School: State of the Sky will explore how documents housed within archives, libraries, and museums can be used to reimagine dominant narratives. Through the creative translation of newspapers, photographs, data, and other archival materials—participants will explore ways to un-archive and recirculate marginalized, contested and unknown histories.
The seminars will be guided by visual artists, poets, filmmakers, and anthropologists, providing a space to connect with diverse research methodologies, engage in creative experimentation, and foster critical discussions about cultural knowledge and memory. A different practitioner will lead each seminar, including, Michael Leong, Noah Theriault, Sobia Ahmad, and Nida Rehman, with the first and final meetings facilitated by the program organizers, Luke Stettner and Calista Lyon.
Alongside the seminars, participants will have twice weekly access to the exhibition’s unique solar darkroom, where participants can use documents to experiment with photograms—exposures made using the sun as a light source. The darkroom will encourage hands-on creative inquiry and will support participants’ personal research.
Two public film screenings, curated by Benny Shaffer and co-hosted by Pittsburgh Sound + Image will bookend the seminar, framing its duration with cinematic works that resonate with the State of the Sky exhibition and the Summer School’s themes.
Please visit the Mattress Factory’s Summer School: State of the Sky web page for more information.