Erin Southerland

April 18, 2022 by Erin Southerland

Using iNaturalist in the City Nature Challenge and beyond

by Patrick McShea

Participation in this year’s City Nature Challenge (CNC), April 28–May 1, 2023, is a great way to familiarize yourself with iNaturalist, an innovative cell phone app that powers the annual biological survey of metropolitan areas across the globe. Mastery of the easy-to-use technology during this self-paced bioblitz-style event can create positive outcomes long after the Pittsburgh CNC concludes and in places far beyond the event’s six county territory.

Raccoon tracks in the mud. — *During the City Nature Challenge participants can identify observations, such as these raccoon tracks, or rely upon* iNaturalist to identify them.

Although 2023 will be the sixth consecutive year for Carnegie Museum of Natural History to serve as a CNC city organizer agency, I didn’t become an active participant in the event until 2021. In 2021, I was among 446 participants who, in using our phone cameras to take and submit pictures, documented 7,045 observations of free-living plants, animals, and fungi in Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Washington, and Westmoreland Counties. Our collective efforts verified and geo-referenced the presence of 1,219 different species at various locations in the surveyed territory.

My contributions, which came from four half-hour periods over as many days, amounted to only 29 observations, and for each of them I was able to include an accurate name of the observed subject in the submission form’s “What did you see?” line. iNaturalist, which is a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, functions amazingly well in identifying submitted images even when this question is ignored. The app provides users with impressive evidence of its image recognition capabilities by quickly supplying identification suggestions. This digital wizardry is only a starting point, however, because iNaturalist defines itself as “an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature.”

Whether an observation is tentatively identified by the observer or through the powerful software, higher levels of identification certainty occur hours, weeks, or even months later when other users, who are focused on identifying observations, verify, refine, or even challenge identifications. Consistent verification by such reviewers can raise observations to “research grade,” indicating possible use in future scientific investigations.

Because I didn’t pay close attention to the network aspects of iNaturalist during the CNC, appreciation for my phone’s transformation into far more than a multi-category field guide came months later and more than 500 miles to the northeast during an early fall vacation in the Adirondack Park.

Moth on a branch. — *The moth known commonly as the Chain-dotted Geometer on the Boreal Life Trail at the Paul Smith’s College Visitor Information Center.*

On a sunny mid-September afternoon, while my wife and I watched for birds and pitcher plants along a bog-crossing boardwalk that is part of the unique 14,000-acre campus of Paul Smith’s College, we were frequently surrounded by white moths with delicate black markings. When one landed close by I took its picture, then immediately submitted it as an iNaturalist observation. “Genus Cingilia,” I saw on the phone screen within 30 seconds.

Days later, when an email notification informed me that an observation reviewer had refined the identification to “Cingilia catenaria,” or the “Chain-dotted Geometer,” curiosity about the bog moths prompted a visit to BugGuide.net, a reliable site for information about insects and spiders in North America. Here a statement in the “Remarks” section of the species account raised an ecological question: “Locally abundant to the point of being a pest in some years, yet becoming increasingly rare over much of its former range in the Northeast.”

As I wondered whether the numerous bog moths had been a pest-level outbreak, I remembered someone who might be able to answer that question. The observation reviewer had identified herself on iNaturalist. Dr. Janet Mihuc is a professor at Paul Smith’s College who has been conducting a moth biodiversity survey on the college’s lands for the past six years. In an email exchange she was happy to discuss the bog moths and their role in the ecosystem.

I certainly consider C. catenaria common in our area. I am not aware of it being a pest but that may just be because our local bogs have no economic significance to humans so I doubt there is data on the amount of defoliation that the caterpillars can cause. Hopefully the caterpillars are an important food for migrant songbirds before they depart or for resident songbirds. Based on my data, adult moth species diversity peaks in July then drops steadily in August and September. I would expect caterpillar availability to show a similar trend.

Her generous sharing of information was completely inline with my experience as a CMNH educator asking museum scientists for clarification of concepts presented in current exhibits. The fact that the information exchange was brokered by a cell phone app did not diminish the learning that occurred.

Patrick McShea is an Educator at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Reckoning with Indigenous sovereignty and US public lands through place names in national parks

by Dr. Bonnie McGill

A person looking at a park map is seated on a mountainside overlooking a river valley with snow capped mountains in the background — *A hiker at Yellowstone National Park. Public domain photo by the National Park Service / Jacob W. Frank.*

US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (a member of the Laguna Pueblo) recently initiated a task force to address derogatory place names on federal lands, including names using “squaw.” As the first Native American to serve in her cabinet-level post, Haaland has a deep understanding of the importance of the task force’s work, but is everyone on board?

