Space and Place

From skyscrapers to open-pit mines, landscape paintings to gardens, from the artist’s studio to the architecture of incarceration, we engage with space and place on a daily basis. Human and non-human agents imagine, create, occupy, and transform these environments as sites of creative expression as well as domains of cultural history. Experiences and imaginings of space and place have also given rise to cosmologies and cartographies that both anticipate and define human behaviors through their production and use.

  • What does it mean to recognize both power and resistance in space and place? 
  • How do culture and environment work mutually to constitute each other over time? 
  • Why do designers, users, reformers, and destroyers work together and against one another to co-author space and place over time and how can scholars effectively trace this multiplicity of agents and motivations?  
Author: Loghan Hawkes
As a long-time lover of both astronomy and history, it has been a treat to work with the Allegheny Observatory (AO) archive. The...
Author: Celeste Smith
Some of the very first advice I received when deciding to pursue a career working in museums was that I had to be willing to...
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...
Author: Grace Lucas
As the Pitt’s University Art Gallery (UAG) closes its doors before a major renovation, Director and Curator Sylvia Rhor Samaniego...
Author: Alexandra Speaker
Tucked away on the second floor Hall of North American Wildlife at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) is a sun-dappled...
Author: Kornelia Gondek
Standing at 5173 Liberty Ave, is a small gallery space that sits on a corner that, with the large half circle of windows and...
Author: Shawn Simmons with Sam Dorsey and Holden Slattery
As visitors walk across the University of Pittsburgh campus today, they are surrounded by the work of Virgil Cantini, whose...
Author: Harper Morrison
One of the many attractions of the National Museum of American History is Dorothy’s ruby slippers. While interning at the museum...
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...
Author: Layne Shaffer
It’s not every day that you get to do it all. It’s not every day that you get to work with twenty-four artists – all the passion...
Author: Zixiao Huang
         “Where are you from?” Nicolas Trigault, in his Daopao, of 1617, politely asks the Fonthill Vase of 1300 in the National...
Historic black and white image of a man working on a large artwork of intersecting triangles
Author: Shawn C. Simmons
Jasper Johns working in his East Houston Street studio on Map (Based on Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Airocean World), December...
Author: Rebecca Lowery
What does it mean to translate something? And what does this have to do with space and place? The initial question that I...
Black and white framed photograph of a black-clothed figure looking at a beach
Author: Monica Daniels
Carrie Mae Weems, “A Broad and Expansive Sky-Ancient Rome, 2006.” As the spring semester of 2024 approaches completion, I...
Cartoon line drawing of figure presenting to a round table
Author: Emma C. Roberts
From Paul Goodman, Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals (1962). During the spring of 2024, I was a member of the graduate...
Warehouse artwork installation of geometric shapes painted with bright colors
Author: Cecilia Muzika-Minteer
Sonia Boyce, In the Castle of My Skin, 2020, sculpture, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK. We are all reading the earth,...
A mural on a building of a woman in colorful clothing picking fruit from a tree
Author: Camila Aguayo
Damaris Cruz, Recolectando la Semilla, 2017, Calle Aurora, Ponce, PR. Memory is something the majority of us take for granted...
Collage of landscape images including dunes, a beach, surfing, an island and pine trees
Author: Amrita Vinod
Figure 1. A Digital Artwork Blending Different Photographs of Landscapes. Amrita Vinod, “Landscape Collage,” 2024. When...
Author: Amelia Hansen
For me, the conversations of this past semester’s Space & Place constellations seminar have been an opportunity to...
Author: Hattie Lindey
Hattie Lindey, Museum Studies Intern at the Tomayko Foundation - Spring 2024 As an intern with the Tomayko Foundation, I’ve...
Author: Greer Greer
Greer Greer, Museum Studies Intern at the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh - Spring 2024 As the sole Museum Studies intern at...