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The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust is pleased to present its fourth exhibition in collaboration with VaultArt Studios, a Pittsburgh-based non-profit and project of Achieva dedicated to providing a professional studio environment for artists with disabilities. This ongoing partnership reflects a sustained institutional commitment to expanding the field of contemporary art by ensuring that artists with disabilities are not positioned at its margins, but are recognized as vital contributors to its present and future.

This exhibition features a new body of work by Charlie Wallace, a founding member of VaultArt Studio, whose practice engages deeply with the visual language of celebrity culture and is distinguished by his large-scale, meticulously rendered paper doll compositions. For this presentation, Wallace turns his attention to the Major Arcana of the tarot—a sequence of 22 cards that have, for centuries, functioned as a symbolic system for mapping human experience, transformation, and fate.

Across art history, tarot imagery has served as a rich site of interpretation, from its origins in Renaissance Europe to its reimagining by modern and contemporary artists drawn to its dense layering of allegory, mysticism, and psychological insight. The Major Arcana in particular can be understood as a set of enduring archetypes—The Fool, The Magician, The Lovers, Death–figures that articulate universal narratives of beginnings, power, desire, loss, and renewal.

Wallace reinterprets these archetypes through the lens of contemporary celebrity, translating each card into a carefully constructed likeness of a cultural icon. In doing so, he collapses distinctions between mythic and mediated identities, inviting viewers to consider how celebrity itself functions as a modern system of archetype—one through which collective aspirations, anxieties, and projections are continually performed and circulated. His signature two dimensional portrait format further underscores this dynamic, emphasizing themes of construction, projection, and transformation inherent to both tarot and celebrity culture alike.

Charlie Wallace is guest curated by Steph Neary, VaultArt Studios in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.