 Hi everyone. We're going to get started here. Thank you so much for being here today. We really appreciate it. It's been a trying week for the entire city, so we appreciate your time this afternoon. My name is Kate Barbera. I'm the Assistant Archivist for the University Libraries and I am thrilled to introduce to you our speakers today. This is our very first installment of the Library Speaker Series and we have today Ingrid Schaffner and Elizabeth Tufts-Brown. They join us from Carnegie Museum of Arts where I had the privilege of working as an archivist on their time-based media project for about two years. I worked with Elizabeth and many others at the museum to uncover, investigate, and preserve the history of their remarkable film and video departments. I also had the privilege of working with the Carnegie International Archives. For those of you who don't know, the Carnegie International has been a staple in our city since 1896. Yes, you heard that correctly. 1896, which makes it one of the longest running biennial exhibitions in the entire world. The exhibition has a long history of bringing innovative artists, talent, thinkers to our city and I am excited that Ingrid and Elizabeth are going to share some of that history with you today and also highlight some materials from the Carnegie International Archive. Ingrid Schaffner is an American curator, art critic, writer, and educator specializing in contemporary art. She is currently at work on the Carnegie International 57th edition, 2018, which will be on view through March 25, 2019. From 2000-2015, Ingrid directed the exhibition program at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the leading museums dedicated to exhibiting the innovative art of our time. Her many significant monographic and thematic exhibitions have brought attention to under-recognized artists and little explored themes and practices in the art world. Elizabeth Tufts Brown is associate registrar for the permanent collection and the archives at Carnegie Museum of Art. She has a bachelor's degree in art history from the College of William and Mary and a master's degree in art history from George Washington University. Elizabeth has worked with the CMOA archives for over 20 years and has a special interest in the history of the International. I want to thank Ingrid and Elizabeth for being with us here today. We're very excited that they've agreed to join us to kick off our library speaker series. After the talk, I welcome all of you to join us in the lobby right outside for lunch. I also encourage you to check out the Frankenstein complex, which is the exhibition on display here in Posner. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Ingrid Schaffner and Elizabeth Tufts Brown. I'm associate registrar for collections and archives at Carnegie Museum of Art. Just to explain what I do at the museum, the collections part of my job. I bring in all the new gifts and purchases four times a year for the collection and then the archives part. Registrar's are the record keepers of the museum so we sort of naturally took charge of keeping the archives. Somehow it started falling to me to answer all the public inquiries that came in that required research in the archives. We get about 300 inquiries a year. They used to come in by phone call or letter. Now they come in by email or from our website also by phone call. And about I'd say once a week, I would get something, a question about something like this, which is hard to see, but it is the label off the back of a painting. And people would say I found a painting, I have a painting, I bought a painting, I'm looking to buy a painting that has this label on the back. And it says Carnegie Institute or some of the later ones actually say Carnegie International and the year. So I would take that information, that little information and try and find out what international was it in. Do I have an image of it? Is it in the catalog? The complicating thing is that a lot of these paintings were not in the actual exhibition. They were submitted and then rejected. So they have the tag and people think that means it was in the show, but not always. So that's kind of how I got pulled into the archives. So just a little bit of background. I know you all know this face very well. Andrew Carnegie was our founder as well as yours. In 1895 he built his Palace of Culture, which included the Carnegie Museum and that eventually split off into the Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Art, the Carnegie Library and the Carnegie Musical. At the same time he stipulated there should be an annual exhibition of art and he wanted to build a collection of the old masters of tomorrow. So his idea was to buy something out of each international. So in 1895 our first building on the left was built. It really was in the middle of nowhere. There wasn't much in Oakland at that time. I think that that ditch there is now Shelly Plaza because that's the library side of the building. Those two towers Andrew Carnegie hated and called them donkey ears. So as you can see in the next enlargement of the building those are gone. Actually the base of them is still inside the building. So by 1907 we had to enlarge because he had been collecting dinosaur bones which needed a large space to be exhibited in and also we added our Hall of Architecture with the plaster cast of buildings from around the world. So the early internationals which actually started in 1896. I have a typo there. And until 1922 John Beatty was the director of the Department of Fine Arts which was within the museum and he was also the curator of the show. He would travel around for about three months out of the year and visit studios and decide what was going to be in the international. And then every year he was doing that so a quarter of his life he was traveling selecting art. And it would arrive like this on wagons. I suppose it came by boat from Europe and then by train from New York and then wagons like