Feature: Art sprouts up in the ‘Burgh

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an A’E feature by Colleen Seidel photos by Mark Rawlings

It takes an earnest minute of studying the mural on the side of Villa Reale Pizzeria at 628 Smithfield St. before you realize exactly what’s going on in the picture.

“The Two Andys,” as it’s called, depicts Andy Warhol and Andrew Carnegie sitting side by side wearing plastic salon aprons around their necks, their hair set underneath dome dryers. Warhol holds a magazine and, for lack of a better term, a very Warhol-esque expression, while Carnegie, a titan of the steel industry, sits pleasantly soaking his cuticles in solution.

The image, almost nonsensical, has no apparent proper context – two larger-than-life figures who lived in very different worlds sit casually beside each other, their hair in hot rollers.

“Andy Warhol and Andrew Carnegie, highly influential men whose legacies live on in Pittsburgh, are receiving makeovers at a beauty salon,” said Curt Gettman, project coordinator at Sprout Public Art, the organization behind the mural. “It’s meant to convey a sense of humor regarding the idea of [Downtown] revitalization.” The mural is one of 38 currently spread throughout Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, and each is the result of a collaborative community effort spearheaded by Sprout Public Art, a component of the non-profit organization, The Sprout Fund.

Sprout began its public art initiative about five years ago, when Morton Brown followed his wife to Pittsburgh in 2003.

“I had come from Philly, after having worked with the Philadelphia mural arts program,” explains Brown, Sprout Public Art’s original program coordinator. Brown started asking around about public art in Pittsburgh and was eventually pointed in Sprout’s direction.

“Sprout decided to take me on part-time at first, as sort of a pilot project,” he said. With endorsement and help from members of Philadelphia’s program, Brown said, the Sprout Fund raised enough money to do seven murals its first year.

One of those murals was “Listening Through Time,” located at 2201 Wylie Ave. in the Hill District. The mural is of a “saxophonist filling the streets of the Hill with hope through music,” according to Sprout’s description. It features jazz legends Lena Horne, George Benson and Art Blakey, all musicians who have ties to the Hill District.

Its location is significant, too. Wylie Avenue was once home to Crawford Grill, a renowned jazz club from the 1930s to the 1950s.

“In that first year, the project went off without a hitch,” Brown said. Sprout Public Art now produces seven to eight murals each year, according to Gettman, who took over as program coordinator in 2007 when Brown returned to Philadelphia.

There’s a process behind each mural that includes planning, design and production, and it’s Sprout’s role to facilitate this process each year.

Communities apply to Sprout by the end of March with their proposals for murals which include a 25 member-signed petition and photos of the proposed mural wall.

“Getting property owners to agree to a mural and all of the issues surrounding their execution, permanence and upkeep is sometimes a process that takes a good deal of time to work out,” Gettman said.

“Building owners are not paid for the use of their walls,” he added, “so, in a way, it is only through their generosity that our program is able to succeed.”

“We approve about 20 mural proposals per year,” Gettman explained. “The board selects eight based on criteria like the quality of the wall and what the impact or benefit to the community will be.”

After the eight proposals are selected, Sprout brainstorms with each community to write notes about what the community wants represented in the mural.

Connect Greenfield was one such community organization involved in brainstorming ideas for its mural project in Greenfield. Alison Oehler, a board member of Connect Greenfield, said the organization went to the senior center, put up voting boxes in the neighborhood’s PNC branches and held brainstorming meetings that included many general community members.

“We had lots of really wonderful input, most of which related to highlighting all of the ‘hidden treasures’ of the neighborhood,” she said, referring to Greenfield’s “incredible views of Downtown, the tight-knit community and beautiful landscaping.”

Once the community comes up with a general idea for the mural, then it’s time for Sprout to match the community with an artist. But that’s a process, too.

“About 40 to 50 artists apply each year,” Gettman said. “The artists compete, the communities select.”

In early May, Sprout holds a preliminary design exhibition with a handful of potential artists to present their ideas directly to the community. Sprout also has the artists rank in order their choice of community while each community does the same with artists.

By June the artist is chosen and the design finished. Once it gets final approval, the painting phase of the process begins.

