NEW YORK, NY.- Hales has announced that Andrea Geyer's site-specific commission Manifest, is now open at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh USA, through Winter 2023.

Andrea Geyer’s Manifest actively acknowledges and embraces the idea that a museum is made of many people: from visitors and staff to artists, we make and remake the museum every single day. The eight banners with text facing inside and outside of the museum windows cast our voices beyond constructions of past and present and the impermeability of institutions while calling each of our imaginations into a shared space.

Manifest stems from Geyer’s research on San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s (SFMOMA) founding director Grace McCann Morley and her belief in museums as integral to civil society and civic life. Geyer took Morley’s mission to show the importance of art in every aspect of life and scripted a list of wants, needs, and demands put toward museums as an invitation to reimagine what one expects and hopes for when engaging such institutions today. Additionally, the statements in Manifest draw from writings and lectures by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, as well as from those by more recent thinkers such as Wendy Brown, Jack Halberstam, Stefano Harney, and Fred Moten. Geyer also included references in response to the 2016 presidential election (which took place while Geyer was writing the original script) that called for museums to be sites of resistance and sanctuary.

How do you see yourself, your body, your views, ideas, and experiences as you move within this museum? I want, I demand, I need, I insist. Andrea Geyer’s Manifest actively acknowledges and embraces the idea that a museum is made of many people: from visitors and staff to artists, we make and remake the museum every single day. The eight banners with text facing inside and outside of the museum windows cast our voices beyond constructions of past and present and the impermeability of institutions while calling each of our imaginations into a shared space.

For Carnegie Museum of Art, Geyer invites you to contemplate your own needs and desires in relation to the museum today. The artist has created an interactive broadside to create your own list of wants, needs, visions, and demands.

Manifest stems from Geyer’s research on San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s (SFMOMA) founding director Grace McCann Morley and her belief in museums as integral to civil society and civic life. Morley led this museum from 1935 to 1958, establishing gallery tours, art history courses, a public art library, an art rental gallery, the first film program at an American museum, and the TV show “Art in Your Life.” An advocate for modern art and cultural democracy. Under Morley’s direction, the museum was open until 10 p.m. As a result of these efforts, it garnered a following that was expansive and diverse in age, race, economic, and cultural backgrounds. Morley wrote in 1950, “Art is an inseparable and essential part of human life.”

Geyer took Morley’s mission to show the importance of art in every aspect of life and scripted a list of wants, needs, and demands put toward museums as an invitation to reimagine what one expects and hopes for when engaging such institutions today. Additionally, the statements in Manifest draw from writings and lectures by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, as well as from those by more recent thinkers such as Wendy Brown, Jack Halberstam, Stefano Harney, and Fred Moten. Geyer also included references in response to the 2016 presidential election (which took place while Geyer was writing the original script) that called for museums to be sites of resistance and sanctuary.

Carnegie Museum of Art
Andrea Geyer: Manifest
Now on view through Winter 2023