The first time he was hired by The Andy Warhol Museum, in 1997, Mario R. Rossero had just graduated from Washington & Jefferson College.
He had a degree in art and education, but wasn’t yet certified to teach. So he applied to be an arts educator at The Warhol, which had opened its doors just three years earlier.
His interview and application favorably impressed Maritza Mosquera, then assistant director of education. And Mosquera’s opinion of Rossero only grew over the several years they spent together there, working on everything from youth art-making workshops and opening receptions to outreach programs.
“He was definitely special. Just a great worker,” said Mosquera. “He’s creative.”
Mosquera, who remains close friends with Rossero, was thrilled last week — 28 years after she hired him — to learn he was returning to The Warhol as its new executive director.
“I’m really interested in the energy he can bring to this city through the museum,” she said.
In an interview last week at the museum, Rossero, now in his final months as executive director of the National Art Education Association, sounded similarly enthused.
“I think as a young artist educator, I wouldn't have been able to dream that this role would have been possible,” said Rossero, now 49. “But I think as my career progressed, it was like, ‘Wouldn't that be amazing if one day that opened up?’”
An educator’s journey
In the interview, Rossero said his approach to the arts emphasizes community building and equitable access. His resume, along with many members of Pittsburgh’s arts community, backs him up.
Rossero, who grew up in the Canonsburg area, made his mark at The Warhol in part through his skill at keeping people engaged.
“He really takes community into consideration,” said Mosquera. For several years, she recalls, Rossero’s birthday was an annual in-house event, marked even by staffers who didn’t know him well. “The whole museum became engaged by celebrating him,” she said.
After leaving the Warhol, in 2004, Rossero worked stints in the Shaler Area School District and as senior program officer for arts education at Pittsburgh Public Schools.
“He’s just such an impressive, effective and compassionate arts leader,” said Michele de la Reza, co-founder of dance troupe Attack Theatre, who knew Rossero from his days at The Warhol and worked with him in his role at Pittsburgh Public Schools. She said she’s looking forward to having a career educator at the helm of a major museum. “As a nonprofit executive, you can always feel that he’s an artist and an educator at his core.”
Rossero eventually built a national profile, starting with leadership roles in the Chicago Public Schools, including as director of arts education in a system with 400,000 students.
In 2015 he jumped to an even bigger stage, as senior vice president for education at the prestigious Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. There, Rossero led a team of 60 and oversaw 35 programs that reached a vast audience of students and educators around the world.
“One of my passions and maybe the biggest one over time has been to really ensure that there's equity in access to arts learning experiences,” he said. “But especially during my tenure at the Kennedy Center, we really looked at that whole lifelong learner, and how do we do family and community engagement? A lot of my work is, how do we champion the arts so that it's understood and accessible to all, but also remove some of those barriers to access so that those that might benefit the most from the arts don't have to go through some hurdle or stumbling block?”
Among the projects that debuted during his tenure was the Center’s REACH campus, an outlet for accessible, more informal indoor and outdoor programming that opened in 2019. Among the first groups to perform there was Pittsburgh’s Squonk Opera, with its outdoor musical spectacular Hand to Hand.
The troupe’s co-artistic director, Steve O’Hearn, said Rossero impressed him.
“He’s a real sweetheart and open and enthusiastic and really sharp as a tack,” O’Hearn said. He also admired how REACH built community outreach programming around Squonk’s performances, including workshops with public school students and teachers. “They were very proactive,” he said.
In 2020, Rossero was hired as executive director of the National Art Education Association, an Alexandria, Va.-based nonprofit professional group for visual arts, design and media-arts educators with some 15,000 members in more than two dozen countries.
“They’re huge,” said Mosquera, an artist who said she’d drawn on the NAEA’s resources as an educator.
At the NAEA, Rossero and his team won an $8.5 million U.S. Department of Education grant to partner with music, dance and theater education groups to create collaborative arts learning communities around the country.
“We formed an alliance to focus our advocacy strategy because we thought, ‘We're all fighting for the same things. Let's join strategy so we can have a bigger win that make the biggest difference for our students,’” Rossero said.
Yael Silk, executive director of Pittsburgh’s nonprofit Arts Education Collaborative, has followed Rossero’s career from his days with Pittsburgh Public Schools to his role at NAEA. “I have really admired him and his leadership over the years,” said Silk, who is also on the PPS board.
