Pittsburgh's street art, a yarn of epic proportion

An artist in London creates colorful miniature paintings of pastoral settings on blobs of chewing gum plastered to the city's gritty sidewalks. In New York "yarn bombs" cloak Wall Street's charging bull, sheathing the symbol of privilege in a pink and purple, geometrically-patterned crocheted sweater.
 
Across the globe, guerrilla artists are interacting with their environment to make statements big and small, or to simply beautify and colorize areas crying out for love.  How have Pittsburgh artists left their unique mark on the city's landscape?

Let's start with this news, which broke as we finished this article: Outpost Journal Magazine, a new biannual publication debuting in the fall which focuses on innovative art and community activism in cities, worked with Pittsburgh crafter Alicia Kachmar to create a crocheted cardigan for the Mr. Rogers statue on the North Shore.

How perfect is that? (Although one can argue if this is true guerrilla art since it was commissioned, can we just say we totally dig the sweater?)

"For Outpost Journal's inaugural issue, the founders wanted to start a tradition of creating a piece of guerilla street art that engaged with ideas of cultural tourism and created a spectacle that passersby would enjoy," says the publisher in a news release.

That's just the latest to hit the streets. Stephanie Brunner of the self-styled Yarn Over Society has been hard to work with fellow knitters Rachel Sager and Val Head to wrap Pittsburgh parking meters and bike racks in a second skin made from multi-hued recycled yarn.
 
Much of their work can be found along Butler Street in Lawrenceville and a small tag with the letters "YOS" dangles from each piece, an invitation to snap and post a photo on the Internet as part of a crowd-sourced digital scrapbook.
 
"Pittsburgh is perceived as a gray city with old, abandoned buildings," notes Brunner.  "I like the contrast of turning something sterile into a warm, colorful object."
 
"We want to draw attention to an ordinary object," continues Sager.  "When you find our knitting on a parking meter or bike rack, it strikes you.  It snaps you out of your daze."
 
Extra scraps of yarn are reborn in the hands of Head, who fashions them into LED-enabled, pompom-like flowers "planted" around town.  Once again, the invitation is made to photograph and document a form of street art seen as far away as Norway and Brazil.

Colorize This
Brunner is collaborating with fellow artist Leah Bevilacqua on "Colorize Your Walls," an organized attempt to splash color on decrepit or abandoned buildings in blighted areas of the city akin to the well-documented "orange houses" of Detroit.
 
These large-scale urban canvasses have become commonplace in Brazil and parts of southeast Asia and are doing much to bring hope to under-served, even forgotten, populations. Here in Pittsburgh, the organizers launched their effort with an interactive installation at Assemble on Penn Avenue during the July "Unblurred" event.
 
"This is a grass-roots attempt to improve areas on a small, incremental scale," says Bevilacqua.  "There are many blighted areas here, on the North Side, Wilkinsburg. We see it as a laboratory for change."
 
"It's the catalyst," says Nina Barbuto, gallery director at Assemble.  "This can engage people viscerally, and physically with paint brushes.  People can get really comfortable in the city.  We want to light a fire under them."
 
Putting his own imprimatur on abandoned houses in Pittsburgh is artist Bob Ziller, whose Pittsburgh Beautification Project takes Warhol's iconic "Flowers," paints the brightly-colored hibiscus blossoms onto chipboard and affixes them as window dressing.
 
The project started when the artist painted flowers on boarded-up windows on a house near the Birmingham Bridge and has grown into a series of installations enabled by the Sprout Fund and other benefactors.
 
Often working in concert with Americorps and other youth volunteers who outline pre-formed flower casts and paint inside the lines, the effort is bringing a glimmer of hope to more than fifty buildings from Wilkinsburg to Braddock.
 
"I see a lot of tagging in Pittsburgh but I don't see a lot of pure art," notes Ziller.  "What I do straddles the boundary but if it's an improvement and you're not defacing anyone's property, it opens up the possibility of it being public art."
 
The Warhol flowers are on prominent display along Penn Avenue in the Friendship/Garfield corridor, which has become ground zero for guerrilla artists in Pittsburgh thanks in part to the efforts of the Bloomfield Garfield Corp., the Friendship Development Corp. and the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative.
 
These neighborhood organizations have been instrumental in the promotion of "Unblurred," a first Friday art crawl in the Penn Avenue arts district, and also make underused properties in the neighborhood available to artists as studio space.

The Art of Screening
Raedun Knutsen has created a "clean, green and screen" on Penn Avenue, effectively screening a vacant lot on the commercial street thanks to a seed award from the Sprout Fund.  Made of carbon steel, a series of 4' x 10' perforated sheets have been cleaned, sanded and primed then painted in bright hues. The colorful assemblage stands as an art piece on its own, though it may be draped with vegetation later and morph into a living wall.  Artist Jason Sauer of Most Wanted Fine Art has also placed a green and screen on Penn and more projects are in the works.
 
The vibrancy of the local street art scene owes much to Braddock Mayor John Fetterman, who put out a call to artists to use his town's battered landscape as a canvas.  New York artist Swoon and others heeded that call and their Transformazium is a collective formed to "immediately and dramatically transform an environment using limited means."
 
Their bold murals feature blue skies, dancing birds and prancing children and capture the imagination from beneath freeway overpasses and next to vacant lots.  In doing so, they meet their goal and serve as inspiration to many Pittsburgh artists.
 
Long active on the Pittsburgh art scene is sculptor Tim Kaulen, whose work includes a super-sized "Space Monkey," one tin duck larger than your house and latter-day Carmen Mirandas fashioned out of recycled gas station signs and other rust-belt flotsam. This sense and sensibility made him the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts' 2009 Artist of the Year and while the distinction may have led to more formal commissions, Kaulen is still actively exploring the urban environment.
 
"Pittsburgh is an ideal setting for young people to find their way and make art," says Kaulen.  "It's a comfortable city with a low cost of living and that makes it possible to experiment and take risks.  There are logistical challenges to street art and most successful artists recognize those conditions and put themselves in a position to be successful."
 
Kaulen is giving much of his energy these days to The Brew House Association, a collective formed twenty years ago to support visual artists.
 
"There's more tolerance for public art these days," continues Kaulen.  "Communities are crying out for help so it's a pretty pure relationship.  As an artist, I feel committed to be an impetus for change.  It's easy to take the fun out of solutions by putting policies in place so the best idea is for urban planners to identify from the beginning that art can play a role instead of being an afterthought."

And then there's Matt Niemi, an amateur photographer who has documented the tin can art of "vent26" on flickr.  The tin can art is usually affixed to telephone poles and a lot of it is around Bloomfield with a smattering in Shadyside, Lawrenceville and the Strip. Niemi first spotted it in 2004 and has no idea if the artist is still active around here since much of the art bears dates 2001-03.

Elaine Labalme thinks the Roberto Clemente statue could use a black and gold sweater now. Contact her here.

Captions: Bike rack gets the Yarn Over Society treatment; the Mr. Rogers sculpture on the North Shore; Bob Ziller; Raedun Knutsen's "Here Today, There Tomorrow;" Tim Kaulen; detail of Bob Ziller's flowers; Stephanie Brunner and Leah Bevilacqua at Assemble Gallery.

Photographs copyright Brian Cohen