HAAARCH!!! is a yearly showcase of undergraduate research, creative work, and achievement. This forum provides students the opportunity to exhibit, present and promote their research and experiential learning activities.
HAAARCH!!! 2016 will take place in the Cloister and University Art Gallery of the Frick Fine Arts Building on March 21, from 4-6 pm.
Melissa Quarto will be graduating this April with a double major in History of Art & Architecture and Hispanic Languages & Literature with minors in Museum Studies and Studio Arts. She is primarily interested in the political agency of images and place-making through transnational encounters within the Americas. At HAAARCH, she will present her Honors thesis, Performing Incanismo: Cultural Tourism at Machu Picchu, Peru.
Emily Mirales will be graduating this spring with majors in the History of Art & Architecture and Anthropology along with a minor in Museum Studies. As a dual major studying art and archaeology, Emily has developed an interest in material culture studies and the interactions that occur between people, objects, and places.
Brianna Humbert is a senior majoring in the History of Art & Architecture with a minor in French language. Her research focuses on women artists and often takes on a feminist perspective. She is interested in a range of topics in modern and contemporary art, including identity, performance, collective art projects, and feminist art of the 1970s.
Nikita Costantini is a senior at the University of Pittsburgh majoring in History of Art and Architecture and double minoring in German Language Studies and Museum Studies. After graduation in December 2016, she plans to move to Germany to work and practice her language skills.
A non-traditional student, Michael Guttilla, re-started an architectural education begun at Blair Academy. His hiatus from the conventional path was spent drafting, cooking, cage fighting, and collecting credits at community college. Upon entering the University of Pittsburgh, Michael declared Architectural Studies as his major and competed for the Pitt Snowboard Freesytle Team. He will graduate this April.
In our far from post-racial world, museums are increasingly feeling the pressures of demographic change and urgent new campaigns for racial justice. Famous European museums are altering the titles of art works to eliminate demeaning terms; Confederate monuments are being dismantled in public space and sent to history museums for storage; museums across the U.S. are scrambling to shed their image as bastions of privilege and to diversify their audiences and supporters.
Once a heat-swollen, record-setting producer of iron for US Steel, Pittsburgh’s Carrie Furnaces is now a bony relic of the American steel industry, a salvaged monument to the sweat that built the region, and – amazingly – an expansive collection of graffiti.
Today’s museums strive to be increasingly relevant, ethical, and responsible public-facing institutions by engaging with issues like accessibility, diversity, collaboration, and inclusion. Yet in many ways, these are still buzzwords of best practice, and not yet actual pillars of museum work. This begs the question: can museum work of the future solidly marry the theory of ideas and the practicality of making the best intentions happen on the ground?
