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Thursday, December 26, 2002

1974: Barbara Luderowski buys former Stearns & Foster mattress warehouse.

1977: The Mattress Factory is incorporated and forms a board of directors.

1982: Artists are invited to create the first site-specific installations for the exhibition "Factory Installed." Among them is this untitled work by Michael Olijnyk. Also exhibited were "Rainforest Diptych" by Athena Tacha and Diane Samuels' "44 Installations at the Mattress Factory."

1983: Installations "Danae" and "Pleiades" by James Turrell are the first works to enter the permanent collection.

1988: The satellite gallery at 1414 Monterey opens.

1991: The Mattress Factory collaborates with the Carnegie International, curated by Mark Francis and Lynne Cooke, housing four of its artworks. Ann Hamilton's "offering," which combined a case of slowly melting wax ex-voto heads, a coal miner's ledger and 30 free-flying canaries, occupied a nearby museum property. The other International installations were John Cage's "changing installation at the mattress factory," Tatsuo Miyajima's "Over the Border" and Christian Boltanski's "Archives of the Carnegie International, 1896-1991."

1995: Artists who create in residence at the Mattress Factory come from around the globe. Alumet (Astrid Tielemans and Aart Elshout) chose the atmospheric basement of the main building for its "Notes Between Heaven and Earth."

1996: Renowned British artist and septuagenarian John Latham installed "Documentation" at 1414 Monterey.

1996: Japanese Yayoi Kusama was one of three artists in an exhibition guest-curated by The Andy Warhol Museum curator Margery King. (The other two were Greer Lankton and Andre Walker.) Kusama stands within her "Dots Obsession," one of three installations she designed (two, "Infinity Dots Mirrored Room" and "Repetitive Vision," are still up), dressed to blend in.

1997: Winifred Lutz's "Garden," an installation that is both permanent and ongoing, is given its dedication. The artist began physical work on it in 1993 following five years of research about the site.