Energy Flow by Andrea Polli

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Sixteen wind turbines are integrated into this design to generate the power for thousands of LED lights. This eco-friendly, technology driven public art is here temporarily, making the Rachel Carson Bridge sparkle for the Christmas season. Yeah, I know, we're supposed to call it Sparkle Season or some other euphemism, but whatever you call it, the non-denominational artwork is scheduled to be here from Light Up Night until New Year's Eve (18 Nov - 31 Dec 2016).

A computer system controls every strip of lights and can be programmed remotely. During the Light Up Night festivities we watched the light patterns changing in color and rhythm. Definitely a festive addition to the city lights.

Strawberry Way Rotating Mural

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The Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership (PDP) has been working since 2003 to improve the environment of this alley that connects Liberty Ave to Grant St. Heavy pedestrian use has inspired the PDP and local businesses to turn it into an inviting, pedestrian-only area. Over the years there have been some smaller art installations, but starting in 2016, they went big. The entire three block stretch of pavement is now covered with a mural. The art is temporary and the plan is to replace it with something new every few years.

2016: City Composition by Deanna Mance

According to the Office of Public Art, Mance’s mural design was influenced by the surrounding architecture in Strawberry Way and the region’s curvaceous topography.

Underground Railroad Historic Marker

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I know there is a lot of public art in the area that remains to be mapped, but I’m still surprised when I discover art underfoot. Literally.

Wandering through Market Square I noticed a plaque embedded in the pavement and stopped to read it. At first I couldn’t find the art, even though the plaque seemed to be describing it and providing explicit directions. I kept searching high on the surrounding buildings and wondering if I would need to wait until dark to see this. Was the artwork gone and the plaque left behind?

When I started to continue on my way I noticed the lights in the pavement. Tables and chairs set up on top of the design did a good job of obscuring it. Plus, it appears that some of the lights are now missing.

Still, this is a cool installation that uses art for an historic marker. The diagram in the plaque is not directing your eyes to the artwork, but to the location in the sky where you would have seen these constellations on 2 Jun 1835. That was the date of the first publicly announced meeting of the Pittsburgh Anti–Slavery Society.

As we researched this, we realized that it was never actually meant to be public art. It really is just an extension of an historic marker, but we’re including it anyway. Call it curator’s discretion. This is an important part of our city’s history.

The Underground Railroad ran through here and businesses in and around Market Square provided refuge. There’s a write–up here about this marker and why it was installed.

The images of the North Star, Big and Little Dippers are here to represent the methods used by the slaves to navigate to freedom. North Star was also the title of the local abolitionist newspaper. The installation was part of the 2010 revitalization of Market Square.

Particle Falls by Andrea Polli

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Pittsburgh, of all places, knows what it’s like to deal with serious air pollution. Our history is not pretty. There are lots of Pittsburghers still alive that remember needing to use headlights at noon because of the thick pollution. There are still buildings with visible signs of the layers of grime that have had to be sandblasted off most of our older structures.

Thankfully, today all of that horrible, smokey air is just a bad memory. The city and county have gone through a metamorphosis and have come out beautifully. When we rode our bikes by the river last spring we found hundreds of mayflies – the sign of a healthy river.

But what visible signs do we have for the quality of our air? Is it now sparkling clean? Unfortunately we’re not there yet. Pittsburgh and the surrounding area was 21st on the Most Polluted City list in the American Lung Association’s 2014 State of the Air report. This electronic mural showed us visually what that means.

Particle Falls was a combination of science and art that provided a visualization of the real time air quality. The projected image that resembles a blue waterfall formed the backdrop. If the air were free of small particulates, that’s all you’d have seen.

Nearby instruments measured the amount of small particulates in the air and then converted that data into bursts of color. The display crackled with light, shifted, and changed as the levels of particulate matter in the air fluctuated. The higher the frequency of snapping color, the higher the density of particulates in the air.

Close up of projection window.

Photos taken about 10 minutes apart.

The Center for Atmospheric Particle Studies at Carnegie Mellon University were involved with this installation as well. Besides assisting with the scientific aspect of the artwork, they collected data from this to add to their research.

