With Marie Watt

Liner Notes “What’s Going On” Marvin Gaye

Join us Tuesday August 22 at a special time – 6:00PM for a Liner Notes writing workshop in partnership with the Carnegie Museum of Art and artist Marie Watt!

Portland, Oregon-based artist Marie Watt’s explorations embrace and center the histories embedded in materials. For over a decade, Watt has been working with steel I-beams, drawn to their interwoven history with the Haudenosaunee ironworkers, known as “Skywalkers” for walking across the I-beam skeletons of the skyscrapers high above the city. As one of the most recycled materials in the world, steel carries the legacy of past generations forward into the present and future, similar to how Watt works with blankets as sites of ongoing stories and symbols of our connectedness.
For Carnegie Museum of Art, Watt is developing a new body of work that explores steel and glass—materials deeply tied to the region’s industrial history—from a contemporary Indigenous perspective,

challenging assumed contradictions between visibility and invisibility, strength and vulnerability, and presence and absence.
As part of her process, Watt has been collecting words associated with the region’s industrial history and legacy. [see word list] This collecting process is important to Watt, who often engages with self-assembled groups of people to contribute to a larger whole. In Pittsburgh, she is seeking to hear diverse voices by using the format of Liner Notes writing workshop and focusing on Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” Open to all participants, the workshop will begin with an overview of Watt’s practice, then a communal listening, followed by time to compose a new poem or poems inspired by that song. Participants will have an opportunity to read their work to the group, if they choose to. Watt envisions that this event will encourage a multi-generational exchange on art and language.
Watt will ask that participants acknowledge and agree that word fragments generated during the workshop may be used as part of her new artwork, which will debut at an exhibition at Carnegie Museum of Art, March 8–July 21, 2024. Watt is interested in how unexpected meanings can emerge from juxtaposing word fragments in her work and will share her past works as examples of this process.

This is an awesome crossover opportunity and we are so excited!!! If you could please still RSVP to Liner Notes for the random order generator, that would be helpful and we would appreciate it:
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