2025 Poster Session

Carnegie Museum of Art, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a modern and contemporary focused collection whose collection, since the institution’s founding in 1895, has been largely built up by collections from its semi-regularly Carnegie International exhibition of contemporary art-making. For the past 50 years, the museum’s permanent collection has been displayed within a dedicated 60,000 sq. ft., the Sarah Mellon Scaife Gallery. Designed by architect Edward Larrabee Barnes and opened in 1974, the new extension from the museum’s 1907 beaux-art building doubled the museum’s public exhibition spaces with long, corridor style galleries lit by a combination of electric and natural lighting from overhead skylights and clerestories. In alignment with new guiding ambitions established by its 2022 strategic plan, the museum is actively undergoing a phased reinstallation of its permanent collection galleries. With a stated goal of sparking new possibilities for the 21st century museum, the new collection layouts aim to provide a reexamination of inherited narratives, histories, and ways of seeing, through two main strategies.  First, the reinstallation builds around thematic layouts, discarding previously chronological arrangements. As such, proposed gallery layouts incorporate, side by side, artworks from a variety of time periods and artistic mediums. Second, the cross-departmental curatorial team seeks to expand the types of objects able to be shown in the Scaife Galleries, previously limited only to oil paintings and insensitive sculptural media due to a limited understanding of the amount and intensity of the space’s shifting daylight conditions.

Along with their regular survey and treatment activities to prepare for a major collection changeover, Carnegie Museum of Art conservation staff were tasked with developing a plan to allow for the safe and considerate incorporation of more modern and contemporary art and design objects into a space largely intended for the showcasing of traditional oil paintings. An important directive alongside this was to maintain the architect’s desired pellucid mixture of natural and artificial lighting, meaning that natural light could not be excluded from the gallery spaces altogether. Additional challenges included budgetary limitations that ruled out the outright replacement of the galleries’ existing static LED lighting track, as well as advanced, costly interventions to limit the ingress of natural light (such as smart window films or daylight responsive controls. Planning started with understanding existing daylight conditions. The incorporation of Conserv brand data loggers allowed the museum to readily view cumulative light data in different locations experienced over a year. A local firm, LAM Partners, assisted with data interpretation, transmission testing, and daylight modeling. Simultaneously, education was needed to shift the collections and curatorial staff, who had primarily discussed light levels as static (footcandle) numbers, towards an understanding of cumulative light damage and its calculation. Cumulative light calculations from the Conserv allowed us to develop approximate light level equivalencies between daylit and static galleries to aid this transition. A combination of strategies were employed, from traditional rotation scheduling, to strategic object placements within spaces, to the sourcing of supplemental exhibition copies of both two-and three-dimensional artworks from living artists.