While building developers are busy revamping decaying Pittsburgh neighborhoods by smashing… While building developers are busy revamping decaying Pittsburgh neighborhoods by smashing old buildings and putting up new ones, a local art initiative has hit upon another way to spruce up the urban landscape: cover ugly buildings with painted murals.

Among the most well-known of these paintings is “The Two Andys,” a mural that overlooks Downtown’s Wiener World at the corner of Smithfield Street and Strawberry Way.

Painted on the side of an old brick building that now houses a pizzeria, “The Two Andys” is a colorful and humorous depiction of Andy Warhol and Andrew Carnegie – two towering icons of Pittsburgh’s past – seated side by side under salon hairdryers wearing smocks and hair curlers, set against a colorful background of blue and pink bubbles.

“The community group [that commissioned the mural] cast for something about Pittsburgh getting a makeover,” said Morton Brown, the program coordinator for Sprout Public Art, “which is kind of cool, because it goes with the very nature of our program, to give Pittsburgh a makeover.

“But they also said the mural has got to be funny, because you can’t put a serious work of art above a place called Wiener World,” Brown said.

Completed in September, “The Two Andys” was one of the first Downtown projects in an ongoing Allegheny County public mural program.

“We’ve been doing this for three years now and we’ve done 23 murals in the city and the surrounding areas,” Brown said.

Most of the murals can be found within city neighborhoods or in Allegheny’s struggling small towns, with their vividly colorful designs standing out in stark contrast against drab backgrounds of mottled gray and brown brick buildings.

“The murals are quick, fast, eye-catching improvements,” Brown said. “And hopefully they can help encourage more monies to go to revitalization of these areas.”

Brown emphasized that it is important to try to get the communities themselves involved when a mural is underway.

“Not everyone always loves the finished product,” Brown said. “But as long as you engage people and give them a chance to speak out about the project, no one’s going to hate it. ‘Any improvement is better than nothing’ is what a lot of people feel about it.”

He added that giving people an opportunity to participate in the projects gives the community a “sense of ownership.”

The murals program is but one in a number of urban rejuvenation activities under the aegis of the Sprout Fund, a major Pittsburgh grassroots nonprofit organization that provides financial support for youth-initiated civic projects within Allegheny County through its grant fund program, the Seed Award.

Mac Howison, the program coordinator for the Sprout Fund Seed Award, said that the Sprout Fund designed the monthly funding award to improve the image of the region for young people – ages 18 to 40 – that’s targeted at a Pittsburgh audience. The grant ranges between $500 and $10,000.

Howison added that the Sprout Fund has supported more than 125 projects, received 600 applications and distributed $725,000 in the four years of its existence.

Since its founding in 2001, the Sprout Fund’s mission has been to provide the resources necessary for young Pittsburghers’ ideas to become realities. Its influence in the county has been such that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recognized it as one of the “Top 50 Cultural Forces in the Region” for 2003 and 2004.

“The Sprout Fund was formed to address the issue of talent attraction and retention in the Pittsburgh region for young people,” Howison said. “The grant program of the Seed Award was designed at that time to address the issue by sponsoring projects that engender a sense of civic pride and engage young people in activities.”

The majority of the program’s funding comes from foundation support as well as some corporate support. The Sprout Fund does not receive any money from county, state or local government.

Another public art project that will soon be underway with the support of the Seed Award is the “Arts in Transit” program, which will recruit local artists to produce artwork to be displayed on the sides of public buses.

Howison said that Arts in Transit is intended to “raise awareness about public transportation issues in Pittsburgh by inviting artists to submit work to the jury and to an exhibition on wheels for 850 of the Port Authority buses.”

The art will be displayed in the buses’ normal advertising space.

The application process for Arts in Transit ends Dec. 1.

Howison said the program will launch in either late January or early February, and the placards will stay on the buses for six months.

While its most visible projects involve the arts, public art is not the only beneficiary of the Sprout Fund.

“The arts makes up maybe 20 percent of what the Sprout Fund supports,” Howison said. “We also support programs for outdoor education, recreation activities, alternative transportation and civic engagement projects that have to do with voting and registration.

“The common theme throughout them all is a sense of civic engagement and community action,” Howison said.

Some other successful Sprout Fund-supported activities in the recent past include Bikefest and Civic Cards, an organization that aims to promote awareness of local politics by taking images and statistics on local and elected officials and creating baseball card-like profiles of local politicians.

The Sprout Fund will also sponsor an upcoming project to promote Downtown housing called Urban DNA.

“It is a project that will be using a glass storefront to set up a mock apartment to draw awareness that there are Downtown living options,” Howison said.

To that end, the Sprout Fund is certainly not alone. Promoting Downtown residency, especially for the young, is the top priority for many local groups dedicated to the revival of Pittsburgh according to Mary Allen Solomon, the director of marketing and public relations for the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership. .

“Bringing businesses in to revitalize the city is important, like the new developments going on at Downtown’s Forbes and Fifth corridor,” she said. “The real focus is definitely on residential development.”