Please contact the retailer for a list of available brands at that location. We offer a guaranteed 1-day delivery window, or it’s FREE! At 1-800-Mattress, we roll out the red carpet for you with this premium service - tailored to YOUR schedule. If your purchase is not delivered within the guaranteed 1-day window, your delivery is FREE.* 1-day delivery window or delivery is free Free in home set up of your mattress set Free removal of your old mattress set Courteous and professionally trained Dream Team Delivery™ personnel Red carpet and sanitary blue booties to protect your home Red Carpet Delivery Details We guarantee your new mattress will be delivered within a designated 3-hour delivery window, or your delivery is free. If your delivery is late, simply contact the store of your original purchase after signing the delivery manifest with the delivery time stamp and we will credit your account or mail a refund check for the price of your delivery fee within three weeks.
See store for details. Not applicable on all products. As part of our Red Carpet Delivery Service, we will contact you to schedule delivery whenever it's convenient for you. While we install your new mattress, we will also haul your old mattress away. *Not available in all areas.When it comes to contemporary art, you never know what you are going to get. This is part of the fun in visiting these museums because there never seems to be one particular style that is on display. Sometimes it is disappointing, other times thought provoking, but overall you never really know what will be around the next bend. At Pittsburgh’s contemporary art museum, Mattress Factory, we found each exhibit to be more interesting than the last and left wondering why it took us so long to visit this museum in the first place. I’ll be honest in saying that I often leave these type of art museums disappointed because I just don’t “get” why they are popular. Put me in front of a solid blue canvas and I will not say that it is art but rather a lazy attempt to be unique- even if the shade of blue is beautiful.
I enjoy art that is anything better than what I can make myself, and considering I can only paint solid colors and draw stick figures, the bar is set pretty low. Luckily, I don’t think that any of the Mattress Factory exhibits come across as this basic, and even a few of the simpler exhibits, such as James Turrell’s Castro, Red and Danaë, end up with a twist that is much more thought provoking than you’d really come to expect (don’t worry, I won’t ruin the surprise but maybe you can figure it out from the above photo of Castro In fact, many of the exhibits at the Mattress Factory are somewhat interactive- be it a sensory experience (like the above installations from James Turrell), the immersive (like the Repetitive Vision and Infinity Dots Mirrored Room by Yayoi Kusama), or the truly interactive (like the immensely enjoyable Damn Everything But the Circus by Benjamin Sota featuring real life circus equipment to play on). It is for this reason that we feel the Mattress Factory excels where other contemporary art falls flat.
The exhibits are truly a feast for the senses and follow no rhyme or reason as you bounce around from one eccentric idea to the next, allowing for an entertaining experience starting from the first exhibit until the very last. I envision us returning to the Mattress Factory fairly often in the coming months and years as several of the exhibits are temporary placements and will be cycled out with new thought-provoking pieces that will warrant the return trip (although in all honesty, I’d return just to take photos in the Infinity Dots Mirrored Room– one of many permanent exhibits). When other museums of this nature make me want to leave at a relatively brisk pace, the fact that the Mattress Factory encouraged me to stay and want to return again speaks volumes about the quality of the art, the range of exhibits that are on display, and what a welcomed addition the museum makes to the North Side. Now that I’ve done my best to get you excited without giving the secrets of any of the exhibits away, now it is your turn- go visit the Mattress Factory!
Mattress Factory is located at 500 Sampsonia Way in the North Side and is closed Mondays. Do not miss the additional annex buildings that the museum owns as admission is included in the price of your ticket and are a must see. Looking for more unique museums in Pittsburgh? Check out La Hutte Royal, Trundle Manor, Randyland (almost next door!), the Center for PostNatural History, or the Photo Antiquities Museum to start!Book Your Trip Today at: Flights: Skyscanner, STA Travel (under 26) , , Airbnb, Flipkey, HomeAway Car Rentals: Holiday Autos, Hertz, Zipcar *The above links contain affiliate information. By shopping through our affiliate links we'll receive a small commission that helps support our site. Book Your Pittsburgh Hotel Today For our personal recommendations, read our Pittsburgh hotels review database, or read 3rd party reviews on TripAdvisor for more critiques! Explore More of Pittsburgh Looking for more things to do in Pittsburgh?
Use our interactive map to read our articles from in and around the city. Click the map icon and then "more details"! The Best Sleep Of Your Life Enjoy your bed for Plus rest easy with a Step up your sitting game with The Mattress Factory hasn't been an actual mattress factory for a while now. Built on a hillside in the Central Northside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, back at the turn of the last century, it was used as a warehouse and showroom for Stearns & Foster until the 1960s. Today, it's one of the country's more unusual art museums. Filled not with paintings or sculptures — and certainly not with mattresses — it is now, four stories of ... well, of "stories" in a way. Installations that take you places you don't expect to go in an art museum. A recent fourth-floor exhibit called Damn everything but the circus, for instance, was inspired by an E.E. Cummings poem that reads "damn everything that is grim, dull, motionless, unrisking, inward turning, damn everything that won't get into the circle, that won't enjoy."
