Associating with the right people

Associated Artists of Pittsburgh 92nd Annual Exhibition

Through Sept. 29

The Andy Warhol… Associated Artists of Pittsburgh 92nd Annual Exhibition

Through Sept. 29

The Andy Warhol Museum

117 Sandusky St.

(412) 237-8339

A big, bouncy salmon pink elephant with pretty, bright colors – yellow, lime green, magenta, purple and blue – wearing a patchwork blanket with gold fringe and a matching pillbox hat. This was one of the first images I saw in the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh’s 92nd Annual Exhibition at The Andy Warhol Museum.

“But could it be that simple?” I took a harder, closer look at “Pink Elephant” and began to imbue it with social criticism. “Okay,” I thought, “It’s an elephant without a face, and it’s being fed from a tiny bucket. There’s something about it, though. It could just be happy.”

Talking to Kathleen Zimbicki, the artist of the work, reminded me that a gut instinct about art is often the right one.

“It’s happy,” Zimbicki said. She drew inspiration for the piece from a picture her 5-year-old granddaughter, Hriani, drew for her.

The AAP, a nonprofit organization run by artists to support regional artists, has held its annual exhibitions since 1910. This is the first year the exhibition has taken place at the Warhol.

Jerry Saltz, the juror for this year’s exhibition and art critic for The Village Voice, said in a phone interview, “Pleasure is an important form of knowledge.” He explained he didn’t have any preconceived notions about what he was looking for except that he wanted “someone who, if they were going to fail, fail flamboyantly.”

“If they were going to succeed,” he said, “they would succeed big. Someone with ambition.”

With 93 works, this exhibition includes a wide variety of media and aesthetics. Many works, though, reflect ideas common to contemporary experience, such as isolation, feminism, lifestyle or politics.

“The Quilt That Won’t Comfort” and “In God We Trust” both express unabashed and extravagant political criticism.

Chuck Walsh, an associate professor in the biological sciences department at Pitt, won the Tillie S. Speyer Memorial Award for his mixed media installation “Not For Long.”

The work immediately catches your attention because aside from its 24-foot length, it’s made from a variety of recognizable commercial containers that didn’t make it to the trash.

Walsh went through a painstaking process of using multiple coats from the same big batch of paint to give the containers a uniform gray color and texture. When so many of these containers with this even quality are gathered together, the effect is, well, kind of weird. Unless you are a product designer, you are compelled to stop and think about things surrounding you that you are usually too busy to notice.

Walsh said his artistic process starts with a picture in his mind that later turns into a dialogue. When he gets stuck, he does “something outrageous.”

The AAP show at the Warhol presents a great survey of the work Pittsburgh artists are doing, but it won’t be at the museum for long – the show ends Sept. 29.