Mattress Factory installation art goes mobile for kids

The Mattress Factory has a busy fall planned for local kids, and all of it centers around the Factory’s signature installation art.

With a $10,000 grant from the Keith Haring Foundation, Mattress Factory staff will not only connect with more after-school programs during the upcoming school year, but they’re also creating a program of their own.

“It’s really important to us that students have opportunities to work directly with living, working artists,” says Felice Cleveland, the Mattress Factory’s director of education. Although the details of “Install: Afternoons at the Factory” are still being formulated, it will bring local installation artists to work with school kids in Factory galleries once a week starting this fall.

Mattress Factory personnel have spent the last year researching how 3- to 6-year-olds respond to contemporary art. Now, using a $12,000 grant from Spark (of The Sprout Fund), they’re starting mini-Mattress Factories, commissioning artists to build small installations that will fit 10 3- to 6-year-olds inside. These mobile works of art will bring programs to various venues for kids to explore a variety of themes, such as how light can be used as a medium.

Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and Reading Is Fundamental are partners in the project, selecting books to include in the program, based on its theme. By documenting the kids’ experience, the Factory also will be able to make these themed lessons available on their website.

“The Space I’m In,” using a $100,000 Benedum Foundation grant, has brought mobile art tools to kids in Washington, Greene and Fayette counties in past years and will now expand the Factory’s reach to West Virginia. “The big goal is thinking about how we can have the same or similar conversations we have when we’re in one of our installations – about light, sound, memory, space, pattern, time – and how we take that out into the world,” says Cleveland. These tools include The Walls, four pop-up white fabric-covered walls set up to look like a room, into which Factory staff can project environments created by kids or its own artists. Another tool was created by Jeremy Boyle (featured in theKidsburgh article, “A tale of one classroom …”) of Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab. His sound blocks, resembling small speakers, make sounds based on the light, sound and movement around them.

Even before autumn arrives, there’s time to celebrate the end of summer youth workshops with a free-admission Mattress Factory day on Aug. 9.

 

Writer: Marty Levine

Source: Felice Cleveland, Mattress Factory