This summer, Calista Lyon, assistant professor of photography and expanded media, in collaboration with a visual artist, Luke Stettner, will offer Summer School: State of the Sky, an interdisciplinary arts-centered education program at the renowned Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The program will run in conjunction with Stettner's exhibition State of the Sky and will encompass six bi-weekly seminars, twice weekly access to the exhibition's solar darkroom and a series of public events, running from June 17 to Aug. 26.

Summer School: State of the Sky will explore how documents housed within archives, libraries and museums can be used to reimagine dominant narratives. Through the creative translation of newspapers, photographs, data and other archival materials, participants will explore ways to un-archive and recirculate marginalized, contested and unknown histories. 

The seminars will be guided by visual artists, poets, filmmakers and anthropologists, providing a space to connect with diverse research methodologies, engage in creative experimentation and foster critical discussions about cultural knowledge and memory. A different practitioner will lead each seminar, including Michael Leong, Noah Theriault, Sobia Ahmad and Nida Rehman, with the first and final meetings facilitated by the program organizers, Stettner and Lyon.

Alongside the seminars, participants will have twice weekly access to the exhibition's unique solar darkroom, where participants can use documents to experiment with photograms — exposures made using the sun as a light source. The darkroom will encourage hands-on creative inquiry and will support participants' personal research.

Two public film screenings, curated by Benny Shaffer and co-hosted by Pittsburgh Sound + Image, will bookend the seminar, framing its duration with cinematic works that resonate with the State of the Sky exhibition and the Summer School's themes.