Westmoreland Museum of American Art looks to the future

Change comes slowly and thoughtfully to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art. 

The Greensburg institution has had just three leaders and one curator since its founding in 1957. But in the last year, a new director/CEO and chief curator have taken up the torch with a dedication to the past and a vision for the future.

In August, Silvia Filippini-Fantoni took over as the Richard M. Scaife director/CEO following the April 2022 hiring of Jeremiah William McCarthy, now chief curator.

Introducing change can be challenging, and Filippini-Fantoni is careful to ensure that it doesn’t translate to a watered-down institution, maintaining academic soundness in new approaches.

She says important questions for her are: “How do we connect with non-art-savvy visitors? How do we connect people to the ideas these artists are trying to project? We can’t do it with a label on the wall.”

Fostering visitor input when they are in the museum is one approach.

One of the simplest ways to do that, she said, would be to provide cards upon which people could jot their impression of a particular artwork. These would be hung on the wall where others could read them and make comparisons with their own opinions.

Another would be to provide a designated “conversation pit,” which would expand sharing face-to-face. Discussion questions such as “Which work made you want to see more?” could start things off. Participants could be given a special pin “and walk out of the building wearing a souvenir of their experience,” as well as a physical reminder of a new community they had been a part of.

Regarding exhibition structure, she’s found that “immersive experiences that involve all the senses” have been well received.

One example of this immersive approach was a traveling exhibition about artist Georgia O’Keeffe at the North Carolina Museum of Art, where she has previously served. Rather than simply showing her artworks, the museum wanted to show the artist, and how influential the New Mexico environment was to her life and work. 

They shot a 360-degree film in her Abiquiu home and from that built a space visitors could step into, supplemented with superimposed images of her paintings and a recording of an interview with the artist.

The intent, Filippini-Fantoni said, “is to make art resonate with as many as possible.”

A related approach is to use art as a catalyst to compare the context within which artworks were created with cultural attitudes today.

The scrutiny could be applied to works in The Westmoreland’s scenes of industry collection. The workers and their occupations represent the area around us and were painted for the most part by regional artists.

“How do we exhibit those artists but inject new perspectives?” Filippini-Fantoni asked. “What was going on in the world when those artists existed? What impact did industry have on the environment, on people? How do we connect with this work, celebrate these artists, in a new way?”

Ultimately, recent innovations in museum practice – here and elsewhere – seek to build community and attendance, in part by stepping beyond the welcome mat prominently displayed in recent years to aggressively develop formal and informal partnerships.

Filippini-Fantoni defines community as the museum’s own art community, the Greensburg and neighboring communities, and the larger geographical community of southwestern Pennsylvania and even adjacent states.

A goal is to connect with local organizations, artists and vendors to explore the possibility of co-creating programming with them.

“This takes time, energy and resources, and you have to let go of a little control,” Filippini-Fantoni said. “Most of the time when people had a sense of ownership they became advocates.”

Filippini-Fantoni, 49, is the fourth person to fill the leadership position. She was born in the medieval Italian town of Bergamo and developed a passion for art and history beginning in childhood. She has dual American and Italian citizenship.

She holds a degree in history from the University of Milan and a Ph.D. in aesthetics and art sciences from the Sorbonne in Paris. The latter she equates with what in the U.S. would be called museum studies.

She learned behind-the-scenes museum culture working on projects at major institutions including The British Museum and Tate Modern, London; the J. Paul Getty Museum, California; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 

Filippini-Fantoni came to The Westmoreland from The Newark Museum of Art, New Jersey, where she was deputy director, learning and engagement.

McCarthy, 38, is also attuned to the shifting cultural environment and while embracing its call to reflection he doesn’t advocate change for the sake of change.

“What are the things of the past that we want to keep and engage with and what are the things of the past that we want to cast aside?” he asked.

He succeeded Barbara L. Jones, who was the museum’s first curator, then chief curator, from October 1995 to April 2022.

He holds a bachelor of arts in art history from The Macaulay Honors College at City University of New York and a master of arts in art history from Hunter College in New York.

McCarthy was born in Staten Island, and the institutions he worked for are all in New York. So what attracted him to Western Pennsylvania and The Westmoreland?

One factor was Anne Kraybill. The two share a mentor, and Kraybill was The Westmoreland’s director/CEO when he was hired. Moreover, he sees the opportunity to pursue his curatorial interests regarding local conversations and national participation.

“The field of American art is in a period of self-reflection and I hope to aid the museum in becoming a powerful voice in this national conversation,” he said in a press release announcing his hire.

For example, he wants to look at “what other people are overlooking … what have we missed?”

His first purchase for the museum exemplifies this. “Naima,” a 1999 bronze by Black sculptor Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) is of her granddaughter Naima Mora. This fits with the current practice of making efforts to more fully include women and persons of color in exhibitions and collections.

But the artist’s backstory makes this addition even more regionally pertinent. Born in Washington, D.C., Catlett won a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), but the school refused to accept a Black woman as a student. She pursued her education at Howard University and the University of Iowa, where she earned a master of fine arts in sculpture.