Why are place names important? According to a recent study I led, addressing place names could be a starting point for reckoning with the US history of dispossession of Indigenous nations from their homelands. The study, published this spring in People and Nature, demonstrates the dual impacts of problematic place names, e.g., commemorating racial violence while simultaneously erasing longstanding and often spiritually connected Indigenous names for landscape features.

The study: “Words are monuments: Patterns in US national park place names perpetuate settler colonial mythologies including white supremacy”

Many consider national parks our nation’s “best idea”ⁱ but don’t realize how park place names cover up the parks’ violent histories. Among the 16 studied national parks and their over 2,200 place names we found:

52 places named for settlers who committed acts of violence against groups, often populations of Indigenous peoples. For example, Mount Doane in Yellowstone National Park, and Harney River in Everglades National Park, both homelands of Indigenous nations, commemorate individuals who led massacres of Indigenous peoples, including women and children.

205 settler place names replacing recorded traditional Indigenous place names. (This count of replacement names is surely an underestimate because written records are biased toward settler histories, much Indigenous knowledge is maintained through oral traditions, and Indigenous knowledge keepers were rarely consulted when settler maps were made.)

10 racial slurs

214 examples of appropriation from Indigenous languages

107 natural features retaining traditional Indigenous place names

Making meaning

Native American groups including the Blackfeetⁱⁱ and Lakota have called for changing place names at national parks and national monuments for over a century (see pictures below). The research my five co-authors and I conducted was in service to such local and national name-changing campaigns. Place names have been used by colonizers and later settlers as a “technology of power” to justify their occupation of Indigenous lands and hierarchical social structuresⁱⁱⁱ. In the words of Indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou Māori) “renaming the landscape [as part of the colonial project] was probably as powerful ideologically as changing the land”^iv. To me, the study’s findings demonstrate how place names in the parks contribute, at a system-wide scale, to the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty over their homelands. Reconciling this wrong will require a system-wide response, such as Secretary Haaland’s task force and future task forces to address more than just derogatory names.

Top image is a historic black and white photo showing three Blackfeet leaders traditionally dressed including feathered headdresses and four white men standing around the desk of Stephen Mather, seated. Bottom image is a color photo showing Chief Grier in traditional dress handing a document to a man dressed in national park uniform and ranger hat with men standing behind Chief Grier, including Lee Juan Tyler wearing a traditional feathered headdress. This photo takes place outdoors with Yellowstone National Park in the background. — Native Americans resist settler colonial place names in national parks. Top: Blackfeet leaders Bird Rattler (far left), Curly Bear (second from left) and Wolf Plume (third from left) meet with Stephen Mather, soon-to-be Park Service director (sitting), and others in Washington, DC in 1915 to protest the use of English-language names in Glacier National Park. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service, Harpers Ferry Center. Bottom: In 2018 Chief Stanley Charles Grier of the Piikani Nation gives a Yellowstone National Park deputy superintendent a declaration from several Indigenous Nations demanding a change to the place names Mount Doane and Hayden Valley. Lee Juan Tyler (Shoshone-Bannock Tribes) and Brandon Sazue, Sr. (Crow Creek Sioux) stand in solidarity with Chief Grier. Individuals shown have given the authors permission to use their image. Photo courtesy of Nate Hegyi of Mountain West News Bureau.

In discussions with Kiaayo Tamisoowo (Bear Returning over the Hill) Chief Stanley Grier (Fig. 1B) of the Piikani Nation and Blackfoot Confederacy, he said that our study has

shed important light on the true spirit and facts pertaining to National Park Place Names which were in place since time immemorial by our ancestors. To give Place Names [such as Mt. Doane in Yellowstone] to persons who authorized and who carried out the massacre of approximately 173 of my ancestors in 1870 on the Marias River, Montana is an atrocity that only perpetuates the illegitimate honor of persons that would be classified as War Criminals. Hayden Valley ought to be changed to Buffalo Nations Valley^v and Mount Doane to First Peoples’ Mountain.

I also recently spoke with Chief Arvol Looking Horse, spiritual leader of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Great Sioux Nation. For decades Chief Looking Horse has sought to change the name of Devils Tower, the enormous, landscape-dominating igneous rock formation in northeastern Wyoming that is the namesake of Devils Tower National Monument. His proposal to change the name of the geologic feature to Bear Lodge has sat with the US Board of Geographic Names since 2015 due to stalling by congressional representatives from Wyoming. Bear Lodge is a sacred site to many native nations including the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota. The site’s current name originated from the mistaken settler belief that Native religious rituals conducted there were forms of devil worship.

