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Join us for an opening reception July 25 during our Gallery Crawl.

Ben Schonberger is a Pittsburgh-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice examines the complexities of identity, power, and the archive. Through processes of appropriation and recombination, he recontextualizes found imagery to explore the intersection of personal and collective histories. 

This exhibition draws from the visual culture of the gay underground and the sonic legacy of Patrick Cowley, a pioneering composer and producer whose work helped define Hi-NRG (pronounced “high energy”)—an accelerated form of disco that emerged in the late 1970s. Before his death from AIDS in 1982, Cowley crafted some of the era’s most innovative electronic music, shaping a soundscape that pulsed through queer nightlife. 

For Hi-NRG, Schonberger constructed densely layered compositions sourced from vintage print media, merging representations of authority and sexuality. The works interrogate the shifting boundaries between power and desire, exploring how these forces converge within visual culture. At the center of the gallery, a vitrine displays brass knuckles cast in glass, evoking a tension between aggression and fragility, dominance and vulnerability. Reinterpreting a symbol of force through a material associated with transparency and breakability, these objects reflect the exhibition’s broader meditation on control, desire, and the ways in which systems of power are both historically inscribed and continually reimagined.

About Ben Schonberger

Ben Schonberger is an artist and educator based in Pittsburgh, PA. His multidisciplinary and layered practice investigates the complexities of identity through long-term social inquiries. His work explores themes of identity, the archive, and power, often using photography as a foundation for sculpture, installation, collage, and performance. 

Schonberger’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at prestigious institutions, including the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Toledo Museum of Art, Aperture Gallery, the Phoenix Art Museum, VOX POPULI, Cranbrook Museum, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. He is the author of four books: Perfect Safety (2020), Detroit Shoreway (2017), HAMMER (2016), and Beautiful Pig (2014). His work is included in prominent institutional and private collections, such as the Toledo Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the New York Public Library, the Franklin Furnace Archive, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Library. Schonberger is a member of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, The Aperture Foundation, and the Society for Photographic Education. He currently serves as Senior Lecturer in Photography and Program Coordinator for Media Arts at Point Park University, where he teaches courses on photography, experimental video, graphic design, and performance art. He earned his MFA in Photography from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, and his BFA in Computer Imagery and Photography from Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, WV. 

Ben Schonberger: Hi-NRG is presented by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.