Everything Once Arranged Has Become Scattered: An Exhibition Curated by the 2022–2023 Applied Curatorial Practices Class

EVERYTHING ONCE ARRANGED HAS BECOME SCATTERED – featuring Ross Mantle, Rebecca Shapass, Kim Beck, Sarah Kim, Isla Hansen, Lenka Clayton, N.E. Brown, Jamie Earnest, Alisha Wormsley, Barbara Weissberger, Jake Reinhart, Phillip Andrew Lewis, Laura Hudspith

February 3 – March 3

Exhibition Reception: Friday, Feb. 3, 5–8pm

The Anderson and VCUarts are pleased to present Everything Once Arranged Has Become Scattered, an exhibition of thirteen Pittsburgh-based artists organized and curated by the students of the Fall 2022–Spring 2023 Applied Curatorial Practices class. Representing four distinct School of the Arts studio and academic majors, the five student members of the class have worked tirelessly over the past seven months to provide a glimpse into Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s contemporary art scene.

This exhibition is organized and curated by the members of The Anderson’s Applied Curatorial Practices course: Sanija Dowden, India Mawn, Eileen Morley, Sophia Saucer, and Zachary Thomas-Kucerak.

Curatorial Statement

Everything Once Arranged Has Become Scattered explores Pittsburgh as a site of repeats, rifts, and joints. The exhibition weaves together the work of thirteen artists of various backgrounds interacting with their shared city. Much of the work involves an investigation of a deeply familiar place, as the artists interrogate the constructed thresholds on which they stand, confronting the truisms of the city. The artists connect with the city by digging through physical and metaphorical archives, reworking what they have discovered, or inserting their personal narrative into the city. 

Drawing on roads, rubble, bodies, and other physical qualities that, when combined, make a city—much of the work exemplifies the uniqueness of a place. In an echoing of its industrial roots, Pittsburgh today serves as a reservoir for resourcefulness. Seemingly mundane elements are celebrated, and objects of the past transcend their own histories, made new with careful consideration for the future. Charged with self-awareness, humor, and drama, the works of the exhibition imbue humanity into even the most inhuman; cast concrete becomes limbs of bodies and rocks begin to impersonate one another. Using what is available and creating what isn’t, the artists excavate the Pittsburgh landscape for complexity and unearth new ways of seeing. A scattering can portend a re-coming together of a new, extraordinary composition. What will we find at the bottom of the mine?

Poster designed by Kalib Hubbard.