this from either downtown or East Liberty wherever they were coming in. The exhibition was suspended a couple of times in 1906. We were busy building that big enlargement of our building so they did not have an international. And then of course due to World War I and 19 from 1915 to 19 there was no international. Jump forward to 1974 and we enlarged again and added that section at the upper left which is the Skafe Galleries. And it was a good thing because by that point we were still collecting contemporary art out of the internationals and contemporary art was getting bigger and bigger. I'm gonna fast forward to today. Alright so bigger and bigger. Bigger and bigger and bigger and building scale. So here is work by El Anatsui on the facade of the Carnegie Museum right now signaling that the Carnegie International is in the house. El is a Ghanaian artist who is based in Anzuka, Nigeria and it's a beautiful bridging of Ghana, Anzuka, Pittsburgh, Oakland, and Wilkinsburg because much of the piece was fabricated here in Pittsburgh. D. Briggs a sculptor in Wilkinsburg whose studio is a firehouse and she makes big sculpture. When I was looking for someone to help put this thing together which came in bits and pieces from Nigeria D. with her community it was a summer job for lots of kids this this summer was to make this incredible work of art that's on the facade of the building. Let me just say the Richard Sarah sculpture that's on the plaza was part of the 1985 Carnegie International and El responded to it with his work called Three Angles. You can see the part of the composition has a similar kind of wedge-shaped form and whereas Richard Sarah's sculpture is made out of tons and tons of cordon steel that dark part of El's sculpture is thousands and thousands of bottle caps that are all joined together by pieces of copper wire and then the rest of the sculpture there's a kind of mirrored material behind the Richard Sarah that El wanted to bring the sky in and open up space for the Sarah to kind of let it lift off from the building which he feels kind of obscures it and then El said that he wanted to kind of fill in the rest was something that's very quotidian every day and what could be more every day than information so that there's plates that were donated by the Mepper printing press here in Pittsburgh aluminum printing plates to make this sculpture which also kind of reads as a painting and for El these diagonal lines across the surface for him are conjuring of the the confluence of the rivers that we are at here in Pittsburgh so it's it's very cited and it's very much a bridge to the international and then you've also probably noticed on the exterior of the old building the neons and I'm sorry this is not the best image but that's what I got so these are encircling the the the old building and around the facade of the Carnegie library our names it's a work of art by Tavares Strahan a Bahamian artist who when he visited the museum was very interested in the names engraved on the building the names of great white men so Tavares has added a contemporary contemporary list of women and people of color who have also contributed to art science literature exploration engineering and these names are you can find them if you could open it but you can't in this book that's on view in the international it is the encyclopedia of the invisible that Tavares researched and created and it is massive and when you do open it and look inside it looks like every colliers or encyclopedia Britannica that you ever copied a research paper from in grammar school except all of the entries are people you don't know so Tavares's bigger project is to illuminate a history of the invisible and so I like the way he's transformed our whole building into something yeah something encyclopedic all right so yes it's the 57th Carnegie International mmm and here is my team on the left Ashley McNellis curatorial assistant and Liz Park associate curator and to say that when you do the Carnegie International it's a gig I came here in summer of 2015 to research the exhibition put the exhibition together make the publications and then when the exhibition is over me and my team horse maybe that wagon shows up and we get on it we get ahead yeah head on out of town so and this has been the tradition since 1991 so I think of there's an old history of the international and then there's a contemporary history of the international it begins in 91 when outside curators are brought in to do this signature exhibition of the museum and I was thinking a lot I've been coming to Pittsburgh since 95 to see the international it really is a magnet for the field a real bed bellwether for the field so and so I've been thinking about this exhibition building on those past internationals and I thought a lot about this space the Hall of Sculpture and how it becomes a kind of the icon of your international so the icon of my international is not this so I'm so just to show you here's from 1991 a work by Alan McCullum who it's thinking about the museum and its collections it's casts of dinosaur bones from our own great paleontology collection so casts of dinosaur bones it's like making the museum as Boneyard and there's a wonderful little anecdote of a child looking at this with his father and the father saying oh I don't think they've put this one back together yet so yes contemporary art so flummoxing so and and then here's just quickly so you have in your mind to here's from 1995 and here's from 1999 and here's from 2004 and it doesn't matter who but this how you can see how this is a very dynamic frame this is 2008 and then here's from the last international and I'm sorry I don't have image of course you'll have to go and see it's an amazing work by post commodity an indigenous collective who created what for them is a sort of sand painting made out of chunks of glass coal and steel so it is a made of the materiality of Pittsburgh's own industries so and you'll see it and to