Artist Jon Laidacker knows firsthand the process of painting a Sprout-funded community mural. In fact, he has done two works with the program – his first in 2004, his second in 2006.

“In all honesty, I got involved as a way to stop pumping gas for a living,” he said, laughing. “I had just graduated from undergrad [at Mansfield College] with a degree in studio arts, and pumping gas was about as far as that got me. One day I was leafing through the classifieds, and saw an ad for Sprout Public Art. I never thought I would be doing a mural.”

Laidacker’s best-known work, at least to Pitt students and Oaklanders, is the mural on the side of the building located at 3609 Forbes Ave. Titled “Interpretations of Oakland,” it is a collage of images past and present of the neighborhood.

“There are five photographs that I took myself of current-day Oakland going around the perimeter. The center image is a 1936 photo of the building that I painted, and there is the PBS image of Fred Rogers,” Laidacker said, detailing his work.

“I tried to pull a lot from my studio work,” the artist explains of his inspiration for the photorealistic piece. Although the community provides brainstorming points, he said, “the artists ideally morph our own style around what the community facilitators want.”

“You can see the mural from the top of the Cathedral,” said Georgia Petropoulos, executive director of Oakland’s Business Improvement District, one of the community organizations behind Oakland’s mural.

When each mural is finished, it receives an official dedication in a ceremony held sometime in September or October.

“They’re basically outside parties,” Gettman said. For example, the Bloomfield mural completed this past summer was dedicated coinciding with the 2007 Little Italy Days.

Another one of Sprout’s functions is to fund each mural initiative it takes on. Gettman estimates that each mural costs between $10,000 to $20,000 to produce.

“The cost of the mural depends on the size of the mural. A larger building space requires bigger equipment, which incur rental costs like lifts,” he explained.

The funding is provided by foundational grants like that of the Laurel Foundation and the PPG Industries Foundation, Gettman says.

It’s a big pull for communities to get involved with the project. According to Petropoulos, BID got involved because they had wanted a mural in the neighborhood for a long time and finally had a funder they could take advantage of, alluding to Sprout.

Brown added that most of the funding in the early stages of the project was locally provided, coming from “non-profit philanthropic arms of corporations whose whole mission was to give local artists the chance to make an impact.”

If Katherine Young’s encounter with a pedestrian last summer while painting her “Urban Flora” in Shadyside is any indication, the murals are making quite an impact.

Young, a painter by training who does mostly drawing work in the studio, was picked by Shadyside’s committee to paint its mural on the side of Doc’s Place at the corner of Bellefonte and Walnut streets.

“People smiled a lot, said ‘thank you,'” she said, “but my favorite interaction was with this lady who came up to me and said, in a rather confrontational tone, ‘I hate murals, but I like yours.'”

“And that meant a lot to me,” the artist reveals. “To have someone change their opinion because of something I did.”

Young’s piece, like Laidacker’s, takes a lot from her gallery work. The birds featured in her mural are silhouette drawings from a 1930s field guide, and she originally laid out the design by drawing on the building with sidewalk chalk.

But despite any similarities, painting a public art piece takes on quite a different stride than painting for a gallery.

“You have a plan going into it and then you realize that plan doesn’t really work,” Young said about her first experience with mural painting.

According to Sylvia Rhor, an art history professor at Carlow University, public art can actually be “more organic and complex than gallery art.”

Another difference, Rhor added, is that public art is encountered in everyday life, and this increased exposure can build curiosity or interest among those who see it.

Rhor’s class this spring will work with Sprout in detailing the community impact of the murals they have placed thus far.

“One important aspect [of the murals] is that it builds a public coalition. The process can be more empowering than the final product,” she said.

Laidacker echoes her sentiment: “I think a public mural, a community-informed mural, is one of the most socially relevant artworks that can be produced.”

In fact, Rhor sees Pittsburgh at a prime right now for public art. As she said, “The Sprout murals, because of sheer number and their placement in various neighborhoods throughout the city, have been key in bringing a new awareness to the possibilities of public art in Pittsburgh.”

Print layout design by Braque Hershberger