Pittsburgh Beautification Project founder hopes to beautify local communities

By: Jenelle Pifer / For The Pitt News

Posted on 21. Apr, 2010 in News

On the first Friday night in April, Bob Ziller’s Penn Avenue studio space smelled of paint and sawdust. The large room was chilled and dimly lit. Its center remained empty, but along the walls gigantic flowers bloomed under spotlights, growing more colorful by the minute.

The flowers have been growing since July, when Ziller, an artist from Wilkinsburg, Pa., founded the Pittsburgh Beautification Project. For years, he kept a weary eye on run-down buildings throughout the city.

He decided something had to be done. Last July, on the boarded windows of an abandoned uptown building near the Birmingham Bridge, Ziller decided to paint a few flowers.

After receiving wood panels, paint, a studio space and funding, Ziller founded the community development project seeking to uplift rundown properties by revamping their exteriors. Since then, he has placed hundreds of Andy Warhol-inspired flower murals, mostly painted by members of the community, on more than a dozen run-down buildings throughout Pittsburgh. Students can see Ziller’s Birmingham Bridge project as they ride the bus from Oakland to Downtown.

“As an artist, you just have these impulses to make something,” Ziller said. “And it’s nice to hear the feedback. I’ve only heard good things.”

After receiving supplies from the Sprout Fund, a nonprofit group that sponsors grassroots community projects, Ziller quickly saw the project’s potential to bring the community together. He began to hold painting parties open to the public on the first Friday night of each month. Between 50 and 100 people stopped by to help and painted up to 30 panels each time.

Ziller’s project hibernated through the cold winter months from September until April, when his flowers once again began to multiply as a part of Unblurred, a monthly gallery crawl in the Penn Avenue Arts District.

Lily DiFiore, whose mother is a regular of Ziller’s painting parties, turned 2 years old and celebrated in Ziller’s studio that Friday. She slapped pink paint inside — and outside — the outline of a flower almost as tall as she was. Concentrating on the lower left corner of a 4-by-8-foot plywood sheet, Lily covered her flower in pink and then, turning her attention to the orange flower to her right, dotted its center once, then twice and then just once more.

“Now she’s just showing off,” another man in the studio said as he watched from behind.

“It all suggests a sense of promise,” Carrie DiFiore, Lily’s mother, said. Many properties around the city look neglected, and the flowers show that somebody cares, she said.

Before each event, Ziller uses a wooden template to paint the outlines of six flowers on each wooden panel. “Like a coloring book,” Ziller said. “They ended up being a perfect format for having the public at large come in and paint, because people can just do a flower or a number of flowers, and people who aren’t artists can make something interesting.”

Mike Washil, a volunteer for the Beautification Project, said the audience of Ziller’s events has always been diverse.

Families, artists and community members regularly attend, along with anyone from the gallery walk who happens to wander inside.

“We have toddlers and grandparents, people of all ages and races. People get excited, because it’s something they can actually participate in,” Washil said.

The event earlier this month produced a flower with rays like the sun and another in pale blue that resembled a cloud. By the end of the night there were splatter-painted petals and stripes of pink and yellow.

Ziller painted the first set of flowers last July in solid colors, taking his cue directly from Andy Warhol’s famous 1964 silkscreen “Flowers.” Since then, he has yet to paint a single petal, working instead to add only the finishing touch — a background of grass. He said there are so many people willing to help, it all seems to run on remote control.

“All these little kids just go wild with paint and patterns, so it’s really fun to see. It’s much more creative than what I had done, so it’s pretty humbling,” Ziller said.

Because of the visibility of the project and word of mouth, community development groups and local residents now actively seek Ziller’s help to revitalize properties in their areas.

Rob Levkulich, a South Side resident, installed Ziller’s panels in a property he’s fixing up in Polish Hill.

“Everyone loved it,” Levkulich said. “It’s a great intermediate step before we can get windows.”

Ziller originally chose the Warhol-inspired pattern in homage to his first flowered building in uptown near the Birmingham Bridge. After a friend told him Andy Warhol was born in the neighborhood, the choice was easy, he said.

To Ziller, Pittsburgh is a great city in which to be an artist, and he said he hopes to continue to honor local talent.

Admiring the work of Hill District artist Romare Bearden, he said he hopes to translate his collage-like style to more murals throughout the area.

Ziller will continue to hold open painting parties the first Friday night of every month in his studio space, located at 4810 Penn Ave.