Elizabeth's point about how important the international is for building the museum's collections this is our Winslow Homer that has the accession number of one so Homer won the Carnegie Prize in 1996 we acquired this picture and and we will and we will acquire works from this current international just as we did the last international so oops and I thought I had an image here there's been a poultry geist in my slides hmm so anyways yes yes all right I'm gonna go back to this just for a minute because Winslow Homer actually didn't win first prize oh okay he won the chronological medal which was under Carnegie's idea to buy one painting from each year of the international so had to be painted in that year it was supposed to be not ever exhibited before it was an American artist it was like very constricted so that only actually lasted a couple of years because I think it was in 1897 they couldn't find a painting they wanted for 1897 so then they didn't buy one but the next year there was a painting that was painted in 1897 that they got instead so that kind of fell apart we do buy out of each international and I will say that their two prizes now given for the international the Carnegie Prize and the fine prize and post commodity whose work is in the hollow sculpture which I did not show you they won the fine prize so they were the prizes continue yes the prizes do continue so I just wanted to give you a view of the archives and that those gray boxes are Kate's property there but the top right those are all the original entry blanks from the artists that were in the internationals all the way back to 1896 so a lot of our early papers before 1941 are actually on deposit at the archives of American art I think when they were building the scape galleries they decided what are we gonna do with all these papers so they gave them to the archives and it's actually good because they digitized most of the at least the international papers so people can do research on them but we still have the the entry blanks and I have a couple up here on the table for you to look at afterwards we also have correspondence we have photographs we have all the catalogs and we have shipping records so we have a lot of materials even without this the things that are now in Washington and that leads to it again so in embarking on the international the world is it is your onion and and of course you're not going to travel the entire world so I was interested in this idea of thinking about my travel building on the travel since 1991 and the idea that on the contemporary international has been kind of mapping a global contemporary art world so what a great what a great project for some interns to research the past in international curators travels because no there weren't this like handy itineraries lying about so three interns worked on this project to go through the files and reconstruct the itineraries of curators from 1991 to 2013 and then we added my look of travel too so you can see it better on the screen in front of you the sort of color each color is a different curators year of travel and how we're we're mapping the world here and it's nice the researchers wrote a piece published on our online magazine about their methodology and research and it was like really going into the files and finding it was they were they were looking at receipts from like restaurants just to say oh yes they were there on this day yeah so and travel agent you know itineraries and all sorts of things whatever whatever we could find whatever we could find so the map I think is called something like a fantastical map because it's there's a lot of the confidence factor is a noise 10 for every one of the itineraries what's next here okay so the little black books when I was always doing research about the early internationals I would I would see mentions of the little black books a little black books prepare the little back black books for Homer St. Godin's trip this summer and I was like where are these little black books and I asked archives in American art have you ever seen these little black books no no no trace of them no trace them at the museum no trace in Washington well one day Ingrid gets a phone call so and I should say because I'm a real archive geek Elizabeth was one of the first colleagues I met with when I started working on the international to learn about the the history and its holdings and that's where I learned about the mystery of the little black books so one day I came to work and the phone rings right and early it's a phone call from Paris hello she actually didn't have fun I can't do that so hello my name is my name is Francis Washburn Francis and my father used to be the director at your art museum and I live in a tiny little apartment in Paris and I'm trying to get rid of some things and I have these little black books and and she literally said these little black books I'm like hold the line and I get Elizabeth and then we're like this and she says that we're welcome to have them she said I'm sure you have copies but I just thought I'd check she said they're in my fireplace in my apartment I really need to get them out of there so she asked if we would like them we happen to have one of our curators going to Paris the following week on a trip and she said she would pick them up for us and so now we have them and they're organized by country and yeah they're they're little three-ring binders like a phylofax if anybody still knows what that is yeah and information typed about when you're in Paris what hotel what the restaurants are lists of studio artists and addresses and then they're annotated by the and they were prepared yearly for the director right so lots of times they say for a certain artist what they had in the last two or three internationals just as a reminder and then maybe if they have an idea of what they might be able to show the director this time and with little annotations by the director that in pencil that would say no or say the