From Blue Wings Magazine (May, 2014)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, the famed American writer and author of The Great Gatsby, once wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. All I can say is that he didn’t know Pittsburgh.
Perhaps no major American city has undergone as a rapid change as this storied western Pennsylvania metropolis located at the confluence of the Allegheny, Ohio and Monongahela Rivers. Once known as “Smoky City”, because of its omnipresent iron ballast, Pittsburgh has undergone a remarkable transformation since the 1980s, morphing from an industrial city best known for its football and hockey team, the Steelers and Penguins, to one with a distinctive, edgy cultural identity.
Of course, Pittsburgh still has its football team. For Pittsburghers, or “Yinzers”, as they are sometimes affectionately called after the local accent, Pittsburgh is and always will be Steeler City. As the volcanic cheer emanating from any of the city’s sports arenas and bars when the six time-NFL champion Steelers or its sister teams, the Pirates and the Penguins, are playing will confirm – or the passing conversation at Pamela’s, the city’s fabled dinner chain – Pittsburgh may well be America’s most sports-mad city.
But Steeler City is also mad now about something else: culture. Or, as the new slogan of the city’s largest arts organization, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, goes, “Pittsburgh Is Art.”
STEEL CITY’S ARTISTIC LEGACY
In point of fact, Pittsburgh has produced its fair share of talented visual artists over the years. Mary Cassatt, the great, late 19th-century America Impressionist and colleague of Degas, hailed from Pittsburgh. So did John Kane, the uber-talented Scottish-born so-called “naïve painter” whose bucolic cityscapes of Pittsburgh during the late 19th and early 20th centuries provide a window on what life in Iron City was like when its furnaces were going full blast.
Then, of course, there is Pittsburgh’s most famous native artistic son, Andy Warhol, whose idiosyncratic vision and legacy are memorialized in the Andy Warhol Museum. Established in 1993, six years after the Pop Artist’s untimely death, the seven-floor museum, the country’s largest dedicated to a single artist, features a mammoth collection of Warhol’s works. These include various iterations of the artist’s trademark Campbell’s Soup can and Brillo paintings, and enough Silver Elvis’s to make you dizzy, as well as thousands of Warhol’s photographs and films from his old Factory days. Be on the lookout for the errant, white-haired Andy impersonators wandering the halls with studied blank face.
The museum also features an impressive assemblage of Warhol memorabilia from the artist’s Pittsburgh days. If you want to know what grade Andy got in drawing at Schenley High School, which he attended during the Second World War, before studying commercial art at what was then the Carnegie Institute of Technology, look no further. And don’t forget to stop by the Silver Cloud room, where visitors can bat away silver pillows to their heart’s content. Afterwards head back downtown across the Monongahela River via – you guessed it – the Andy Warhol Bridge, while taking in the city’s iconic, crystalline-studded skyline.
CARNEGIE GLORY
All of the aforementioned artist’s works, along with those of many of the great American and European masters, are also on display at the monumental Carnegie Museum of Art. A room devoted to European and American art of the 1820-1860 period is particularly exquisite: note how the paintings are displayed in a manner that recalls the exhibitions and domestic interiors of the 19th century, closely grouped and hung in multiple rows along the walls. This is also the place to see how Lincoln’s America (including pre-industrial winsome Three Men Fishing (1832) and Russell Smith’s arresting Pittsburgh Fifty Years from the Salt Works on Saw Mill Run (1884).
While you are roaming the Carnegie, don’t forget to check out the sprawling Hall of Sculpture, with its striking Greek and Roman reproductions, including a scaled-down Parthenon. Afterwards, skip down the museum’s fabled multi-chromatic Magic Stairway and grab a club sandwich at the superb cafeteria beneath a giant Warholesque diptych of the museum’s namesake and chief benefactor, Andrew Carnegie.
It was Carnegie, the philanthropic-inclined steel magnate who was once America’s richest man, who inaugurated the triennial Carnegie International, ‘the oldest North American exhibition of contemporary world art, in 1896 “to find the masters of tomorrow.” Over the years the triennial has exhibited the works of such varied then-or-soon-to-be masters as Winslow Homer, Auguste Rodin, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, as well as Pittsburgh’s own John Kane, who was officially, and belatedly, discovered by the art cognoscenti at the 1926 Carnegie International at age 67.