Artist and Zany Umbrella Circus founder Ben Sota arranged a canvas-draped, room-sized installation where visitors could walk a very low tightrope, drape themselves on a trapeze, even roll around in one of those giant metal acrobat wheels. Across the hall is Ryder Henry's Diaspora, a futuristic city-in-miniature (with one house small enough that you could hold it in your hand, that opened to reveal its furnishings including a tiny mirror that reduced the viewer to the right scale) and what looked like a space station receding toward the next galaxy. Also on this level, in a locked room, there's a permanent exhibit — Sarah Oppenheimer's oddly titled 610-3356 — a molded plywood-sheathed hole in the floor that lets you see straight out the side of the building one floor below. For some reason, birds don't fly in. The museum keeps the room locked so kids won't fall out. Other permanent exhibits include Yayoi Kusama's pair of mirrored, polka-dotted rooms that give new meaning to the notion of infinity for anyone who steps inside them;
the hauntingly exquisite light sculptures of James Turrell; and Greer Lankton's heartbreaking It's all about ME, Not You, which, in re-creating her bedroom, offers a window into this transgender artist's struggles with addiction and anorexia. All of these are examples of "site-specific installation art," meaning art that's tied to the space it's in, and it's the only thing you'll find at The Mattress Factory now, though that was not true when the building began its new life in 1977. "We opened a food co-op on the first floor, with vegetarian cooking," remembers Mattress Factory founder Barbara Luderowski. Everybody says, 'You had great vision' and so on. The hell I did. It was an evolutionary process, built originally on desire for myself: a place to work, a place to live, and a community in which I could thrive as a person." Others thrived there, too, including a young artist whose work was included in the first crop of site-specific installations: Michael Olijnyk, who's now co-director of the museum.
"He always refers to himself as the nightmare dinner guest who never went home," chuckles Luderowski. Today, "going home" just means going upstairs. The two co-directors share a huge open living space on the top two floors of the museum, and preside jointly over an arts complex that now includes the main building plus artists' residences and workshop areas in several other buildings. One of them — a three-story Victorian townhouse down the street — has been taken over by what Olijnyk says is "literally miles of black yarn" for Trace of Memory, an enormous, townhouse-filling spiderweb of sorts created by Berlin-based artist Chiharu Shiota. "We wanted her to do the whole building," explains Olijnyk, "so this idea is in the whole building, so when the visitors are coming, they're opening door by door and finding this piece." What they're finding is basically three floors' worth of memory befogged. The installation makes the objects in the rooms hard to focus on: A bed, a pile of suitcases, a wedding dress that floats in mid-air, all rendered fuzzy and indistinct by hundreds of angled, irregular strands of yarn stretched wall to wall.
"It took 13 people 10 days," marvels Olijnyk. "And when they said 10 days we thought, 'No way,' because we saw them working on one room and it was very, very labor-intensive. But they would start early in the morning, and sometimes work until 2 in the morning, then get up the next day and do the same thing." The effect of their labors, and the latticework of black yarn they've created, is that you see this century-old rooming house through a haze of memory ... an effect that had special resonance for one attendee. "Someone came and visited us," says Olijnyk, "who was actually born on the second floor. And when he walked down the steps — you see those three brass mailboxes? — his mother moved into the building in 1932 and her name is still penciled in on that brass mailbox." Trace of Memory, like many of the Mattress Factory's installations, is a complicated idea, rendered in spare, minimalist form. That contrasts with the directors' private residence, up above the museum, which is wildly maximalist, crammed with thousands of objects the two have collected — Luderowski's tchotchke-filled cabinets (including dozens of 1930s Mickey Mice (artisanal figures created from patterns that ran in Vogue magazine), Olijnyk's midcentury modern furniture.
Find Unforgettable Art In A Most Unlikely Place: A Pittsburgh Mattress Factory "Living with him is a little like having Christmas all the time," says Luderowski. "He brings home these treasures." Treasures that he's artfully arranged with a curator's eye. Her treasures tend toward the hand-crafted ... the worn and lived-with. "I can't afford top-of-the-line," she explains. "If I were a doll collector, you'd be after the perfect dress, the perfect shoes, the perfect mechanics and so on. I love the mechanics, I don't give a damn about the exterior particularly. I look for bargains, I look for broken, which I can readily repair and it gives me that hands-on thing again." "Again" because Luderowski and Olijnyk are artists, not just arts administrators — devoted enough to site-specific creativity, that they live atop their own creation: this beehive of artistic activity. "I love being even a peripheral part of the actual process," says Luderowski. "The thinking process, the flexibility, and the problem solving, and all those things which to me are so important in terms of what art does for you."