In a country that prides itself on its larger than life monuments and museums, the quiet understated elegance of the ‘Mattress Factory’, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a welcome change. Celebrating its 30th anniversary currently with an exhibition by Indian artists enticingly titled ‘India: New Installations,’ the museum has since its inception exhibited works by more than 300 artists from all over the world. 

The story behind the space is as inspiring. When Barbara Luderowski, an artist by vocation and presently executive/artistic director of the museum drove through Pittsburgh on her way to New York to sell her own work, little did she realise a small legacy she would inherit from her parents would go towards supporting other artists. She seeded the museum in a neighbourhood that was hardly considered upmarket. She did not envision the space as it is today at the beginning of her journey. She merely wanted the community around her to participate in a celebration of art and aesthetics. Luderowski likes to underplay the idealist in her, impatiently dismissing the matter of the initial vision. “It just evolved,” she laughs, more bothered about the shaking table in the Indian restaurant where I met her for lunch.  

No less has been the contribution of the Museum curator Michael Olijnyk, who set aside his own career as an artist to embark on the same mission as Luderowski, a few years later. He too is matter of fact about the sacrifice claiming this was something that needed to be done and his artistic background has been useful in his current role. As he continues to think like an artist and that is an advantage while dealing with artists who are exhibiting their work in the Mattress Factory.  

The Mattress Factory is a venue for exhibiting Installation Art. Artists from across the world are offered residencies that give them a stipend apart from travel reimbursements and lodgings to come to the site and work on their projects. The current exhibition, by Indian artists that include two from Bangalore – Navin Thomas and Krisnaraj Chonat – is indicative of the interest Indian contemporary art is generating in the West.

The other artists whose works are on display include Mansi Bhatt and Sudarshan Shetty from Mumbai and Anita Dubey and Raqs Media Collective from New Delhi. The exhibits demonstrate that there are other centres apart from Carnegie Melon in Pittsburgh, where Indians are leaving an impression.

While participation from the Indian artists who are perceived to be slightly different from artists from other parts of the world engaging in installation art, as they are more conceptual and less “hands on,” has been enthusiastic and whole hearted, the museum officials are a little disappointed by the response of the wealthy Indian immigrant community in Pittsburgh. Not many have come forward to help in the fund raising activities of the museum. When Luderowski and Olijnyk visited certain Indian institutions set up purportedly to raise funds for arts and artists, in their last visit to India, they were asked for tips on how to raise funds!

At present, Luderowski and Olijnyk along with other museum officials are looking at the new directions the museum may have to take in the next 30 years, as the space is more than an internationally recognised art venue today. It is also a centre for community development.   

Just a couple of houses away from the Mattress Factory is located a house whose wooden facade is entirely covered with Chinese calligraphy that expresses the poetry of the exiled Chinese poet Huang Xiang in his own hand. The house, known as “House Poem,” belongs to an organisation called “City of Asylum/Pittsburgh,” and it provided sanctuary to the poet for a period of over two years. The house has become a tourist attraction in Pittsburgh as well as the pride of the neighbourhood.

The story behind the house is almost as interesting as that of the saga of persecution of the Chinese poet in his own country where he was imprisoned and tortured. In 1997, Ralph Henry Reese, a businessman who ran a telemarketing organisation, and his spouse Diane Samuels, artist and sculptor, found themselves a part of the audience in a talk by Salman Rushdie when he was visiting Pittsburgh. During the talk, Rushdie mentioned in passing how he, along with Nigerian Nobel Laureate in Literature Wole Soyinka, had started an institution in Europe to preserve “Freedom of Expression,” by providing sanctuary to writers who were being persecuted in their own countries. Subsequently American fiction writer Russel Banks helped them to spread the network to US as well.

The idea of City of Asylum found an immediate resonance with Reese and Samuels who owned a house they were renting out for income, just a couple of houses away from where they lived. The couple were determined to make the cause their own and started a correspondence with the organisation, offering their rental house to the programme.

Their perseverance was to pay off many years later when in 2004, the network offered sanctuary to the Chinese poet and his spouse Zhang Ling in the same house. After years of repression in his own country where he was imprisoned and tortured, followed by a bleak and anonymous exile in the US, Huang Xiang began to relate to the outside world as the poet of repute that he is. Widely regarded as the Walt Whitman of China, Huang Xiang travelled all over the world during his residency in Pittsburgh performing his poetic pieces and offering talks and seminars in literary gatherings. 

In 2006, Huang was succeeded by novelist Horacia Castellanos Moya, who had to leave his home in El Salvador after receiving death threats for writing fiction about the political sickness in Latin American countries where he drew attention to the nexus between organised crime and the political powers. He lives in another City of Asylum house just a few doors from House Poem, where a text of Wole Soyinka’s is silkscreened onto a glass outside the door and interpreted in a mosaic behind the glass and in a sculpture spanning the entire front of the house.
A third residence is being renovated for another author, and Rushdie has contributed texts to be used as the basis of an artwork outside this home. Marked by writing of all these famous writers and poets, the houses are well on their way to  acquire the status of monuments dedicated to free speech. Reese talks of them as an outdoor library project, keeping the historical context of the Carnegie free library system, which began in Pittsburgh and spread throughout the US.

City of Asylum/Pittsburgh has begun to diversify its activities by also offering shorter term residencies to writers from other countries who are not seeking sanctuary but just a room of their own to ruminate and write. 
City of Asylum/Pittsburgh is a part of the North American network, recently renamed as “Cities of Refuge,” and apart from Pittsburgh, there are centres in Las Vegas, Ithaca and Santa Fe. Each is run autonomously but all of them adhere to a common institutional goal — to say what you want to say is the foundation of any civilised society.