ROMANCE
Things to Come: OUTLINES, 1941–1947
an exhibition and program series devoted to the historic gallery
co-curated by Brittany Reilly
March 20–Aug 16, 2026
Things to Come: OUTLINES, 1941–1947, co-curated by Brittany Reilly, revisits the history and impact of Outlines, an experimental gallery active in Pittsburgh between 1941 and 1947. Founded by 21-year-old artist Elizabeth “Betty” Rockwell (1920–1998) along the city’s Boulevard of the Allies, Outlines created a radically interdisciplinary program and meeting ground for the avant-garde that expanded thinking toward hybrid models.
Things to Come—titled after H.G. Wells’s speculative fiction screenplay and its 1936 film adaptation shown at Outlines as part of Rockwell’s robust film series—will unfold over the course of five months and as a subtle backdrop for Romance’s concurrent gallery programming. Alongside select archival material and works by artists and designers exhibited at Outlines—including original pieces shown at the historic gallery—an ongoing series of programs featuring emerging and contemporary artists will engage the model of what Rockwell described as a “public–gallery–library–theater of modern art.”
Outlines championed European modernists not yet widely known in the United States, and American artists remarkably early in their path, including those driving creative inquiry in Pittsburgh where many of the artists immersed themselves. Outlines held exhibitions of early sculptures and jewelry by Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell’s rarely seen Forgotten Games box constructions, film experiments by Maya Deren, and performances by John Cage and Merce Cunningham, among many others. Several of these artists engaged chance operations and “non-art” vernacular, which constituted a distinctive facet of the gallery’s program.
Congruent with the Bauhaus ethos and involving its players, Outlines also blurred dimensions between creative disciplines—architecture, industrial and furniture design, functional objects, hand-craft and the graphic and advertising arts. In this environment, industrial designer-artists László Moholy-Nagy and Robert Lepper exhibited and lectured; projects by Gropius and Wright, among other architectural concepts, prompted discussion; and innovative techniques by Anni Albers were showcased.
In Things to Come, excerpts from Rockwell’s gallery scrapbooks are presented as facsimiles, lending texture and factual grounding to this history often shared through lore. These documents are accompanied by a group of works on paper by artists underrecognized for their contributions to abstraction in the US. Works by Stanley William Hayter, Balcomb Greene, and Irene Rice Pereira, among others on loan from the Marty O’Brien Collection of American Art, constitute an anchor of the exhibition. Presented alongside a short film by Joseph Cornell made from footage of a racing subway, these works emphasize motifs of speed and acceleration, as well as the reimagining of movement.
An atmospheric installation in the adjacent gallery, on view through April 26, brings together objects by designers involved with Outlines including Jens Risom, Isamu Noguchi, Peter Muller-Munk, and Eva Zeisel. Staged as a period room of the imagination through dialogue with Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon(1943)—and interwoven with outtakes featuring both artist and gallerist—the film’s flickering presence evokes a psychic architecture. While probing modernism’s implicit, very real limits, this presentation also celebrates these works, Outlines’ rigorous experimentation, and female-led endeavor.
----
Expanded essays and contemporary programming forthcoming.
Special thanks to the Marty O’Brien Collection of American Art courtesy of the O’Brien Art Foundation; Collection of Jason McClelland; Cathy Raphael; Kris Rockwell Foundation; Jason Tracy; Steven Haines; the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; and Tracing Outlines, 2015 documentary, Cayce Mell.