When I asked Chief Looking Horse why returning traditional place names is meaningful to him he said,

We as a people of the Earth are connected to Mother Earth, the source of life. Our history is spiritually connected to the Earth. We take care of the Black Hills, the heart of Mother Earth, through ceremony. Returning place names is needed more than ever because of the global disasters. The name of sacred sites came from the spirit, through ceremony, through prayer. For example, Mato Tipila, Bear Lodge is where the White Buffalo Calf Woman brought us the sacred pipe. I am the 19th generation keeper of the sacred pipe. And yet a soldier can just, out of anger and hatred to our people, rename such a sacred place Devils Tower. In our sacred language we don’t even have a word for devil. Returning Mato Tipila, Bears Lodge is the most important derogatory name for Deb Haaland to address.

Some readers might label this study and its attention to place names as a part of cancel culture. To me, that is a red herring that distracts from the need for the dominant US culture to reckon the US history and living legacies of land dispossession and genocide of Native American peoples, a long process repeatedly marked by instances where peoples were separated from their lands.

Reckoning with the past is necessary for all peoples to move forward together into a future that is more equitable and sustainable. This concept is a guiding principle for the work we do in the Anthropocene Studies Section at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Part of my motivation for this work was to understand the kind of restorative actions involved with the reckoning of US history and on-going harms of settler colonialism.

A closing thought on “wilderness”

In popular US culture, our national parks and wilderness areas are thought of as places to escape; places to be out there with “real nature”. But settlers had to first make national parks and wilderness areas free of human occupation. Much of the awe that current national park lands inspired among European colonizers was in part the result of active ecosystem management by Indigenous peoples living with the land. Many national park ecosystems were dramatically changed with the loss of Native American stewardship (e.g. preventing forest fires)^vi.

As the first and now second edition of “We Are Nature” demonstrate for museum visitors, humans are part of, not separate from, nature. In fact, most of terrestrial Earth has been stewarded for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples. So the idea of an uninhabited “wilderness” is less ecological science and more of a settler colonial myth. That doesn’t mean national parks haven’t come to play an important role in conservation of biodiversity or that we shouldn’t visit national parks. I suggest, however, that we visit with greater awareness of park history and of the peoples for whom those lands are their homelands. I also suggest environmentalists use the term wilderness with care and understand it’s social-cultural implications^vii.

Get involved

People can take action by getting involved with a national campaign launched at WordsAreMonuments.org by the social justice pop-up museum, The Natural History Museum. Also, check out this new guide on how individuals, community groups, and Tribal Nations can change place names. The public is also invited to comment on potential replacements for derogatory names on federal lands by April 25.

Bonnie McGill, Ph.D. is a science communication fellow for the Climate and Rural Systems Partnership and based in the Anthropocene Studies Section at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum staff, volunteers, and interns are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Notes

^[i] From an essay by Wallace Stegner: “The Best Idea We Ever Had” in Wilderness magazine, Spring 1983 p4-13.

^[ii] A note on Blackfeet vs. Blackfoot: The nation in what is now Montana is Aamskapi Pikuni (Blackfeet Nation, including individuals shown in Fig. 1A), a member of Siksikaitsitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy), which also includes the Kainai-Blood Tribe, Siksika, Peigan-Piikani (including Chief Grier in Fig. 1B).

^[iii] Rose-Redwood, R., Alderman, D., & Azaryahu, M. (2017). The urban streetscape as political cosmos. In R. Rose-Redwood (Ed.), The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place (pp. 1–24). London: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781315554464

Alderman, D. H. (n.d.). Commemorative Place Naming: To Name Place, To Claim the Past, ToRepair Futures. In F. Giraut & M. Houssay-Holzschuch (Eds.), Naming Places. London:ISTE-Wiley. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341412389

^[iv] Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2nd Ed.). 1025 London: Zed Books Ltd.

^[v] The sovereign Tribal Nations of Yellowstone formally requested the Yellowstone Superintendent to support changing Hayden Valley to Buffalo Nations Valley (see Fig. 1B). Ferdinand Hayden was a geologist who led the first federally funded geological survey of Yellowstone in 1871. His report was essential in persuading Congress to establish the national park. His report also called for the forced assimilation or, failing that, extermination of Native Americans. Other writings of his also demonstrate his white supremacist worldview, a tool used by settler colonizers to justify dispossessing Native Americans from their lands.

^[vi] Read more about this in:

Anderson, M. K. (2013). Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources. Oakland: University of California Press; Kimmerer, R. W., & Lake, F. K. (2001).

Maintaining the Mosaic: The role of indigenous burning in land management. Journal of Forestry, 99(11), 36–41. doi: 10.1093/jof/99.11.36

Kimmerer, Robin W. (2012). Braiding Sweetgrasss : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. (1st ed.). Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions

^[vii] Fletcher et al. 2021. Indigenous knowledge and the shackles of wilderness. PNAS https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2022218118

The Art of Making Fish Familiar

by Patrick McShea

Sculpture of a monster fish in a museum exhibition

Fish in the wild are difficult to observe, even for the scientists who study them. Monster Fish: In Search of the Last River Giants, an exhibition traveled and developed by the National Geographic Society, encourages visitors to learn about this challenge from one such scientist, Dr. Zeb Hogan, host of the popular Nat Geo Wild television show.