Now Rossero and his husband are moving to Pittsburgh, and Rossero is coming to the Warhol, which has an annual budget of about $9 million and is among the city’s biggest tourist draws. In 2023, it welcomed some 180,000 visitors.
The museum is also known for its youth programming and, more recently, for the Pop District, a 10-year plan announced in 2022 to remake its corner of the North Side with workforce development programs, public art and a planned concert and event venue.
Rossero said, he’s looking forward to getting back to working directly with artists and the community at large.
“I'm really excited, maybe a little selfish to be able to be in person in a bricks-and-mortar institution,” he said. “And when I was in Chicago Public schools, I was like very much a part of the fiber and fabric of that city and community. And I'm really looking forward to having that kind of feeling and experience here again in Pittsburgh. I love building those relationships.”
Joseph Hall, co-executive director of the Kelly Strayhorn Theater, has known Rossero since his Pittsburgh days, when he frequented the theater. He likes that Rossero has a long history with the Warhol.
“He brings back an institutional knowledge,” said Hall. “He’ll be a leader that is really thinking about equity, and that’s what I’m really excited about.”
Looking back … and ahead
Rossero said his seven years at The Warhol remain formative. And that’s largely thanks to the Pittsburgh-born man who inspired one of the world’s biggest museums devoted to a single artist.
“I can't even tell you the amount of influence he had on my perspective and work,” Rossero said.
Warhol’s story, he said, challenged his youthful idea of the artist as a lone figure who labored ceaselessly in a single medium. Warhol, by contrast, worked in his Factory surrounded by a community, and ranged across media, from silk screens to film.
“I think working here at The Warhol, it helped me understand that you don't have to choose one medium. You don't have to work alone,” said Rossero. “This idea of collaboration and experimentation, of pushing boundaries, of dabbling and trying things out really sort of entered my artistic vernacular.”
He was also inspired by the museum’s executive director at the time, the late Tom Sokolowski. “I was always in awe of his energy and his deep knowledge,” Rossero says.
As executive director, Rossero succeeds Patrick Moore, who led the museum for seven years. Moore left in May, so by the time Rossero officially starts work March 31, the Warhol will have been without a permanent executive director for 10 months.
Asked about his biggest immediate challenges, Rossero said one is getting the museum’s team of about 40 full-time employees moving in the same direction.
“I think that the challenge is probably just really, bring the staff together and unite them around that common touchstone of Warhol,” he said. “And just it's that reminder, you know, you have a leader that cares about you, and we are united around Warhol’s life and legacy in art, and we can celebrate that and work together towards the future.”
Rossero said he’d spend his first few months on the job doing “listening tours” with everyone from museum staff to the community at large.
“I want to really understand where we are as a museum, what our needs are,” he said.
One need is for a curator. During the past two-and-a-half years, the Warhol — which as recently as 2022 had two full-time curators — has employed a curator for only about eight months, with the work of organizing shows done by other staff. Moore curated the current show, “Warhol + KAWS,” pairing Warhol works with pieces by the famed street artist.
The curator’s job has been unfilled for nearly a year and remains unadvertised. But Rossero said he thinks the staff has done a good job filling the gaps, and he doesn’t want to move too quickly.
“I want to make sure I understand exactly the kind of approach we need and the kind of background we need from that person,” Rossero said.
More broadly, he wants to create “a multi-year interpretative plan” to guide the exhibits the museum stages or sends out on tour.
And he said he’s fully on board with the Pop District, which has been the subject of some internal controversy. The months just before and just after the launch of the Pop District saw an exodus of five long-time high-level staffers at the museum, many of whom said they thought the initiative was drawing focus from what they considered the museum’s core mission of staging exhibits, studying Warhol’s archive and making it available to a wider array of people.
But Rossero said the Pop District both harks back to Warhol’s own eclectic art practice in his studio called the Factory, and forward to fresh role for museums in the 21st century.
“To me, the Pop District looks like an absolutely natural progression. It looks exactly like part of the Warhol Museum's identity and DNA,” he said. “I think the training programs, the studios for youth and for workforce development, that all makes sense to me and kind of continues that Silver Factory energy forward.”
“We're really hopeful that this is only going to strengthen the museum and its identity,” he added. “But it's not at the detriment of any other program or any other critical part of the museum. We're going to continue all that great work, just as we always have.”