GALLERY CRAWLS
The nest Carnegie International is scheduled for 2016, but you need not wait that long in order to discover the next wave of masters. Just check out some of the cornucopia of private galleries which has recently sprouted up across Pittsburgh. Or, if you’d like to absorb and/or imbibe your new found art with a flying jury, join in with one of Pittsburgh’s wildly popular “gallery crawls.’’
First there is the Cultural District gallery crawl, which takes place every three months and takes in the fast-growing number of exhibition spaces in the downtown area. “We started ten years ago with just four or five galleries or alternative spaces,” says Murray Horne, curator of visual arts at Wood Street Galleries and one of the “godfathers” of the nova-like Pittsburgh art scene. Since then the crawl, which also features an artist market, live bands, and food trucks bearing the local delicacy, kielbasa and other culinary delights, has morphed into a giddy, district-wide conga line that encompasses over a dozen spaces and regularly draws a crowd in the hundreds.
“It’s amazing how it’s grown,” says Horne. A sculptor and native New Zealander, Horne has been a curator at the influential Wood Street Galleries since 1996 when Pittsburgh was still shaking iron filings out of its hair. “Of course the free beer helps.”
Then there is the more free form Unblurred Gallery Crawl, which takes place the first Friday of every month and boogies down and around the mushrooming Penn Avenue Arts Corridor in the Garfield and East Liberty districts of Pittsburgh’s rapidly gentrifying East End. Here you can witness and participate in everything from spoken word to modern dance and green technology workshop, while savouring the diverse homemade wares on display at Most Wanted Fine Art, the Irma Freeman Center for Imagination, and other kindred cutting-edge spaces.
LAWRENCEVILLE HIP
“The Pittsburgh arts scene has grown substantially since I first arrived here,” avers Lindsay Merrill, a realist painter who lives in Lawrenceville, the cozy-buzzy “inner suburb” of the city that has been called “the Williamsburgh of Pittsburgh.”
“There are a lot of different styles of art in Pittsburgh from experimental to store front project to the multitude of plastic and media arts,” says Merrill, who specializes in aviation scenes. She is fond of painting over a steaming Finca El Puente, one of the high quality coffees on offer at Espresso Mano on Butler Avenue, Lawrenceville’s main drag. “What unites all of us is a do-it-yourself mentality and an enthusiasm for sustainability and the potential of underused or vacant building spaces.”
“Pittsburgh Is a great place to be an artist and work and live,” says her partner, Paul Rouphail. “There’s room, to grow here.” Rouphail is a self-described urban archaeologist who specializes in limning city landscapes, and whose brooding landscapes have caused more than one observer to compare him to a young Edward Hopper, with an edge. “It’s also exciting to be part of the city’s renaissance” he says.
Both Merrill and Rouphail attended Carnegie Mellon University, the same school where their famed predecessor, Andy Warhol, first learned to wield a brush. The difference is that they, like a growing number of their peers, elected to stay in Pittsburgh, rather than to move to other cities in search of putatively greener pastures.
The couple’s funky home base of Lawrenceville may remind one of Soho in Manhattan before it turned into a luxury goods mall, with a touch of San Francisco’s North Beach thrown in. Where else can you find an art gallery that boasts its own message parlour? That would be Zombo Gallery, with its Divine Touch Therapeutic Center, the demented offspring of local art dealer-turned-DJ Michael “Zombo” Devine. Or a bowling alley with a Rock and Bowl event in which local bands perform on the bowling lanes? That would be Lawrenceville’s famed Arsenal Lanes.
While in the neighbourhood, try the Challah French toast at the warm picaresque Coca Café, the neighbourhood’s best-known brunch spot. (The avocado omelette also comes recommended). As the day winds down, check out the tequila selection and Tex-Mex ambience at the Round Corner Cantina, a bar across the way which is popular with the artist crowd, as well as the increasing number of savvy cultural tourists who have found their way to this newly-minted arts mecca.
“Yes, I guess you could say that we are putting down roots hare,” says Rouphail, as the buzz from the packed outdoor patio rises to a veritable hum.