In the exhibition, now on view in the R. P. Simmons Family Gallery until April 10, 2022, stunning life-size sculptures, evocative illustrations, and informative panels set the stage for Hogan’s appearance on several well-spaced video screens. Here, in clips with run times of a few minutes, Hogan presents on-the-water, and sometimes in-the-water, reports from six continents about conservation efforts that involve not only other scientists, but also the local people who rely on healthy fish populations for their food or livelihood.

Observing Fish in the Wild

Away from the exhibition, the importance of images in sparking an interest in hard-to-observe wildlife can be noted at a scale where both the creatures involved, and the extravagance of their depictions, are much reduced. By personal example, much of my visual understanding of lesser known fish species in Pittsburgh’s rivers comes from viewing the scientifically accurate, full color, plates in Fishes of the Central United States (University Press of Kansas, 1990), a book illustrated and co-authored by Joseph R. Tomelleri.

Cover of the book "Fishes of the Central United States"

Over the past 36 years, the artist’s detailed portraits of our continent’s finned wildlife have appeared in over a thousand publications ranging from fishing magazines and field guides to outdoor clothing catalogues. Tomelleri’s career as fish artist began in Kansas in 1983 when he and other biology graduate students at Fort Hays State University wondered about the diversity of fish species in a stream that winds through the campus. The resulting student-driven investigation culminated in a publication titled, Big Creek and its Fishes, a work in which Tomelleri had responsibility for fish images. Because the full suite of physical characters that distinguish one fish species from another can rarely be captured in photographs, he used colored pencils in an attempt to accurately render every scale and fin ray.

As the artist’s attention to anatomical detail led to a professional career, his illustration process became standardized. Subjects are collected by seining, through the electrofishing techniques used by fish biologists, or by old-fashioned angling with rod and reel. A captured fish is immediately photographed to record natural colors, then depending upon size, preserved frozen or in a formalin solution that is later replaced with an ethanol solution.

Although Tomelleri says the physical requirements for preservation have limited his experience with “monsters” to creatures three feet long or less, one species account in Fishes of the Central United States makes a case for the frightening aspects of fish that size. A description of Flathead Catfish, a species that recently brought attention to Pittsburgh’s rivers because of the enormous specimens caught and released by local anglers, includes a cautionary warning:

Flatheads breed in natural cavities of river banks, an instinct that leaves them susceptible to illegal hand fishing or “noodling.” Adept noodlers can recognize a big cat’s den by feeling the cleanly swept cavity floor and mound of silt or debris in front of the hole. One may assume that it is the bone-crushing bite of a 60-pound flathead that keeps the slightly squeamish stuck on the bank with rod and reel.

illustration of a flathead catfish — Flathead Catfish. Image credit: Joseph R. Tomelleri

Patrick McShea is an Educator at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Learning From Misinterpretations

by Patrick McShea

Every job has its awkward moments, even work aiding museum visitors in their interpretation of exhibits. One memorable situation in that realm involved a father explaining skeletal bear remains to his three grade-school-aged children.

The setting was Discovery Basecamp during a busy December weekend in 2012. The exhibition had been established just two months earlier as an experiment in providing museum visitors with opportunities to examine authentic objects from the Educator Loan Collection, the enormous cross-discipline teaching collection that is managed to serve the needs of classroom teachers and other educators. In a section of well-lighted, first floor rear exhibit space, three free-standing racks of wire shelves held two dozen colorful toolboxes containing a wide range of natural history materials for visitors to examine, and the tops of five adjacent tables displayed large sturdy objects for close, hands-on inspection.

I was spending the day welcoming visitors to the space, and training a work-study student from the University of Pittsburgh and another from Carnegie Mellon University to do the same. We aimed to assist visitors in retrieving and returning toolboxes, and whenever asked, to answer questions. Listening to visitor conversations during that time was an important way to evaluate the success of the ongoing experiment.

“Hey, let’s look at this,” I heard the father say as he gathered his children around a display table and picked-up one end of a yard-long, rope-linked strand of more than 20 large resin-coated vertebrae. “The tag says ‘bear,’ so let’s see if we can figure this out.” He stretched out the column on the tabletop, and moved both hands to its far end where an irregularly shaped shoebox-sized bone structure anchored the string. The structure, which was not identified on the simple paper tag, was the fused combination of the creature’s sacrum and hip bones, and the father’s unfamiliarity with mammal skeletal anatomy was immediately apparent. He mistook the bear’s butt-end for its skull, explaining to his children how the hip sockets were holes for the eyes, and that it was a shame the animal’s teeth were missing.

Bear vertebrae, sacrum, and hip bones on a table. — For anyone unfamiliar with mammal skeletal anatomy, hip sockets that once secured rounded femur heads might be confused with eye openings.

