Ben Schonberger Opens Solo Show, Hi-NRG, with Public Cultural Trust
Pittsburgh-based artist Ben Schonberger (MFA Photography 20113) opens a new solo exhibition, Hi-NRG, with the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s 707 Penn Gallery on Friday, July 25, 2025. The opening reception on July 25 from 5:30-9pm coincides with a Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Gallery Crawl throughout the district.
The 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.
Hi-NRG will be on view from Friday, July 25 through November 2, 2025.
Learn more:
Ben Schonberger: Hi-NRG – Pittsburgh Cultural Trust