red one or you know like a little mnemonic sometimes they're little sketches of what it's really fascinating yeah so little black books I guess that's that's a picture of Gordon Bailey Washburn with Mr. Bobard I think who was the president of the Institute and their you know planning the 1958 international biggest ever and we're gonna talk a bit about how the black books were the kind of methodology I think that's the next one okay yeah so yeah um Gordon Washburn took over that black book from Homer St. Godin so I have never found Homer St. Godin's black books but we have the descendants of them but I know he used the same thing because I've seen those mentions of the black books in the correspondence so we have a whole series of these photographs of him visiting the artists studios mostly in the like 20s and 30s I guess so before World War II on the left he's there with Reginald Marsh and I guess his wife and they're sitting down to some kind of meal he I think was great friends with a lot of these artists on the right that's Mondrian in his studio it's not a very good photo but I knew you all know who that was yeah so he just like like baby and I'm sure Washburn they all traveled for significant parts of their years and here I have Homer St. Godin's of course was traveling across the Atlantic on a boat and there's part of his itinerary if I think it's 1922 or 23 or 24 and at the bottom it's a 10 days on the steamer and you know just like one after the other city so pretty intense but then Ingrid has her travel story yeah yeah and so it continues got to get out there do your research so I'm faced with this question of how am I going to strategically organize my research I'm not gonna go everywhere in the world I really wanted to get off of my own beaten past as a curator who travels to Europe routinely into different parts of the United States and major cities in South America so so I hatched this idea of inviting five curator colleagues in different parts of the field to each go on a trip with me someplace new to both of us so to travel for two weeks with a colleague as a thinking and traveling partner the the companions I called them weren't my co-curators by stretch they were really yeah colleagues to be with in the field and that that the travel would be following their own interests their own trajectories of research or really did get us both off of our own beaten paths and I like this idea too of the international supporting research like in kind of that great tradition of the Natural History Museum sending scientists out into the field so here they were sending me and my curatorial companion out into the field and just briefly Karen Coney I traveled in parts of West Africa she's the curator the director of the Veerless Center about urban politics at the new school Ruba Katrib and I Ruba was interested in going to some place mid very specific recently recently soviet or newly post soviet and near Middle East so we went to the caucuses region Ruba's at the Museum of Modern Art in New York Dorian Chong is a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Hong Kong and we were headed to Pakistan and Bangladesh and then there were terrorist texts directed at Americans Europeans it didn't seem like a good place for me to go so we went to India instead busy silver curator based in Lagos Nigeria has her research is art of the African diaspora we traveled in the Caribbean and then Magali areola is a curator based in Mexico City and she was interested in this sort of trade trade routes cultural roots history of colonization that would connect Mexico City and Manila so both under Spanish role in colonial histories so we traveled in parts of Southeast Asia and we too had intense itineraries that were composed by Liz Park my associate curator taking sort of leads from me and leads through my companion and then the criteria for her art for our travel was not for me to run around and find artists to bring to Pittsburgh which is very colonial model not a contemporary one but to really have a bigger understanding of what is the contemporary when you move outside of the hubs of this art world so that was our research quest and I just want to show you a picture of my office here was my this is the map this is Buckminster Fuller is a map of the world that shows the true relationships of scales of continents that has no right set up or upside down so that was our that was my field of research and then just an anecdote from the travel with BC Silva we were in Haiti and we were visiting the Centre de Art and they were preparing for their first exhibition since the earthquake had really devastated their facility at an exhibition of a Haitian artist named Jasmine Joseph here's one of his paintings from the 1950s and we had a lovely visit and when I came back their archivist reached out to me and she said well we were going through our archives here and we found this letter from your museum in 1957 inviting Jasmine Joseph to participate in the Carnegie International and we wonder did he participate in the Carnegie International there it is it's signed by Gordon Washburn so it's probably a little black book that relates to all this we should look but we did look in the catalogue and indeed Jasmine Joseph did participate in the Carnegie International so I love this that even in the even in the contemporary travel and research you're coming upon the history of this exhibition so a number of artists have engaged with the history of the show with Pittsburgh but specifically with the archives the artists John Rubin and Lenka Clayton both of whom are based here in Pittsburgh have national international careers as artists John of course is the head of graduate studies in the fine arts department here at CMU so I asked them to create a project that would activate one of the galleries the main galleries when you first walk in off the lobby and so John and Lenka in their way spent a lot of time in the museum spent a lot of time with Elizabeth