“Lewis Hine Pictures America” features more than 70 photographs from the early 20th century highlighting steelworkers in Pittsburgh, immigrant life, and the realities of child labor. While Hine’s photos have resonance today, The Frick Pittsburgh curatorial team worked with a local interdisciplinary artist and educator, Quaishawn Whitlock, to tell a more comprehensive story.
Whitlock collaborated with The Frick Pittsburgh Assistant Curator Lauryn Smith to create wall installations for the exhibition, focusing on Pittsburgh’s history and industrial legacy. Three large-scale pieces interact with Hine’s photographs throughout the galleries, featuring the United States of America, Lady Liberty’s torch at Ellis Island, and the Homestead smokestacks.
“I wanted to find a way to think about the monumentality of these structures in people’s lives,” Smith said. “What they can mean both in thinking about the monumentality of them literally, but also the emotions that are felt around them.”
Whitlock— whose work explores cultural memory, identity, and the struggle of Blackness— returned to the Frick after being a guest labelist for last year’s Kara Walker exhibition. Walker’s “Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)” featured silhouettes of Black figures overlaid on woodcut illustrations of the Civil War.
The opportunity to again confront gaps in history and create silhouettes that could enliven the exhibition appealed to Whitlock.
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Whitlock noted his family had never visited the Frick.
“There is a disconnect as to who goes where,” he said. “So there’s kind of an itch in me. There's an inkling, a want, a desire in me to bridge that.”
‘Beyond the Wall’
In addition to inclusivity, another aspect the “Lewis Hine” curatorial team considered was ensuring a photography exhibition would be compelling for audiences inundated with images on social media.
“We wanted to bring on an artist like Quaishawn who works so much on installation and really thinks about, how do you bring a particular atmosphere, or immerse people in a feeling, in a way that doesn't take away from the artworks at hand?”
Whitlock wanted his installation “to be more texture-based than anything, so you could almost question whether or not it’s some kind of mixed together, amalgamated version of Lewis Hine’s work.”
He created collages from 65 of Hine’s photos from the exhibition, scanning and printing them, then forming larger silhouetted images with cut pieces of paper. The artworks are made of printed “photo tex material,” similar to vinyl, able to be stuck to walls as a decal.
Whitlock was also encouraged to use the entirety of the gallery space.
“To me, this is the perfect canvas to make it dynamic, make it interesting, make it accessible,” Whitlock said.
“I loved, and was constantly encouraging him to keep going as high up or as far down as he could,” Smith said. “And as much beyond the wall as possible.”
Collaboration and Curatorial Practice
Beyond his installations, Whitlock was part of the exhibition’s design process early on.
Whitlock also collaborated on graphic design, creating a banner featuring Hine’s photographs that hangs in the museum's rotunda.
“I was really grateful when Quaishawn said yes, because there's a lot of things we learned together,” Smith reflected on the collaborative design process.
For an artist whose work can be solitary, “I valued the discourse of it,” Whitlock said.
“Nothing we do at the Frick is truly singular,” Smith said. “This show looks the way it does because of conversations we're having internally within the curatorial team, and even within our community.”
See Quaishawn Whitlock’s artwork when you visit Lewis Hine Pictures America, now on view at The Frick Pittsburgh until May 17. Tickets are available here.
Rachel Wilkinson is a Pittsburgh-based writer and reporter researcher whose essays and profiles have appeared locally in Pittsburgh City Paper and nationally in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Esquire, and others.
