When I meet Margaret Kross in her gallery, Romance, she’s surrounded by spirals, wheels, and the faint hum of fluorescent lights leftover from the space’s former life as a cardiology office. “There’s a sort of psychological weight to this place,” she says. “You can feel its history.”
Creating a Home for Artists at Romance Gallery
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Kross returned in 2023 after several years between Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago. The first exhibition in her new space in North Oakland, Fourth River, meditated on Rust Belt mythology and defunct visions of American progress. The title, drawn from the city’s underground aquifer, served as a metaphor for invisible currents: what flows beneath industry, beneath the stories cities tell about themselves.
That sensibility—romantic, critical, slightly melancholic—threads through all of Kross’s curatorial projects. “I’ve always been interested in intimacy, love, sentimentality,” she says. “Things that might be dismissed as trite in the context of contemporary art.” It’s fitting, then, that the first iteration of Romance began in the basement of her apartment in 2023 (yes, complete with a Pittsburgh potty). “It started as something small, intimate, and always a bit chaotic,” she recalls. Eventually expanding into her living room, she quickly realized that it was time for a change.
In searching for a new space, Kross toured a few buildings with white cube setups around the city. None felt right. “It felt like I was trying to make the program feel too grown up,” she says. The cardiologist’s office—a true, untouched time capsule from the ‘90s—was something else entirely. “There was a kind of poetry to landing here, reckoning with its history, and making it work,” she reflects. “You take a place with connotations of fear and anxiety, and you think about how it might become something else—something about care and connection.”
A New Exhibition: Machine Turn Quickly
That ethos resonates through Romance’s current exhibition, Machine Turn Quickly, featuring artists Hunter Foster and Ang Ziqi Zhang. The show centers the wheel as a symbol of technology and time, a tool of creation and control that has both enabled and exhausted human labor.
In the gallery, Foster’s coiled canvases radiate in safety orange and camouflage green, their surfaces vibrating with circular motion. Zhang’s works, by contrast, move inward, spiraling toward hidden centers. Together, their visual languages evoke both the rhythm of machinery and the slow, psychic time of dreams. A small book, designed as a tear-off calendar, compiles fragments of their shared research and serves as a physical invitation to slow down, to handle time page by page.
Kross notes that the show asks an enormous question: “What does it mean to make art right now? Hunter and Ang aren’t offering a solution. They’re asking us to pause, to recognize that time itself has become a kind of tool—and maybe we can use it differently.”
The Growing Challenges Artists Face in Today’s Age
That question—how to make and show art right now—has defined Kross’s trajectory since she returned to Pittsburgh. In a city increasingly branded by corporatized health care and “AI Avenue,” the gallery stands as a reminder that care, emotion, and slowness are still radical values. Kross situates her gallery within a larger local ecosystem. “There are so many boons here,” she says, listing just a few of the spaces and organizations she admires: april april, Bunker Projects, Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, Brew House Arts, etc. She sees reciprocal support as the pulse of Pittsburgh’s art network: “It’s not about competition. It’s about conversation.”
Her enthusiasm for the city’s growing contemporary art scene extends beyond its borders. She recalls showing at an art fair in Marseille, a port city whose industrial past mirrors Pittsburgh’s. “People were genuinely excited to hear about what’s happening here,” she says. “There’s a sense of curiosity about the city, and a recognition that something meaningful is taking shape.”
Outside of the gallery, Kross continues to write for international art publications while advising local collectors. For now, she’s simply enjoying having some physical separation between work and life for the first time in a few years. But Romance, as its name suggests, remains a deeply personal endeavor: “When I think about the serendipity of this space, the heart doctor, the machinery of care… it all connects,” Kross says. Romance, then, is about a kind of healing, about making art and community that keep the pulse going.
Machine Turn Quickly is open through November 12 at Romance (155 N. Craig Street, Suite 110). Gallery hours are Fridays and Sundays 1-5pm and by appointment.
Story by Shawn Simmons
Photos Courtesy of Romance
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