kind of being directed to different archives file parts of the history that they might have looked at a lot of different things yeah yeah including the little black books including the little black books that was the start that was the start but what they ended up being drawn to maybe you want to say what this so this is what we call the Carnegie international record card and each artist has one or more this is Gary Melchers who exhibited in a lot of internationals this is card two for Melchers so it has the name of the artist their nationality of course when they died and then each year that they participated on the left and the name of the painting AE at the left is annual exhibition so is it the first the second these are later the 11th on the right it says whether it was listed like in the catalog I believe and looks like Melchers was on the jury a lot of these years so he was not qualified to get a prize so they noted that but a and R is accepted or rejected looks like most of these were accepted position refers to how they hung because the salon hanging that in the early 20th century where they would have like paintings stacked on top of each other on the wall so one was the coveted position the bottom it's like Melchers did well so John and Lenka looked at these cards and they were fascinated by the rejected titles which were noted by an R Melchers of course doesn't have any but and then they were also looking at the actual titles we kept track of the rejected titles up to 1931 yeah the Carnegie was a painting annual up until 31 yes and artists submitted their work for consideration so John and Lenka were drawn to all of the ours which just imagine some of those days are ours and they this is their project for the international and there there are Lenka and John but at when museums open you will see two painters at this table in the gallery and they are translating the R title rejected titles into new paintings these text paintings that then get hung on the wall and then it's like a clock that as new paintings are added they all they shift and eventually make their way to this bin because there's only so many slots in there it's like a like a Fordist project they're turning out these titles and when they reach the bin they are there for takes so visitors can take home a rejected title new painting from the Carnegie International and they have it's been it's been really it's wonderful to walk around the museum and you see people with this they're kind of large to these paintings under their arms apparently opening weekend visitors from afar who were at the airport could identify one another because they're walking around with these some rejected titles under there and actually they don't usually make their way to the bin because people are waiting for them yeah yeah yeah it's a wonderful project it really is activating this international in the history of the Carnegie International by way of the archive so to say I am an archive geek I did an exhibition an important exhibition for me and my work that looked at archiving and collecting as as process for contemporary artists as imagery for contemporary artists so I am always thinking about the archives so even beginning on this project yes Elizabeth was one of the first colleagues I wanted to meet and thinking about how this international it is exhibition but it will then be archive so one of the first things we did the team did is we we got our website up and running on this is our website home page you can see it's very lean that's purposeful and you can you could click on participants there was we didn't have a database at the museum where you could put in an artist's name and see who was in the international so one of the things that we did was to create just that so now you can type in a name you could type in whistler and do search and you could see that whistler was in many many many many many Carnegie internationals as an artist as a juror etc so our international will enter this database that we created and this is super geeky but the the international has sort of three design phases for me so that first phase like the website that it was so lean was the truss phase like name for a truss bridge which is the most like simple industrial kind of bridge and in that phase of the exhibition and the kind of research and development phase we referred to the international as Carnegie until 57th ed 2018 and it had this kind of almost typewriter font so now we're in the fuss phase with the exhibition on and now it's the Carnegie International 57th edition 2018 with this kind of fussy farm fussy font and so our our our exhibition guide that's the that's the identity right now for the international but we will be entering soon haha the catenary phase so a catenary is a natural line between two points so like a like a rope bridge is a catenary and so obviously I was thinking about Pittsburgh and its bridges and as we make to cat our way to catenary I think of like the whole project kind of snapping down and we just turn into CI 57 2018 and that's as we enter archive so we're doing a second publication for the international and it will be in this sort of yeah lean mean catenary scheme and yeah and we're gonna work with Elizabeth to put all our papers we're already doing we're already doing it and no other inter-curators ever done that have they Elizabeth no you've been right yeah yeah usually they just leave you with boxes of yeah yeah as you know yeah so anyway so okay so um just to end the presentation with I'm gonna be speaking next Thursday about the international at the museum 6 30 the 8 I won't talk all that time but I'll talk for quite a bit of it and it's this kind of fast-moving look at the at the at the show which I've been giving annually so I hope that you'll come to that to hear more about the Carnegie International and I think I think Kate's gonna take some questions for us but I just wanted to mention I brought in lots of show-and-tell up in the front please