I didn’t correct him. Instead I explained to the work-study students that I’d be down in the loan program’s basement storage area for a few minutes. By the time I returned with a black bear skull, the attractions of the exhibition had pulled the family unit apart. All three children were engaged with toolboxes containing insect material, while their father was examining mineral samples on another table.

Bear skull on a table. — Discoloration and broken and missing teeth mark this American black bear jaw as a long-used teaching specimen.

I approached him holding out the bear skull and saying simply, “Our lack of labels might have caused some confusion a little earlier.” He looked at the skull, glanced back at the table with the vertebrae column, and then, to my great relief, laughed and accepted the skull from me. He called his children back to the original table, and with the skull as a visual aid, offered them a two-minute remedial lesson. I stood as far away from the table as possible.

Patrick McShea works in the Education and Visitor Experience department of Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

For the Love of Dead Plants

by Koa Reitz

Reposted from Plant Love Stories.

One of my earliest memories as a child is my friend finding a big leaf when we were at the park, and me bursting into tears because I wasn’t the one who found it. Fall was my favorite season because as I walked around, there were plenty of things for me to pick up! I was absolutely captivated by the leaves that fell off of the trees, and would pick up as many as I could. I don’t remember why I was so attached to these leaves–the dead part of the plants around me–but I would always end up with a stack of leaves when I got home.

I think a big part of my obsession with collecting leaves was their colors. But sometimes I would find a particularly big leaf and, as a small child, I was absolutely dumbfounded at the leaf bigger than my head. I had to have them. When I brought the leaves home however, I never kept them, they would sit outside for a while until they would eventually blow away or decompose in the yard. This wasn’t exactly an issue for my young self, as object permanence had yet to fully develop. And there were always more leaves to find!

Person holding a leaf the size of their head. — The author can still find leaves larger than her head! Here, American sycamore (*Platanus occidentalis*)

As I grew up, I became less and less invested in picking up all of the leaves I saw. I think eventually I saw so many that it was hard to find a new color combination I had yet to see, so leaf searching had lost its allure. I would still stop to look at the leaves when there was a particularly vibrant red, or an exciting combination of green, yellow, and orange all in the same leaf, but I left the leaf where it stood. No more collecting for me.

Until recently, I had no reason to think that collecting plants could have any purpose, scientific or otherwise. Contrary to my thinking, there is a vast and important process of collecting and storing plants, of all kinds, to be used for reference and scientific research. Herbaria are collections of preserved plants dating as far back as hundreds of years ago. These specimens can be used for a variety of things including taxonomic classifications (scientific naming systems), DNA sequencing, and phenological observations. Phenology is the study of the time when certain things in the life cycle of a plant happen. For example, phenology can look at the time in a flowering plant’s life that it begins growing new leaves, when it grows flowers, when it develops its fruit, or when leaves turn colors in the Fall. Phenological data from herbaria have been used to look into the past in ways that wouldn’t be possible without a collection of old, dead, plants. A group of scientists at Boston University used herbarium specimens to determine that a warmer climate led to earlier flowering times. This conclusion has various implications including evidence that a warming planet has concrete impacts on the natural environment and changes how we look at climate science overall. It is important to look to the past if we’re going to make informed decisions about the future, and herbaria are full of accessible and valuable information that can help develop scientific claims of all different kinds.

Person standing between metal cabinets. — The author stands among the botanical collections at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s herbarium in Pittsburgh, PA.

I am particularly interested in Herbaria because of my work in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Herbarium. It was compelling to me to work with scads of cabinets full of dead plant specimens. Currently, I am working on a project where I look at digitized Chorispora tenella (purple mustard) specimens in the Carnegie Museum Herbarium, and herbaria from all over the US. Chorispora tenella is a plant that is invasive in parts of the Western US, and we are looking to see how the phenology has changed over the course of its invasion. There are endless questions about the timing of flowering or the spatial differences in flower or fruit number, just to name a few. I think I started to form a relationship with the plants, as I look at image after image and count the number of flower buds, flowers, and fruits, just as I had formed a relationship with the fallen leaves when I was young.

Above: purple mustard (Chorispora tenella ) botanical specimens stored at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.**

There’s so much to learn from these seemingly simple and still specimens. When I do this work, it brings me back to when I was a child and had the (not so permanent) leaf collections of my own. I think there was a part of me as a child that wished to observe what I gathered further, but I had no method or resources to preserve my collections. Now, with herbaria, there’s access to thousands of species of plants that span all over the world. They open up countless lines of study and things to learn and explore, all from dead plants in cabinets. I even find myself collecting and questioning things again, renewing my sense of exploration. And I still make time to find leaves bigger than my head.

