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New York Times
4 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
$5,000-Per-Plate Dinner Tests Museum Ban on Political Fund-Raisers
At a private event hosted by Senator Dave McCormick, Republican of Pennsylvania, donors wandered through a sculpture hall at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and partied with their cowboy hats on at a dinner where each plate cost $5,000. The aftermath was less celebratory. Dozens of employees at the Carnegie Museums sent an open letter to trustees, saying that the fund-raiser violated guidelines meant to safeguard the institution from partisan activities. The money raised was not directed to McCormick, who was elected in November, but to a nonprofit with ties to a political action committee he established. The organization supports conservative policy goals in energy and manufacturing. Weeks after last month's event, the museum network's chief executive, Steven Knapp, acknowledged to employees that it was a violation of policy, accusing the fund-raiser's organizers of providing misleading information and promising to contact McCormick. 'The people working for him have put us in a terrible situation, have really damaged our relationships internally and externally, and we didn't deserve that,' Knapp said in a staff meeting, according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times. He added, 'I'm so outraged by what occurred to us that I would be just as happy to say, 'No more politicians, period.'' McCormick's office did not respond to a request for comment. Originally framed as a 'palace of culture' by the tycoon Andrew Carnegie in 1895, the museum network includes the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Science Center and the Andy Warhol Museum. It is one of the largest cultural institutions in the country, with annual expenses above $70 million. On July 15, the Carnegie Museum of Art hosted a dinner for PA Rising, a nonprofit organization connected with Pennsylvania Rising, a political action committee that was established by McCormick to help Republicans in the state get elected. (Pennsylvania Rising ceased activity this year, according to campaign finance reports.) The event was held after McCormick's inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, which was attended by President Trump and Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat. The dinner raising money for PA Rising, which offered a marquee sponsorship deal for $500,000, has been controversial for Carnegie Museums because of its policy that it 'does not accept bookings for partisan political events or fund-raisers, including voter education, registration and get-out-the-vote drives led by partisan groups.' The day before the dinner, Knapp said in a small leadership meeting that canceling the party at that juncture would bring political scrutiny and that it would be easier to handle if museum leaders could maintain plausible deniability, according to three people with direct knowledge of the meeting who spoke anonymously because they fear repercussions for discussing internal deliberations. Knapp did not respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for the museum network, Betsy Momich, said in a statement that his remarks were a response to questions about canceling the event based on rumors circulating on social media. 'At that time,' she said, 'we had written assurances from event organizers that the rumors were not true.' Anna Rogers Duncan, an adviser to PA Rising, said in a statement that the dinner was held at the art museum to show off Pittsburgh's rich cultural heritage. 'As we had made clear from the beginning,' she said, 'the dinner was not a political fund-raiser for Senator McCormick and we offered to explain this further to the museum leadership.' The museum spokeswoman said Knapp was not aware of any offer to meet with PA Rising before the dinner. Museums generally avoid politics to maintain their audience's trust in the unbiased nature of their programming, experts said. Historians were critical of the Trump administration after it told the Smithsonian Institution this week that it would review exhibitions in search of 'divisive or ideologically driven language.' 'If a museum were to become associated with one political party over another, then the material in their exhibits would be questioned,' said Sally Yerkovich, who teaches museum anthropology at Columbia University and leads revisions for the code of ethics at the International Council of Museums. After the dinner, local publications criticized Carnegie Museums for breaking its own policy and for potentially violating rules in the tax code that largely prevent nonprofits from 'directly or indirectly participating in' political campaigning. More than 60 employees signed an open letter that said Knapp had disregarded the staff's concerns by allowing the event to take place. The consequences, they wrote, included 'reputational harm done to Carnegie Museums, an unhealthy work culture and our damaged relationship with the communities we serve.' In recent days, Knapp told employees that he had been working to revise the museum's policy to include an explicit mention of events hosted or sponsored by political action committees or other campaign-related organizations. 'I do not believe that any set of guidelines or procedures we adopt will guarantee that future embarrassments will not occur,' Knapp wrote in an Aug. 11 letter, 'but we are certainly open to advice on additional ways of minimizing that risk.'
