"Building a Transatlantic Bridge" in the news

The Pittsburgh G20 Partnership recently wrote about our Transatlantic Bridge. View here.

***Excited about the trip***

Passports, Visas, Tickets, Journals: We have everything!

On Tuesday Antje Reiber and me will take our plane to the airport in Pittsburgh. We both are very excited about the trip, we have never been to the USA before.

Katie has already sent us an itinerary, so that we are well informed about everything that is going to happen within the next days in Greensburg. The most exciting day will be on Thursday, when we meet Kelley Audia´s class and give her students the Journals!

We are looking forward to meet all of you!

-Stephanie

The photo shows the airport in Düsseldorf, where our journey will start.

Pretty Mummies

Zeche Hannover, LWL-Industriemuseum,Web 2010

Zeche Hannover (Coal mine Hannover) 1973, Bernd and Hilla Becher

In Bottrop, a town near Oberhausen, you will find the wonderful Museum "Quadrat" ("Square"). It just has become the venue of a collection of photos, performed by the famous artists Bernd and Hilla Becher ("Bernd und Hilla Becher. Bergwerke und Hütten – Industrielandschaften" - till May 2nd). In a special way, this exhibition spends a touch of presentiment relating the "Feuerländer", to be shown in the LVR-Industriemuseum from July 25th onwards.

Pictures in Black and White from all over Europe, pictures from Pennsylvania too, give insights into a grey and dirty past. The scenes seem to be blast-frozen, only by pure chance you will find people, workers on the photos. The Bechers wanted to objectify their subjects visiting only shut down plants under cloudless sky and using a slightly heightened vantage point. Since the early 1960s their as cold as meticulous eyes have been portraying "structural sculptures", as they call them, pale and silent witnesses of former realms: discharged winding and water towers, abandoned coal mines, dormant coking plants, iron and steel works.

These obituary notices are manifesting the power and force of a bygone world, already out of operation but with an aura borrowed from Egyptian pyramids, perhaps a little more complicated regarding structures and details. When firstly published or exhibited, these pictures have been going to change the perception of a whole generation of historians, who started to detect, to discover and to conquer what Germans should call later "Industriekultur". At best the Bechers not only opened eyes and changed minds, but even saved some buildings from demolition.

Are we, however, still strong enough on bearing the rough and austere beauty of these awe-inspiring monuments, these mighty memorials? Outside the photographs they became more harmless, pleasant, stylish, got cheered up by advertising decoration, by clever recycling, by imaginative transformation, and – matter of sheer luck – by inspiring art: new kind of embellishing the truth?

We are talking about pretty mummies, about cases of eloquent self-denunciation: An epoch is fading definitely, fading not only in the Halls of the "Square". But about 5.000 miners are still at work in real mines and coking plants, just in Bottrop, absolutley not squaring with.

Visitors from Germany Headed to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art For Building a Transatlantic Bridge Project

GREENSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA, February 12, 2010 – Stephanie Buchholz, Project Coordinator at the LVR-Industriemuseum, and Antje Reiber, a teacher at Heinrich-Böll-Gesamtschule, both in Oberhausen, Germany will be arriving in the United States on February 23 in conjunction with Building a Transatlantic Bridge, a partnership between the Westmoreland Museum of American Art and the LVR-Industriemuseum. During their visit, they will view The Westmoreland’s collection as well as visit with Greensburg Salem High School teachers and students. The trip will also include visits to local cultural and historical sites.

Read the news release.

Feuerländer - Regions of Vulcan - heavy industry in art

This international exhibition project with a transatlantic focus is organized by the LVR Museum of Industry and comprises 200 paintings illustrating the development of the mining, iron and steel industries from around 1800 to the structural changes of today.

It contrasts the Ruhr region, Europe's largest industrial conurbation, with the rapid growth of Pittsburgh, the steel capital of America. Paintings of industry by Bonhommé, Baluschek and Gorson, and by Schütz, Felixmüller and Rethel enable comparisons between these "Feuerländer" (lands of fire).

An Art´s Giant: Luyten´s "Werkstaking" Comes To Oberhausen

Photo: Annemieke Broeke, Stedelijk Museum Roermond


It’s a giant painting, consisting of three parts, a triptych the expert says. Height: ca. 3 m (118 inch), length: ca.12 m (470 inch). Hendrik Luyten, the Dutch artist, didn’t paint by church’s order many triptychs have been made for. He rather painted a political manifest remembering and discussing the industrial actions and strikes of the miners in the Walloon Borinage of the end of the 19th century. Belgium had been one of the most important industrial countries in continental Europe bearing heavy social conflicts. A rare event, when artists took part in the struggles jeopardizing their career. Also the later famous autodidact van Gogh got to know with the living conditions of the working class in that region…


Photo: Annemieke Broeke, Stedelijk Museum Roermond


Luyten´s painting is called "Werkstaking", that means "walkout" or "strike". In 1916 he gives the Belgian state the painting with its life sized workers as a gift. But because of it’s obvious political content, the triptych wasn’t presented in Antwerp in the right way but deliberately ignored it. So in 1930 Luyten bequeathed the triptych to the Museum in the Dutch city of Roermond, his place of birth, where it has been shown since…

That’s the history before the idea of the exhibition "Feuerländer" came up in the LVR-Industriemuseum, inspired by the Westmoreland Museum’s presentation of "Born of Fire" in Oberhausen. The future will give the Stedelijk Museum of Roermond a new building, by this way offering an opportunity to ask successfully for the giant painting: Luyten had left the old Roermond home end of 2009 before a new hall will be prepared for housing this three-part painting in 2011. In the meantime the painting makes an excursion to Oberhausen, just on the occasion of the European Capital of Culture festival in the Ruhr area. "Feuerländer" directs at showing the history of industrial development and labour seen by artists. Therefore strokes of luck, that this Luyten is available for that propose just in time.



Photo: Joyce, Stedelijk Museum Roermond


These photos are showing the work of dismantling and transporting the art giant in Roermond. And now the Museum in Oberhausen is preparing the "holidays" of this special guest, where it will be one of the political stars of the "Feuerländer". There is still a lot to do concerning the installation of the most important painting on strike all over the Benelux countries: a real monument in the exhibition "Feuerländer", starting on July 25th - and the Transatlantic Bridge will surely accompany actively all the events.

Official Web site of Ruhr.2010

If you want to know more about Ruhr.2010 (also in English!) please visit:

www.essen-fuer-das-ruhrgebiet.ruhr2010.de/en/home.html