Koa Reitz is an undergraduate student studying Ecology and Evolution at the University of Pittsburgh, and a research intern at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees, interns, and volunteers are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

** To learn more about these natural history specimens, you can visit the Mid-Atlantic Herbaria Consortium. Specimens are as follows (left to right): CM356992 collected in 1989 in Oregon; CM448686 collected in 1939 in Idaho; CM288678 collected in 1981 in Colorado; and CM288281 collected in 1982 in Colorado.

Facing Outward, Looking Ahead: Richard Serra’s “Carnegie” As Part Of An 125 Year Legacy Of Architecture and Outdoor Sculpture

by Albert D. Kollar and Mary Wilcop

On a sunny fall weekend last November 6th and 7th, a celebration honored the 125th Anniversary (1895 – 2020) of the founding of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (1895) and the Carnegie Institute Extension, now Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835 – 1919)¹(fig. 1).

Sculpture of Andrew Carnegie in an ornate marble room. — Fig. 1: Andrew Carnegie, Music Hall Foyer

Although the event had been postponed for a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 “Crash the Carnegies” celebration was enjoyed by thousands of visitors. Inside the Oakland museums, families enjoyed artmaking, performance, and learning activities that paid homage to Carnegie Museums’ past 126 years. Fronting Forbes Avenue, the statues and art works that lend much to the understanding of all that’s presented inside, continued their silent vigil.

The Buildings

The long stretch of buildings along Forbes Avenue in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh is home to Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Carnegie Music Hall. The entrance to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the furthest west section of the massive complex, faces the gateway to Schenley Park. The connected buildings that comprise this modern campus were constructed in three distinct phases (the first building in 1895, an extension in 1907, and the new Scaife wing in 1974)². A review of the history of the Carnegie Library and Institute buildings’ is available in the posts “CMP Travel Program and Section of Invertebrate Paleontology Promote the 125th Anniversary of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh With a Walking Tour” and “A Journey to France to Uncover the Mysteries of the Carnegie’s Grand Staircase.”

Close-up of a steel bar with the name Carnegie on it. — Fig. 2: View from inside the museum: a Carnegie Steel Company I-beam supporting the roof of the 1907 extension.

With 1895-era facades made of elegant light gray Berea sandstone mined from a quarry in Amherst, Ohio ², the Carnegie Library and Institute building proclaimed itself to Pittsburgh and the world at large as, in Andrew Carnegie’s own words, a “palace of culture.”³ The library was built, both financially and literally, by Carnegie Steel. Earlier, the company’s structural metal beams were used in Pittsburgh’s first skyscraper, the Carnegie Steel Building, a structure designed by Longfellow, Alden, and Harlow (Floyd 1993)⁵. The Carnegie Institute Extension (1907), undergirded by a steel support frame, used steel beams fabricated at the newly created United States Steel Corporation Homestead Works, formerly Carnegie Steel¹ (fig 2).

John Massey Rhind Bronze Statues

Historic black and white photo of a group of people in front of a statue of Michelangelo. — Fig. 3: Michelangelo Statue. Courtesy of Carnegie Library Archives.

With the completion of the Beaux-Arts style Carnegie Institute Extension, departments of music, art, literature, and science were established as distinct administrative divisions of Carnegie Institute and Library. These now lapsed distinctions are mirrored on the building’s exterior in the bronze sculptures collectively referred to as the Noble Quartet. Seated in classical Greek chairs made of Barre Granodiorite of Vermont² are four male figures. The statues of Shakespeare (literature) and Bach (music) sit atop granodiorite slabs on either side of the main granodiorite staircase to the Music Hall entrance. Just east of them, at the entrance to the art and natural history museums, are seated Michelangelo representing art (fig. 3) and Galileo representing science.

Classical style stone building on a cloudy day. — Fig. 4: *Noble Quartet Muses*

John Massey Rhind (1858 – 1936), a close friend of Andrew Carnegie, was commissioned by him to create these works along with four others that tower three stories above them from parapets on the edge of the building’s roof (fig. 4). Known as the Muses, these standing female figures represent allegorical spirits whose achievements equal those of their seated counterparts. The creation of eight largescale architectural figures to match the Classical style of the building was not an easy task. Statue models shaped in clay by the artist, were shipped from his New York studio to Italy to be cast in the lost-wax process, then returned for assembly and finishing⁶.

Sarah Scaife Gallery

In 1974, the footprint of the Oakland campus expanded once more with the opening of the Sarah Scaife Gallery. Designed by renowned New York City architect Edward Larrabee Barnes (1915-2004), with large spaces and high windows, the gallery exterior is in some ways a modern equivalent of the Beaux-Arts Carnegie Institute Extension³.

The new building was constructed in a more modernist style commensurate with the contemporary architectural styles at the time. Its interior is clad with Larvikite, a beautiful gray blue iridescent igneous rock from Larvik, Norway⁸. The exterior cladding is also Larvikite, but here the stone has a bronze iridescent color to create visual continuity between the radically different Beaux Art and modernist structures.