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Carnegie Museum of Natural History hosting unique networking event for young professionals
A Pittsburgh museum is hosting an event to connect young professionals in the area. 'Jurassic Journey' will be held on Sept. 29 from 6-9:30 p.m. at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History on 4400 Forbes Avenue. It is designed to offer a networking opportunity for young professionals. Activities include fossil sifting and rock painting. Attendees will also have the chance to explore the Daniel G. and Carole L. Kamin Hall of Dinosaurs after hours and enjoy complimentary drinks and light refreshments. The event is intended for people aged 21-40 and is part of the Carnegie Connectors series. Carnegie Connector Members can attend the event for free, while other membership levels and non-members are required to pay $35. According to the Carnegie Museums' website, members are leaders who recognize the importance of investing through their membership in the four Carnegie Museums and the region. Anyone interested in attending must be at least 21 years old and can reserve tickets online. Click here to reserve a ticket. Download the FREE WPXI News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Channel 11 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch WPXI NOW Solve the daily Crossword
New York Times
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Color Black Dazzles in Raymond Saunders Retrospective
Few have done more with the color black than Raymond Saunders. The Pittsburgh-born painter and professor emeritus, now in his early 90s, has spent most of his career in Oakland, Calif., covering canvases and other flat surfaces with a dense, inky backdrop that dazzles the eye. Then, by adding a dizzying array of mixed-media elements, from Ouija boards and found children's drawings to appropriated advertisements and exhibition posters, he really makes it sing: Mere expanses of black paint, in his treatment, become both imaginative universes and art-historical chalkboards, capable of summoning up and subsuming just about anything he can think of. Still, it was thoughtful of the Carnegie Museum of Art director, Eric Crosby, and the assistant curator Alyssa Velazquez, who put the show together, to start the artist's largest ever museum retrospective with a pair of 1962 canvases that accessibly demonstrate the birth of his central insight. Called 'Raymond Saunders: Flowers From a Black Garden,' the exhibition features nearly three dozen works of art. 'Winterscape' is a simple coastal landscape about four feet wide. A wet, gray sky runs across its top edge, with a brighter, slicker strip beneath it serving as water. A brief thickening of the boundary line between those grays might be a foggy island. Beneath the water, covering most of the painting's surface, is a dense tangle of marshy grass — and that's it. Because the view is into the light, the grass is in shadow, which allows Saunders to render it all with broad, overlapping strokes of black. The organic wiggle of these brushstrokes, and their raggedy, grasslike top edge, are unmistakable. At the same time, though, the whole area, with its gestural pirouettes and scratchy, reflective textures, functions almost as an abstract monochrome. Ignore the top edge and you've got something very much like one of Ad Reinhardt's black paintings. Except that it's better, because it's all that and figurative, too. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Forbes
16-06-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Scientists Recreate 5000-Year-Old Blue Pigment
Ancient Egyptians used pigments to create dyes and paints, but the origin of one blue pigment was lost to time. This dye was regularly found on artefacts from ancient Egypt, and still used by the Romans. After that, though, it was gradually used less and less until nobody remembered how to make it. But now, researchers from Washington State University have recreated this blue pigment. Researchers Travis Olds and Lisa Haney from the Carnegie Museum examine an ancient sarcophagus that ... More was painted with Egyptian blue pigment. The researchers worked with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute. After studying the blue pigment on materials from museum collections, they made their own version of it with different recipes using silicon dioxide, copper, calcium, and sodium carbonate. They shared their recipes in a research paper last month. Egyptian blue is different from many other ancient pigments, because it wasn't a pigment found in nature. So rather than trying to find the plants or minerals that naturally produce this blue, the search was on for the lost recipe that would have created this bright blue. Everything the researchers tried would have to resemble methods that people would have access to 5000 years ago. So to heat the materials, they had to limit the temperature to about 1000 degrees Celsius (about 1800 degrees Fahrenheit). That sounds pretty hot already, but modern industrial furnaces can reach much higher temperatures. After doing a chemical analysis of the pigments they produced, the researchers compared this to samples they took from museum artefacts. For example, they measured the exact wavelengths of both visible and near-infrared light that are characteristic of the pigment. One thing they noticed was that there wasn't just one version of Egyptian blue. Often the pigment was mixed with other materials and just slightly different based on where or how it was made. 'You had some people who were making the pigment and then transporting it, and then the final use was somewhere else,' John McCloy, lead researcher on the study, told Washington State University. 'One of the things that we saw was that with just small differences in the process, you got very different results.' But often these differences didn't have a big effect on the color. Even with only 50% of the blue pigment, the color dominated over other materials in the mixture. The newly created pigments are now part of the collection at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But there could be more to these ancient blue pigments. 'It started out just as something that was fun to do because they asked us to produce some materials to put on display at the museum, but there's a lot of interest in the material,' said McCloy. Egyptian blue has caught the eye of people who are interested in using it for new technological applications, because the pigment produces near-infrared light that could be used for fingerprinting in forensic science or for security solutions such as counterfeit-proof inks. But even without these modern applications, the recreation of Egyptian blue gave an insight into a long lost recipe for the world's first synthetic pigment.
CBS News
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Inaugural "DinoFest" takes over Carnegie Museum of Natural History
The prehistoric beasts on display at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History got their moment in the spotlight on Saturday morning as part of the inaugural "DinoFest" event. Free with admission, the celebration included the scenes, insights, activities for all ages, and live discussions from dinosaur experts. With the new Jurassic World Rebirth movie coming out on July 2, experts also spoke about how they consult for Hollywood movies. "It's just an absolute celebration of all things paleontology. We have hands-on activities, we have sit-down talks with collections managers, paleontologists, we're live-streaming a dig, we've got a live sculptor here. Truly, this is one of the biggest and most fun events that we've had this year," said Stuart McNiell, Senior Manager of Public Programs for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Also part of the event, guests got to take a behind-the-scenes, never-before-seen look at a new velociraptor before it's officially put on display.
