Artist Carolyn Speranza builds public engagement into all her projects. Community organizing is one of the primary mediums in her palette, right along side desktop video and internet-based, social networking tools. The forms her work has taken over the past two decades include public art, site-specific installation, light sculpture, web based and video art.
A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, Carolyn Speranza was a web master and designed sites for an internet start-up during the World Wide Web’s fledgling years of 1995 – 7. From there, she became a fellow at The STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a research center for artists using technology at Carnegie Mellon. Speranza was one of a small group of artists who were the first to develop online communities using then nascent technologies to mirror real world communal interaction. As a fellow, she designed and administered “Community Forums Online” for the Andy Warhol Museum, and brought the museum into a partnership with Intel Corporation, a relationship that transformed the museum’s use of the internet. (1998 – 2000)
Speranza began using audio and video in 1997. Several years later she created a block-long video aquarium, built inside a traffic tunnel for First Night Pittsburgh. “Urban Aquarium” was selected by Americans for the Arts for its 2001 “Year in Public Art,” observing her unusual collaboration with a chiropractor, martial artists and a theremin playing musician. While at Pittsburgh Filmmakers as a 2002 Heinz Endowments Creative Heights recipient, Speranza began working narratively. She continued her endeavor in public collaboration, however and close to a thousand people participated in making the film, “Sight of Stillness,” in a series of meditation workshops and in a symposium presenting scientific research on health and meditation.
In 1993 Carolyn Speranza was commissioned for Literacy Windows, the first in a series of public art that she would co-author with artist Lisa Link. Subsequent projects by the two artists, My Bread Tastes Sweeter and End of the Line: Building Bridges with Pittsburgh’s Busways were published in Lucy Lippard’s Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society and Malcolm Mile’s Uses of Decoration: Essays in the Architectural Everyday. End of the Line toured Russia in the “Engaging the Urban Environment,” exhibition at the Centers for Contemporary Art in St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, and Moscow. As fellows at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon, they were noted for their adoption of new uses of the computer in making art, their multi-strata and democratic approach to engaging non-artists in artistic collaboration, and being among the first to give public art an added, accessible dimension by using the World Wide Web.
From 2003 – 2007, Speranza trained in community organizing programs with the Center for Progressive Leadership; PA Center for Women, Politics, and Public Policy; Wellstone Action; The League of Young Voters and the DNC Fifty-State Initiative. She was the program developer and trainer for “Creating Career Paths with Youth: More Choices than the Military,” for the American Friends Service Committee. She is one of 1000 people, chosen nationwide, to be trained by Al Gore and The Climate Project to give presentations on global warming.
Speranza began exhibiting art in 1985 with solo and group shows followed by performance work, screenings, telematic and web-based art exchanges. Lucy Lippard, Robert Atkins, Elizabeth K. Menon and British scholar, Malcolm Miles have published her work (and her work with Lisa Link) in their anthologies. Her artist books are in both the Carnegie Mellon and the Art Institute of Chicago Joan Flasch Artist Book Collections. She has authored articles for the ARLIS Journal, Artcom Electronic Network and has presented at the Metanexus Institute Conference, the Invencao Conference and the Museum Network Conference, among other symposia. She has developed coursework and taught classes at Central Michigan University, Carnegie Mellon, Carlow University, Pittsburgh Filmmakers, the Andy Warhol Museum and the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. She has administered programming for the Wexner Center, the Greater Columbus Arts Council and the City of Pittsburgh’s Arts in the Parks.