By 1974, after nearly a century of atmospheric soot and pollutants from the steel mills and other modes of industrial and residential coal use, the old light gray Berea sandstone of the 1907 building darkened to a deep brown. This intended cohesion no longer exists because the sandstone underwent a major cleaning in 1989⁹. Its original pale tone now stands in contrast to the naturally bronze-toned Larvikite.

**Richard Serra Carnegie Sculpture and COR-TEN Steel**

In contrast to the bronze sculptures used in the 1907 Carnegie Extension, sculptures made of modern alloys of steel and aluminum are incorporated into the exterior plazas of the 1974 Sarah Scaife Gallery. The largest of these works is the Richard Serra Carnegie sculpture, which was installed as public art for the 1985 Carnegie International and was selected in a tie for that exhibition’s first prize¹⁰.

Richard Serra's Carnegie sculpture with the Cathedral of Learning framed in the background. — Fig. 5: Serra sculpture at CMOA

The 40-foot tower, made of four panels of 2.5-inch-thick COR-TEN steel with acute edges and corners, emerges from the Larvikite surface of the entrance plaza. The sculpture commands great sight lines with its height and profile echoing that of the nearby Cathedral of Learning, the University of Pittsburgh’s 42-story Gothic Revival, Art Deco tower (fig.5).

Steel skyscraper in downtown Pittsburgh. — Fig. 6: US Steel Tower. Image credit: Derek Jensen (Tysto).

COR-TEN is a proprietary high-strength, low-carbon steel alloy introduced by U.S. Steel Corporation in 1933. It features prominently in the company’s Pittsburgh headquarters, the U.S. Steel Tower, built in 1971 (fig. 6)¹². The name COR-TEN is an amalgam that references the product’s most notable properties, corrosion resistance and high tensile strength. The steel’s exceptional resistance to atmospheric corrosion negates the need for painting. After production, in a process that occurs over several months, a surface patina develops as the steel is exposed to wet and dry weather cycles. In many applications COR-TEN surfaces turn a reddish orange, but colors can vary from orange to brown depending, in part, on atmospheric conditions. Very fine surface oxidation layers can also build to create a rainbow-like iridescence, known as structural color – the same process that lends colorful beauty to peacock feathers and butterfly wings.

By the mid-1960s, the unique properties of COR-TEN attracted the interest of artists, especially those producing outdoor sculptures. Beverly Pepper, a sculptor known for her large-scale metal works, was introduced to COR-TEN’s properties while working at the U.S. Steel factory in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. In 1964 she was the first sculptor to explicitly use COR-TEN as a sculptural medium¹¹. Other artists soon followed, including Serra in the early 1970s. Although Serra was originally trained as a painter, he was already familiar with the working properties of steel. The artist’s father worked in steel mills and as a pipefitter. Later, Serra supported some of his schooling by working in steel mills¹⁴.

By the time Serra’s design was conceived in 1985, only one company, the Lukens Steel Company, which operated the world’s widest rolling mill in the southeastern Pennsylvania town of Coatesville, could produce the large plates required for the commission. After production the plates were shipped across the state to a Pittsburgh-Des Moines Corporation plant on Neville Island, just outside Pittsburgh, for assembly.

The Significance of Carnegie

In its sheer size and monolithic simplicity, Carnegie lends itself to many interpretations. Like the large institution it fronts, the sculpture can be experienced from walking around the outside and by standing within.

By the time of Carnegie’s installation, leaning metal plates were a feature of several of Serra’s public sculptures. For Carnegie, however, the plates were made both to lean and tilt diagonally, rather than being strictly vertical, a form Serra describes as “almost like a V or like lifting your arms up.”⁶ Implicitly, though perhaps unintentionally, this form and its materiality may speak to the original vision Andrew Carnegie expressed in an 1897 letter: “….not only our own country, but the civilized world will take note of the fact that our Dear Old Smoky Pittsburgh, no longer content to be celebrated only as one of the chief manufacturing centers[sic], has entered upon the path to higher things, and is before long […] also to be noted for her preeminence in the Arts and Sciences”¹⁶.

Symbolism. Alone in Carnegie

The bare steel, deliberately lacking any interior or exterior covering, stands prominently in the plaza asserting its own essentialness to the story of the museum.

Fig. 7: View looking up from the interior of *Carnegie*.

To enter the sculpture’s interior from its Forbes Avenue side, visitors slide through a tapered passage between two plates. Once inside, even on the brightest summer days, several minutes are needed to adjust one’s eyes to overwhelming darkness of the interior. Following the walls upwards leads to a glowing view of the sky, blue or gray, depending upon the weather, and undoubtedly occasionally rose pink for some moments at dawn and dusk. The effect is intentionally physically and visually destabilizing (fig 7).