be careful with the the materials that you can tell are old and delicate but you can touch anything and there's catalogs there's a scrapbook there are some documents and photographs I'm just gonna point out this is the catalog for the first Carnegie International and this is the guide for the current Carnegie International so we were thinking about history and another thing that Elizabeth brought that you really have to see is Edward mook here's Edward mooks he's is his what is this this is his entry blank so and it is signed by him so it tells the name of the painting that he wanted to submit to the international and how much it was valued at and the value of the frame and where they should pick it up and then they signed it yeah and actually this is the other real treasure this is letter from Alexander Calder and he's I don't know if you can see there's a little sketch up here of his mobile which is now at the airport but it was designed for the grand staircase at the Carnegie and from there for many years it was part of the International it was the 58 international all right all right so we're gonna open it up for questions now yeah Brian Brian Splenda thank you for presenting today quick question is that the database of public-facing and free database yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah no no it's um so we created our own website for the international I think it's Carnegie International 2018 and so that's where you can learn about programs and there's reading and that's where this little toy yeah so yeah at the museum we have of course our own internal database but mostly we focus on paintings that we have in our collection that were also in the international we do have other you know if you ever have a question call me actually for a librarian ask about a database absolutely that then our database thinking about how our website will probably vanish but we all know that did all the records went into the main day right right and we also have we do have an archives website which is records.cmi.org Kate set that up there's not much about the international on it yet but it will be eventually okay thank you other questions yeah way in the back thank you that's my favorite question I think we all should be asking that question it's it's such a beautiful project as soon as Tabara showed me his first sketch of what it would look like it was like I almost couldn't believe that they weren't there because it's just so simple and and yet you can't even imagine how hard it was to get those names up there where there's no electricity and it's a historic building you can't drill hole in it and on and on and on but there they are and right now there is no plan for them to stay but what can we do to advocate to keep them because the night that it opened I didn't know those were there I've been kind of out to lunch doing whatever you know just not even thinking about it and I got out of my car I didn't do the you know the valley part so I was just like down the street and I walked up and it's dark and these lights are there and I think after living in Pittsburgh for almost a decade I I hadn't even made it in the door and I was almost weeping coming up museum because I thought this is the first time we're there you know it's always been every time I walked up a list of white men and it was the first time I felt like well while you were weeping because tomorrow's had this performance that he for him was happening so it's just kind of a pop-up performance where children wearing these little bomber jackets that tomorrow's mother made the Bahamas for them this performance where they they own the names of different so like this little girl jump there's a little soapbox and so girl jumps on she said I'm Shirley Chisholm and then she like says so like about ten kids performed different names there's a lot of weeping going on that night yeah but I mean I don't know what I don't have your answer yet but the more I heard the question there's more that needs to be an answer yeah absolutely and it's and it was really done in partnership with the library you have to welcome the kids and they did so that's an interest perhaps on both sides I feel like it fixed something that had always been missing so thanks so there's there's one didactic panel when you first walk in and I called the billboard that's big and it's welcoming and kind of lays out the some of the the big ideas for the show but I really wanted to make an exhibition where we as visitors didn't walk into a gallery and look for words to read and I selected artists who worked I know would be very present in the galleries and and worked closely with the artists to really think about them inhabiting the space with their work and I think the show is very successful in that that I people do seem to feel really just free to be in the exhibition and but yet I've written the text on wall text so I think a lot about wall text and how you use it strategically or not and so we want that information available and so that's I love 19th century travel guide so I love the idea you have a little guide and the there are wall labels that will say the artist name in the title and then as a page reference and you could turn to page 94 and read a little bit about Rachel Rose in the gallery or later and the guide is it's accessible in that it's it's a $15 purchase or you can loan them for free and just wander with one in the gallery and because I didn't I want I wanted to show where you with the art in the museum thank you for that question are they supposed to leave the museum probably not that's like an archivist question yeah I know we kind of consider them as you know they were working documents so we're just happy to have it back actually we when we got the collection of black books there were some that Gordon Washburn had used after he left the museum he went to New York after Pittsburgh and so he went to Asia Asia House Asia society in New York and so I've actually sent those