Noise from the passing cars and buses mingle on a busy downtown street. Business suits and T-shirts share the sidewalk with the crisp white uniforms of culinary students on break from their school next door. A professionally dressed woman with curly brown hair waits patiently at her bus stop, located directly in front of the intriguing storefront windows of the Future Tenant gallery. A young artist works on the sidewalk nearby. She is busy taking final snapshots of her creation, Lost Broadcast, before it must be dismantled from its prominent window position.
The artist, Eileen Maxson, is a 2nd year student in Carnegie Mellon's Master of Fine Arts program. She has just completed a 2½ week show at the Future Tenant gallery featuring her work and the art of five of her classmates. The gallery, an unfinished chunk of space owned by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, has essentially been lent to the University on a month to month basis since 2002. It's run by arts management graduate students from the Heinz School and the College of Fine Arts. If a 'future tenant' ever moves in, the gallery must move on, hopefully nearby. Future Tenant provides 6-8 weeks of opportunity each year for up-and-coming Carnegie Mellon MFA artists to show their works in a downtown setting, smack in the middle of Pittsburgh's Cultural District.
The curly haired woman waiting in front of the gallery watches Maxson take pictures, clearly interested in the installation filling the windows. A casually dressed man walks by and joins the scene, also drawn to this piece. In the gallery's left front window, Lost Broadcast is composed of a podium bursting with blue wooden 'microphones' set in front of an imposing blue curtain backdrop. On the right side of the storefront, that window is jammed with TV screens of differing sizes, endlessly broadcasting videos that appear to be live conferences.
Evidently, the man who has interrupted his walk has passed Lost Broadcast before. He recognizes Maxson as the woman who is reading lyrics in one of the videos. "Isn't that you?" he asks. The curly haired woman moves closer to join in the conversation. Soon, three strangers at a bus stop are engaged in a thoughtful discussion of Lost Broadcast. Maxson couldn't be more pleased. This spontaneous exchange is one of the responses she had hoped for, and "one of the great things about doing something in a space like Future Tenant downtown." It is also in sharp contrast to the very different reaction the installation art received the week before at the Cultural District's well-attended gallery crawl. During that event, a young man hopped onto the podium and excitedly screamed into the silent microphones to the unhearing crowd outside the gallery windows. That exuberant display also thrilled Maxson. The reactions represent the "two sides of the spectrum that I wanted."
The buzz of the traffic on the street continues. The three strangers at a bus stop end their conversation. The man walks on, the curly haired woman spots her bus, and Maxson steps inside to begin dismantling.