“Naima” is placed prominently in the reinstalled permanent collection galleries along with other recent acquisitions, collection standards and works that haven’t been displayed in a while, and loans from artists and other institutions. One such work is the abstract painting “O the Times, O the Manners,” a 75-by-168-inch diptych by New York artist Melissa Mayer that occupies an entire wall.

The gallery reinstall is a 2023 project McCarthy initiated. It was last done in 2015 when the museum reopened after renovation and expansion.

Rehanging museum collection galleries is an opportunity to highlight significant legacy works but also new acquisitions and art from storage that has achieved currency in the moment. McCarthy believes these presentations should not be static or predictable and encourages visitor feedback.

“We might put artwork up and it fails to connect completely, and that’s OK. We’ll do things differently in a few months. Or, we might take an artwork down and only then realize it’s a fan favorite, so we’ll put it back with the next rotation, but maybe in a completely new way,” he says.

“We will move at the speed of learning.”

The McKenna Gallery, home to the museum’s beloved scenes of industry collection, offered an ideal lab for the interaction McCarthy wants to encourage.

He convened, for input, participants whose ownership went beyond general museum membership to people who had formed the local community for generations, importantly including those whose family members had worked in the depicted steel mills.

The gallery reemerged as “Breaking Ground: Landscape and Labor in Southwestern Pennsylvania,” more exhibition than repository compared to its predecessor.

The title and the selected paintings are meant to create a dialogue across the walls; “to sensitize people … you have industry, you have the landscape; they are not separate.”

To further integrate the notions of land and sense of place, McCarthy, who has expressed admiration for the rolling hills of the Laurel Highlands viewed from the Cantilever Gallery, opened up the wall in the McKenna Gallery to expose the windows to view Greensburg and points beyond.

The goal is to create a coherent story, “to try to bring a context … to create a space where people can think their own thoughts. … It can’t ever be comprehensive,” McCarthy says, “but that doesn’t mean it can’t be meaningful.”

The middle of the gallery is now sunlit and open with a lounge-like arrangement of furniture that seductively invites social contact.

“The true potential of this museum is as a space where people’s humanity is in touch, meeting in this space where you hope they’ll even talk,” he says.

Changing exhibitions – both imported and those organized by McCarthy – are additional opportunities to read his curatorial vision.

The summer show, “Block Party: Community & Celebration in American Art,” was a compilation of artworks from different time periods, media, subjects, cultures and artist identities.

“‘Block Party’ was sort of like an experiment for me,” McCarthy says, “with no true beginning, middle or conclusion; the show [was] intended to be open-ended and provoke new insights and discoveries. I think people looking at art want to be surprised. I think they want an element of chance or magic.”

He placed, for example, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled (L.A.)” of 1991 directly across from Alex Fletcher’s “Communion Service, First Presbyterian Church, Greensburg, PA” (circa 1950).

The Gonzalez-Torres piece comprised a layer of “green candies individually wrapped in cellophane” arranged on the gallery floor. At first glance the work has a childlike aspect, McCarthy says, until you realize it’s a memorial to a person dying of AIDS. Visitors were invited to take a candy from the display, which would be replenished in “endless supply” for the exhibition duration.

Fletcher’s realistic painting of a gathered congregation, created decades earlier, depicts “a spiritual act,” McCarthy notes, and in that sense, it might be compared to the Gonzalez-Torres. The church is an important part of the Greensburg community, McCarthy says, as was Fletcher, the first president of the Greensburg Art Club and a longtime member of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh.

The juxtaposition changes the reading of both works, McCarthy says. “Putting these two pieces together expands the meaning of both.”

Also noteworthy was the screening of the 1992/1999 digital video, “Mrs. Peanut Visits New York,” another of McCarthy’s purchases and the first video work to enter the collection. Created by celebrated filmmaker and video artist Charles Atlas, it features the legendary late performance artist and Lucian Freud model Leigh Bowery sauntering through Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.

The video was co-acquired with the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, and is The Westmoreland’s first joint ownership agreement.

Both Filippini-Fantoni and McCarthy are getting their footing as they acquaint themselves with local traditions and custom, examining and elaborating upon those while directing the museum culture with ideas drawn from their own life experiences.

“Ultimately,” McCarthy says, “I hope at the museum we make people feel comfortable that the museum is a part of their life.”

If you go 

The Westmoreland Museum of American Art at 221 N. Main St., Greensburg, is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The museum is closed on Christmas and New Year’s Day and closes at 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. Admission is free, and free parking is available. There also is a museum gift shop and Café Marchand.

The museum will be open after hours until 8 p.m. on Thursdays with an outdoor light display, free seasonal hot beverages, treats, a scavenger hunt and a themed cash bar.

Check out the complete calendar of events.

This multimedia experience highlights the five unrealized projects designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Southwestern Pennsylvania: Point State Park, a self-service garage for Kaufmann’s Department Store, the Point View Residences, the Rhododendron Chapel and a gate lodge for Fallingwater. The exhibition was co-organized with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy’s Fallingwater.

Find more information on the special exhibition.