Author: Shawn C. Simmons
As a Summer 2025 Marstine Fellow for Research and Public Engagement at the University Art Gallery (UAG), I spent much of this summer following the traces of some of the city’s most influential modernist artists. Some were visible in plain sight, like the large enamels and sculptures of Virgil Cantini that punctuate the University of Pittsburgh’s Oakland campus. Others were harder to pinpoint: a line in a letter tucked into a file at the Detre Library & Archives at the Heinz History Center, or the recollection of a community member. Together, these traces offered starting points for curatorial decisions that will shape the UAG’s roster of upcoming exhibitions.
One of my central projects was co-developing Cantini on Campus, a public walking tour that maps the many artworks by Virgil Cantini scattered across campus. Cantini’s practice ranged widely—enamel on steel, wool tapestry, mosaic, kinetic sculpture—but his guiding vision was consistent: art should be part of daily life. At Pitt, that meant integrating monumental works into the architecture of new postwar buildings, where they symbolized the ambition of a rapidly modernizing university. Seen together, these works tell a story of civic aspiration and futurity. They also prompt reflection on what it means when artworks blend into their surroundings. What does it mean to attend to something hidden in plain sight?
I worked with HAA undergraduate Louise Matthews to design the tour to make these works visible again, not as static ornaments but as touchstones of late 20th-century Pitt history. The project, an extension of the student-curated UAG exhibition Earth and Ether: The Art of Lucille and Virgil Cantini, also asks audiences to expand their looking beyond Virgil. His wife and collaborator, Lucille (Kleber) Cantini, was equally integral to the city’s artistic life through her own studio practice and teaching. While her contributions have been less visible in the public record, they remain central to understanding the Cantinis’ shared legacy. For me, developing the exhibition became an act of balancing the narrative, placing Lucille and Virgil’s names side by side and inviting audiences to imagine the artistic dialogue that animated their household and their city.
Equally important was the chance to bring community voices into the project. I worked closely with members of the Cantini family, as well as former students and colleagues of Lucille and Virgil, to gather reflections that will be incorporated into exhibition labels and related programming. Their insights remind us that—following Virgil’s ethos—art is indeed a part of everyday life, one that extends into everyday encounters.
My contributions extended into Wavelengths, an exhibition featuring four modernist sculptors—Aaronel deRoy Gruber, Josefa Filkosky, Sue Fuller, and Jane Haskell—whose ties to Pittsburgh are varied but significant. Part of my work this summer involved mapping these different trajectories, tracing where these artists studied, exhibited, and how the city shaped their practices at key moments. This research will inform a virtual tour that situates each artist’s individual story within a broader narrative of Pittsburgh’s modernist history.
Each of these projects began with the act of following traces and asking how they might be connected: how a weathered steel sculpture communicates midcentury ideals of modernity, or how a personal memory reframes an artwork we thought we already knew. These experiences refined my understanding of curatorial practice as a responsibility to connect research with public experience.
The Marstine Fellowship gave me the time and space to approach this research-in-action more expansively. It underscored that curatorial work is not only about recovering the past but also about reanimating it in the present. As the UAG’s exhibitions open this fall, I hope these efforts encourage others to pause, look up, and notice what has been there all along.