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The PGH4ART Campaign, an artist-led, volunteer group of students, artists, and activists are calling on city lawmakers to enforce Pittsburgh’s Percent for Art Law, which requires 1% of publicly-funded construction and renovation projects to be set aside for the creation of public art. It hasn’t been enforced since its inception in 1977.
Please sign the petition. Every signature counts: http://bit.ly/PGH4ART
Please share the petition. Just think, your friends can join these Pittsburgh arts leaders in their support of the campaign:
Your friends can join these Pittsburgh groups and organizations in their support of the campaign:
Every signature counts. Please sign the petition here: http://bit.ly/PGH4ART
Thank you for your support,
The PGH PERCENT 4 ART TEAM
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Social Sculpture & Community Engagement. Large-scale Media Installation & Public Art. Partner-based Project Development.
PGH4ART Team Portrait
October 1, 2014 — Carolyn Speranza
The PGH4ART team: Brian Brown, Dave Ninehouser, Kat Gregor, Justin Shao, Reyghan Pierce, Roxanne Banks Williams, Marvin Williams, Erin Gill Ninehouser and Carolyn Speranza. Absent: Kerry Lee Hinkson and Lee Salih. Photo by Jenny Jean Crawford
“All Eyes on Art” and the PGH4ART Campaign
October 24, 2013 — Carolyn Speranza| With the slogan, All Eyes on Art, the PGH4ART team, an artist-led group of students, organizers, and activists called on city lawmakers to enforce Pittsburgh’s Percent for Art Law, which requires 1% of publicly-funded construction and renovation projects to be set aside for the creation of public art. It hasn’t been enforced since its inception in 1977. This letter to the editor at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette lays out the issue and its context in detail. |  |
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In every election cycle we publicly debate on what is and is not working about our government. With candidates vying for our votes, we discuss the performance and methods of elected officials. The PGH4ART Team is using Pittsburgh’s mayoral election as a social space in which we can effectively bring All Eyes to a city law that has lain dormant since 1977. The Team is working with the Hill District Consensus Group, Fight Back Pittsburgh, and students from CAPA High School in support of the campaign. At the May 2013 demonstration at Katz Plaza, our street team collected signatures for the petition while our online organizers got the word out via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. |
| “Art as part of the social landscape has a profound impact on communities,” said Shannon Pultz, the head of CAPA High School’s visual art department. “Study after study shows that the amount of art equals the amount of vibrancy of city life,” and sure enough mayoral candidate Bill Peduto and city council candidate, Dan Gilman, were in attendance at Katz Plaza. The All Eyes on Art event was discussed in a political rather than an art context in both the Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh City Paper. Heading into the November election, candidates for Pittsburgh Mayor and City Council answered in-depth questions about enforcement and implementation of the 1977 law. They have been published by the City Paper. |  |
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Re-visiting 1996-7 “End of the Line” as the Carnegie Library Shifts to Digital Labs
December 14, 2012 — Carolyn Speranza
Carolyn Speranza with Lisa Link on Skype present “End of the Line” at the Carnegie Library.
Earlier this fall, in October, Lisa Link and I presented End of the Line: Building Bridges with Pittsburgh’s Busways, a temporary public art project at Spark’s Lunch n Learn at the Carnegie Library. At the core of the project was our digital art and community research workshops at Carnegie Branch Libraries. The type of work we were doing in 1996-7 had not been done before in Pittsburgh; certainly not as a key component of a public art project. In our presentation we looked at End of the Line from the lens of the libraries’ recent shift to digital labs.
We used the decentralized network of Carnegie Libraries as a structure for engaging residents in these neighborhood hubs. Coming from the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, we had a research orientation towards working with project participants. We came to library workshops to conduct oral histories, to gather and copy personal and historic photographs, and to begin conversations about what mattered to people – their concerns, issues, hopes and dreams for the future of their communities. None of the hand-held technologies that we currently take for granted existed at the time. Our only hand-held was a Sony Walkman. We worked with desktops, not laptops.
Partnering with the libraries in the public engagement and outreach process was the best thing we could have done. In our Spark presentation Lisa and I talked about the qualities that librarians have which make them perfect partners for this type of project. We shared how librarians are innately talented problem-solvers, community leaders and embody the term “customer-service.” Less than month from our national election, Lisa said “librarians should be running the country.”
From the libraries we came back to the STUDIO having successfully conducted our community research. We set about analyzing materials and quickly saw four themes emerging for the design of bus billboards. In order to include everyone’s participation on the project, we created an online archive, using the 1997 Frames technology of WEB 1.0.
Here you can see one of the twenty Port Authority buses we used to transport the project. Inside the bus, Lisa and I are seated by one of the interior posters celebrating the libraries’ key role. In the bus, we are talking to Ruth Rosfeld’s daughter. Ruth was featured in our “neighborhood hero” themed bus billboard design. She is from Beechwood, and you can just see the Beechwood librarian in the background of the photograph.
You can find the original End of the Line web site here and a photo album with complete documentation here. At Spark’s Lunch n Learn we had a packed house of educators, library professionals and community leaders.
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In these Art and Context Anthologies
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Carolyn Speranza 