Ornate stone staircase — Fig. 8. Carnegie Grand Staircase

Some visitors experience entering the tower-like structure as a representation of a steel mill’s blast furnace. In this sense, the design functions as an extension of the John White Alexander Crowning of Labor murals in the Grand Staircase, which depict workers making steel in the first floor murals and, as the smoke rises to the second floor, reveal female spirits bringing the fruits of labor to a knight in steel armor who resembles Andrew Carnegie¹⁷ (fig. 8).

Serra often hesitated to assign a single meaning to his sculptures, preferring their interpretation remain broad and therefore boundless. Still, in an interview with Art Historian Vicky Clark during the work’s installation, the artist struggled to completely separate the sculpture from its implicit connections to the museum and Pittsburgh. “There’s something about steelworkers and the tradition of steelworkers that means that they have a basic respect for how something is built. It becomes a metaphor for what the industry of the town has produced.”⁶

Sculptures and Thought in the 21^st Century

While John Massey Rhind’s Noble Quartet functions mainly as an embellishment to the building, with a specific interpretation dictated by Carnegie himself, the situating of Carnegie in the plaza speaks to the extent to which the function of art and architecture, near the end of the 20^th century, had fundamentally changed. Rhind’s Quartet were positioned to sit along the sides of the Carnegie Institute’s original entryways, out of the path of visitors. Carnegie, in contrast, stands imposingly in front of the Scaife extension entrance, almost requiring entering patrons and passersby to engage with it.

Sculptures of the modern era, particularly those of architectural scale, create environments for individuals to think and reflect, without necessarily a prescribed end in mind. A viewer’s interaction with an artwork like Carnegie can feel obtuse; its faceless abstraction refuses to tell us what it is or how we should feel about it. This ambiguity, for Serra, however, is essential, because it means that “the piece has the potential to engage people with various meanings they might have.”⁶ Like the Quartet, Carnegie, speaks to the outside world about what we might find within. That is, that art, and the museum itself, serve as a site for contemplation and reflection—and not only about art.

Albert D. Kollar is the Collection Manager in the Section of Invertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Mary Wilcop is Associate Objects Conservator at Carnegie Museum of Art.

References

¹Kollar, A.D. 2021. The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (1895) and Carnegie Institute Extension (1907): The Story of the Carnegie Building Stones and Architectural Design presented for the 125^th “Crash the Carnegie” Celebration held in north wing of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

²Kollar, A.D., M. Feeley, A. Joyce Jr., R. Fedosick, K. Hughes, and A. Costanzo. 2020. Carnegie Institute Extension Connemara Marble: Cross-Atlantic Connections Between Western Ireland and Gilded Age Architecture in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ACM, 86: 207-253.

³Gangewere, R. 2011. Palace of Culture Andrew Carnegie’s Museum and Library of Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh Press, 332p.

⁴Kollar, A.D. and B. Tucker. 2020. CMP Travel Program and Section of Invertebrate Paleontology promotes the 125^th Anniversary of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh with an outdoor walking tour. https://carnegiemnh.org/125th-anniversary-carnegie-library-of-pittsburgh-outdoor-walking-tour/

⁵Floyd, M.H. 1994. Architecture After Richardson, Regionalism before Modernism – Longfellow, Alden, and Harlow in Boston and Pittsburgh. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 546 pp.

⁶ Clark, V. November 1985. “Richard Serra’s Carnegie, an unpublished interview.” http://vickyaclark.com/serra_interview.html

⁷Gangewere, R. 1992. What the Muses Hold. Carnegie Magazine, 13-17.

⁸Heldal, T., and G. B. Meyer & R. Dahl. 2015. Global stone heritage: Larvikite, Norway. 21-34. Geological Society, London, Special Publication, 407.

⁹Gangewere, R. 1990. Cleaning The Carnegie. Carnegie Magazine, 31 – 35.

¹⁰CARNEGIE Fall 2021. 125 Years: A History in Objects Continues.

¹¹Smithsonian Archives of American Art. July 1-2, 2009. Oral history interview with Beverly Pepper. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. https://www.aaa.si.edu/download_pdf_transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_283468

¹²Jester 1995.

¹²USS Cor-Ten Steel. 1980. USS Cor-Ten High Strength Low-Alloy Steel.

¹³https://www.aaa.si.edu/download_pdf_transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_283468

¹⁴ https://news.artnet.com/art-world/beverly-pepper-marlborough-contemporary-1470469

¹⁵ Lidji, E. 1985. CARNEGIE, Richard Serra. Carnegie International Article.

¹⁶Wall, J. F. 1970. Andrew Carnegie. University of Pittsburgh Press. 1137p.

¹⁷Gangewere, R. personal communication.

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