The Susan Bergman Gurrentz ‘56 Art Gallery will be getting a new home in August 2025. The gallery will be moving into Woodland 103, the classroom next door to its current space, as the campus bookstore, which will become exclusively a Chatham gearstore, will be moving to the gallery’s current space next to Cafe Rachel.
It was announced Feb. 18 to students, staff and faculty via email that renovations to Woodland 103 will begin this spring to create a new and enhanced gallery space. Renovations are being spearheaded by Kyra Tucker, the chair of the Interior Architecture program at Chatham. The blueprints look to include higher ceilings and lighting grids more conducive to displaying art than the current gallery.
Additionally, the curating room, which holds the older of two Chatham African art collections, will still belong to the art gallery space. A new door will be cut into the adjoining wall of Woodland 103 to allow for continued access to the collection without it having to be moved.
All renovations to the gallery space look to conclude in August ahead of the fall 2025 semester, so there will be no interruption to the classes or artists using the space.
Chatham isn’t unfamiliar with trading spaces. The art gallery has historically moved homes across the Shadyside campus, following other major University changes.
Woodland Hall was once the home of Chatham’s art department when Dr. Beth Roark began working at Chatham in 1996. Roark, an associate professor of art history, has worked with the gallery for much of her time at Chatham, even when it sat next to a black box theater.
“What is now the gallery and the Cafe Rachel was a black box theater,” Roark said. “The area that’s Woodland 103, now that was the gallery. So, the gallery was next door to where it is now, and half of that space was the gallery.”
In 2005, the University made major renovations. When the Athletic and Fitness Center (AFC) was built, the old gym was retrofitted into the current Art and Design Center (ADC) and the art department was moved there. Woodland Hall was renovated during this time, too.
According to Roark, the black box theater was divided into the space that would become Cafe Rachel and the current space for the art gallery. These two structures were built by the same company who had never designed a gallery before.
“There were some problems, like where the bench is [in the current art gallery]. There was a ramp there that stuck out into the gallery space, so they covered it with the bench,” Roark said. “And that has always been a really hard place to hang art, because we have to make sure it’s high enough that people aren’t going to sit on the bench and hit it with the back of their heads.”
Early discussions about moving the art gallery to its former home in Woodland 103 to create space for the new campus gearstore started around late October 2024.
“We did have early discussions and meetings with with the head of the department, with the faculty in the department, with the dean, as we began to kind of introduce why we’re needing to do this, and what it might look like and tried our best to kind of collaborate,” Vice President of Operations and Communications Bill Campbell said. “The gallery is also a named donor space. So we also presented the rationale and the plans about this to that family to be respectful of the alumna who it’s named after, and they were supportive and understood.”
Once the decision was agreed upon by the art department and the family of alumni Susan Bergman Gurrentz ‘56, the University began to plan for the space. It hired Tucker to better design the art gallery space as it moves back into its old home of Woodland 103.
“We also committed to working to build comparable or better space in the gallery across the hall, so that our department has been working with our facility staff and the head of interior architecture, Kyra Tucker, to develop what that plan looks like,” Campbell said.
The gallery has offered a space for students to get hands-on experience curating art, display student artwork and to host shows highlighting local Pittsburgh artists. Though Roark seems enthusiastic about the changes coming to the space allocated for the gallery in Woodland 103, some students remain frustrated.
“I guess I’m kind of disappointed in some ways, because the gallery and the curating room has had a lot of issues regarding space and storage,” Sully Pelles ‘25 said. “It kind of feels like we’ve been fighting tooth and nail for storage solutions and stuff, but then the second that the bookstore vendors want to move and have a new space, then the university can just kick us out of our space.”