notebooks on to them so this is a difficult question do you have any favorites I mean that's like asking which kid do you like best kind of impossible question because I really invested a lot in each artist in their work and in the the invitation of the artists was to participate in making the show together and so artists did come here and they spent time and I think that's another part of why the show is so situated because artists really did think about the spaces and history in the context so it's hard for me to pick a favorite I do very much enjoy the installation that is in the decorative arts collection by an artist Karen Klumnik Philadelphia artists who makes paintings, sculptures, photography, video and always kind of thinking about her work in terms of a kind of theater of art and so Karen's an artist that I've worked with a lot in the past and I'll continue to work with her in the future and I loved how she cited her installations which feel like they feel like 19th century salon style installations very she loves the decorative and she loves the ballet but then it's it's totally punk when you start reading the titles for the works like there's this little charming photograph of some sheep and I made this little feels like a little 19th century gallery brochure and you find the number and you see it's the pretty peeing sheep and I thought personally it was meant to be the peering sheep but no it is a peeing sheep and that's like it's the whole thing it's just filled with delight and subversion that I love yeah and I can just add my own experience I worked on eight at nationals and it's really hard to divorce your view of the work from your experience with the artist because I worked on a lot of installations and some artists are very difficult to work with and that makes me not like their work quite as much but yeah it's hard to make a favorite well I always say it's hard to be an artist and your vision I've got my we've got some difficult ones and the additional questions yeah this lecture and your research question what is the contemporary outside of the hubs could you give us some high points of what the answer to that ah spoiler so it's like a contradiction in terms contemporary history because contemporary can have history work in it it's moving its information as we're standing in it but I say so is history and that's our job is to be kind of always retelling and re-narrating history and histories and so I've been given same lecture for over 10 years but it's not the same lecture of course because every time it's different but it has a structure in terms of these very open themes and as I've been giving it here the first time I gave it it was to look at the past internationals and think about how they define a contemporary the next time was about my research in the field and that kind of contemporary was finding so this time it's actually going to be how our exhibition might help us think about the contemporary and its conditions whichever changing any other questions yeah the trust bridge the bus phase cat Mary cat Mary done are there are did you were the artist that were presented in the international were there are they showing in those three phases no those are just kind of a structural thing for how I was thinking about the exhibition I need a lot of structure and you can kind of get the how is it going to do the travel I wasn't I needed like this kind of five companions and the this trust plus cat Mary I feel silly saying it but was I had also a creative team I didn't introduce you to and they were consultants who kind of like the people you would begin you bring it in at the end of your project and we're making an exhibition to make the catalog with you so designer and editors I invite those people from the beginning and their colleagues who I've worked with in the past in different ways and they are as much thinking about exhibition and exhibition making in great sort of craft and detail as I do and so these I that there that there were these sort of editorial design through lines for the whole thing that make it very holistic I think that's another thing you feel in the show the way we took over the signage of whole museum and it's kind of unified in a way that is connected to the exhibition and it's all one experience in the museum and that's kind of came out of the sort of thinking through these structures for three years three years if time for one final question I was going to come out and hopefully the end of February the process shots because I know there are no images of the work in its finished state that are there right now so did you take process shots of how the artist was making the work in the space is that you know so you have this conundrum when you're making an exhibition and you're making a catalog and if you're making a temporary exhibition that doesn't even exist until the day the thing opens and the artist is done you know so that's why there are no pictures in the guide I didn't want to have pictures of artists representative works because those aren't the works of the current international so the second publication has installation views but not process views but on our being published on the museum's website are these films that Tom Fisher our videographer made incredible process videos of artists work and he's going to be it's like a series that he's going to be releasing over the course of the international that really sort of conversations with artists and then this process photography so that's accessible online I want to thank all of you for being here today I encourage you to come up and look at the materials from the Carnegie International Archive they are powerful and it's a really great way to connect with the history of this wonderful exhibition come up and check out the entry forms they really are just remarkable really really remarkable I also welcome you to join us after at words for lunch in the lobby and to check out the Frankenstein exhibit so thank you so much