Author: Shawn C. Simmons
Recent visitors to the Frick Fine Arts Building may have noticed some big changes. The familiar quiet of the Cloister has given way to the hustle of preparation: the Nicholas Lochoff paintings have been covered with plastic, the Dossena sculptures have been crated, and the shelves of the Frick Fine Arts Library’s reading room have gradually emptied over the course of the semester. These shifts mark the beginning of a long-awaited HVAC renovation scheduled for the summer months, bringing improved temperature and humidity control throughout the building—a major upgrade for the care and longevity of artworks in the University Art Gallery’s collection.
While the building itself is scheduled to reopen by the end of the summer, the University Art Gallery (UAG) will not host public exhibitions until Fall 2027. In preparation, the 2025–2026 exhibition calendar was shortened, with deinstallation completed in early February. Over 3,000 objects from the permanent collection were packed and moved into temporary offsite storage. Though the gallery doors will be closed, UAG programming and academic initiatives will continue in other forms throughout the academic year.
It was against this backdrop that the UAG team (Director and Curator Sylvia Rhor Samaniego, Gallery Coordinator Hannah Powell, Gallery Assistant Olivia Buehler, and myself) organized its sendoff: Nothing To See Here, an after-hours celebration that embraced the peculiar conditions of an empty gallery. The title, equal parts wry and literal, set the tone. With the collection removed from storage and the walls cleared, the event asked: What might it mean to gather in a museum defined, at least temporarily, by its lack of objects?
The answer was to activate the space and to create community in new ways within the gallery. On the evening of Thursday, April 16, the UAG opened after hours to a wide public audience, with a live DJ set by TIZA, food and drinks in the exhibition and vacant storage spaces, and a steady hum of activity. Visitors arrived in costume, channeling favorite artworks ranging from Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece to more local icons like William Gropper’s Joe Magarac. A caricature artist sketched attendees in real time, while students from Pitt’s Studio Arts program staged performances and installed an immersive video work that transformed an empty gallery into a shifting field of light and motion. One attendee later described the overall effect as a “construction site rave,” while another noted how the event “completely flip[ped] the art gallery on its head.”
One of the most striking interventions unfolded in the UAG’s historic Rotunda, where the architectural order of the space was overtaken by a large-scale graffiti installation. Organized by Hemispheric Urban Arts Project (HCUAP) co-founder Max Gonzales, the project brought together a group of Pittsburgh-based artists to reimagine the rotunda’s surfaces as sites of layered mark-making. The intervention carried a productive tension: a temporary, unsanctioned visual language unfolding within a building so closely associated with the authority of art history. It did not attempt to resolve that tension, and it was all the more compelling for it.
If the Rotunda foregrounded immediacy and gesture, the front gallery space took a different approach. Tasked with developing a project for this space, I returned to a simple constraint: how to engage the permanent collection when it was no longer physically present. The solution was deliberately low-tech. The walls were covered with printed images of works from the collection pulled directly from the UAG database, in all their inconsistency. Some images were crisp and well-lit; others were grainy, poorly cropped, or marked by the practical conditions of documentation. These were not images originally intended for public display, but for internal reference.
Presented en masse, they took on a different character. The installation offered a flattened but expansive view of the collection, making its unevenness visible. Visitors were given the simple prompt respond to individual works using a system of stickers: smiley face (Love it!), frowny face (Hate it!), or an undecided expression (what the Frick?!). The prompt sidestepped the language of connoisseurship in favor of a more immediate playful—even irreverent—register. As one attendee put it, it was “interesting to see how different people can feel about specific works of art—and which ones they did not believe were worth putting stickers on at all.”
Over the course of the evening, the walls began to shift. The patterns that emerged were not always predictable. Some of the most enthusiastically received works were those that, in other contexts, might be considered peripheral to the collection’s core. Conversely, works assumed to carry institutional weight did not always evoke strong responses. The result was a snapshot of how a diverse public chose to engage with the collection in an unfamiliar format.
Perhaps I just have HVAC on the mind, but the term “heat map” feels apt here. What the project ultimately produced was a set of traces: attention, curiosity, indifference, and, occasionally, delight. For a gallery revisiting its strategic plan, this kind of feedback offers one way of thinking about the collection as a living entity shaped not only by curatorial decisions, but by the responses of those who encounter it.
It would be easy to frame Nothing to See Here as a farewell, but that the result was anything but that. If anything, this closing party opened the door for a new chapter for the UAG. The event clarified that the gallery’s identity is not reducible to its physical contents. Several attendees emphasized this directly, describing a “sense of community with people [they] had never met before” and noting how the event opened the space to audiences who might not otherwise enter.
In the months ahead, while the UAG operates without a physical base, that question will become more pressing. What does it mean to maintain a public-facing identity without a gallery? How might programming extend beyond the building? How will the UAG incorporate the lessons of Nothing to See Here in the future programming. If Nothing to See Here offered any indication, the most generative responses may come from attending to what the gallery’s emptiness makes possible.