Contributed by David Carrier / Sobia Ahmad makes silver fiber prints and inkjet images responding to Sufi traditions of poetry and oral storytelling. Her The Breath within the Breath is a 30-foot-long inkjet print on Japanese paper, mounted on a platform running diagonally across the gallery. Maggie Bjorklund does oil paintings. Her Assumption of the Virgin (After Titian) is a close-up rendering of that subject. Centa Schumacher manipulates photographic images, and her Salt Fork, Rain on Lake superimposes a white circle on an archival inkjet print. Elijah Burger had developed private codes of quasi-abstract images, like Hex Centrifuge. The unifying theme of the four-artist exhibition “I Believe I Know” that includes this work, now up at the Tomayko Foundation in Pittsburgh, is concern with transcendence. With due reference to William James’s The Variety of Religious Experience, the four artists’ shared goal is to offer visual presentations of mystical experiences. That is a familiar and traditional modernist theme, but here it receives strikingly original treatment.
This fascinating exhibition, with an important theme, is challenging in the best sense: it confronts viewers with genuine existential questions. I would love to know more about the genesis of Ahmad’s big print, for its title is mysterious. I admire Bjorklund’s painting, which alludes to Titian’s sacred representations, but I am puzzled by her three other works. Burger’s code baffles me, and I wonder why Schumacher chooses to impose circles on her images. I bring up these tantalizing puzzles not to fault the show’s enigmatic quality – that is part of its charm and allure – but rather to suggest that it would be exciting to give all four of these artists solo shows, which would afford each the opportunity to provide richer context for their work.
Although I identify myself as a New York critic, I have long lived in Pittsburgh. The city boasts the Carnegie Museums, which have a separate facility devoted to Andy Warhol; a small branch of the Frick; and several other estimable art institutions. The Iron City has an excellent symphony and a fine opera, and fields many excellent theater and musical performances. Pittsburgh has hosted, as the Carnegie collection reveals, some ambitious collectors. It has produced epochally influential artists, including Ellsworth Kelly (who lived there until he was six) and Philip Pearlstein as well as Warhol. And there are plenty of potentially first-rate exhibition spaces in this rustbelt city; the Tomayko Foundation’s gallery, for its part, is an elegant, clean space of which any Chelsea dealer would be proud. Pittsburgh isn’t an art world center, but it has the goods to become a prime destination for ambitious displays of contemporary art. What’s needed, I suspect, are curators willing to cultivate and support local collectors. Energetic journalistic support from the local free newspapers would also be useful, since the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the city’s primary paper of record, only appears in hard copy two days a week. I would love to see the American art world decentralize. “I Believe I Know” could be a step in that process.
“I Believe I Know,” Tomayko Foundation, 5173 Liberty Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA. Through September 19, 2025. Artists: Sobia Ahmad, Maggie Bjorklund, Elijah Burgher, and Centa Schumacher.
About the author: David Carrier is a former Carnegie Mellon University professor, Getty Scholar, and Clark Fellow. He has published art criticism in Apollo, artcritical, Artforum, Artus, and Burlington Magazine, and has been a guest editor for The Brooklyn Rail. He is a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.