The Mattress Factory museum names Anthony Elms as artistic director

Installation-focused North Side contemporary art museum The Mattress Factory will be turning 50 in 2027, and it’s keeping up with the times with a new artistic director who will join the museum in February.

Detroit native Anthony Elms will take the reins of all artistic programs early next year. With a long track record of curatorial experience, Elms looks forward to collaborating with other artistic voices in Pittsburgh. Elms was chosen after a “highly competitive national search,” according to the Mattress Factory.

“I have early, fond memories of the Detroit Institute of the Arts and wandering around aimlessly,” Elms said in an interview. He has both a BFA and MFA in painting and has found just as much satisfaction in editing, publishing and curating art as creating it himself.

Previously, Elms worked in a number of museums and galleries, including at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. He was one of the curators of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial exhibition in 2014. For the past year or two, he’s been working independently.

“It’s kind of going back to my roots,” he said of his solo stint. “I was usually a part-time worker or a contract worker for a good 10 years in Chicago, so it’s a little bit back to that.”

So what drew him to the Mattress Factory?

“When you work independently, it’s not the same thing as sitting at a table and asking questions amongst people. I feel like we do better work when we work in teams and as groups than we do as individuals.”

The nature of The Mattress Factory is very collaborative. The museum offers both exhibition space and an international residency program. It prides itself in putting artists first and honoring the journey, not just the product, allowing makers a lot of freedom to express and innovate.

Elms discussed the common perception of art.

“I think that artists are people who are living in the world, and there’s always a reason they’re making the decisions they’re making. It’s interesting to see how they’re responding in real time to the world. I love having the opportunity to make that public and to be sort of an interlocutor between audiences and artists to figure out how we make meaning and how we look at these things.”

He’s looking forward to doing the kind of work that The Mattress Factory is known for.

“I’ve never worked at a place that’s dedicated, say, to installation or site-specific work, but certainly I’ve been involved with a number of works that have had that ethos. Times change. Installation art site-specific work doesn’t mean the same thing it meant in the ’70s when the Mattress Factory was founded,” he said. “I feel like it’s a good time to re-ask what that means.”

As for moving to Pittsburgh, Elms has never spent more than about four days in the city before, but he’s been making trips here since the 1990s. “I always look forward to new challenges, new environments, new routines. It’s certainly going to be a change and I’ll figure out what that means.”