A short video clip of the display is on You Tube

This installation started in San Jose, Ca in 2010 and was in Philladelphia in 2013. The Heinz Endowment’s Breath Project and the Office of Public Art brought it here to Penn Ave. It operated until the end of December 2014.

No Limits by Alexandre Arrechea

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No Limits is a series of 10 sculptures where Alexandre Arrechea takes the basic shape of a New York City building and reshapes it into a new reality. During the 2014 Three Rivers Arts Festival, four of these sculptures were positioned around downtown Pittsburgh and stayed through September of that year.

The first one was titled: Metropolitan Life Insurance. The elongated version of the Met Life Building is coiled on a stand. It was outside of 4 Gateway Center on the corner of Liberty Ave and Stanwix St.

The NYC Dept of Parks and Recreation newsletter The Daily Plant, had this to say about the artwork when it was in NYC:

The art is meant to create a dialogue with the public that raises questions of control, power, surveillance and one’s role within these categories. Through iconic architectural buildings and urban spaces, Arrechea plays and entices the viewer to explore this concept.
Arrechea said, I believe the same way that a building is exposed to daily elements and changes – cold, heat, rain, fog – it is also exposed to constant changes in function – increases and decreases in market value, tenant use, and therefore purpose and social value. These persistent modifications are something I want to capture and embody in my work, creating a new model in constant negotiation with its surroundings. The Park Avenue project presents a form of marriage between New York City landmarks and architectural elements from different backgrounds. These elements, I believe, symbolically parallel facets of the human condition. With this installation, I have created a set of works that confront dynamism vs. static, the whole vs. the fragmented, control vs. chaos, utopia vs. reality. The series provides a new point of access from which to understand the dialog between art and architecture and how this relationship can evolve and open new doors.

Behind 4 Gateway Center along Liberty Ave is Gateway Center Park. This is where Courthouse was located.

It looks as though the building will rock on the pivot and has a weighted base to stabilize it again, but nothing indicates that these are meant to be interactive pieces so we didn’t try it. Perhaps it’s just meant to represent the ability to right oneself in times of turbulence. On the placards that accompanied these sculptures was the following information:

In each of the four sculptures located in Downtown Pittsburgh, Arrechea reshapes the concept of verticality and monumentality into a new reality: elastic architecture, or city. Sculptures maintain the facade and recognizable features of the iconic buildings, but also adopt new forms – an elasticity that is foreign to the structure. This concept serves as a metaphor to the challenges of adapting to new realities we face every day as individuals and society. The buildings are transformed into a tool, or snail–like shapes as if one could reel these rigid structures in like a hose – expanding and contracting with the rise and fall of the economy and the sociocultural and sociopolitical shifts that occur with economic changes.

The third sculpture of this series was over at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. It was positioned at 10th St at the top of the walkway that leads down to the river. Reminiscent of film on an old movie reel, this one is titled Seagram.

The fourth sculpture was reported to be at 2 Gateway Center along Penn Ave Extension. We walked all around Gateway Center four times searching for it with no luck. We attempted to contact the folks at the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, but never had a response.

We did find a link to the missing sculpture on the artist’s website.

The Flatiron Building, a National Historic Landmark, was originally the Fuller Building, completed in 1902.

Man's Ascent to Woman by David Breeden

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Artist David Breeden brought this sculpture to the 1987 Three Rivers Arts Festival and generously donated it to the city.

Mr Breeden spent two years travelling as a National Geographic photographer and his artwork seems to have been influenced by his time in Botswana. Man’s Ascent to Woman is an abstract figure – a 14 foot high totem – male at the bottom, female at the top. It’s made from Virginia soapstone, a soft, easy to carve, metamorphic rock.

Katy Gresh interviewed the artist in 1993 for an article in the Indiana Gazette and said:

It’s art sculpted for the purpose of healing, but it’s not medicinal in any way. The soothing soapstone that David Breeden shapes to stand in public places is meant to make folks feel good. Breeden knows that too often when people visit places such as hospitals and courthouses they are upset or worried. We hope to let people have a little respite from their emotional and physical problems, he said about the goal of his art work. He considers his job done if they can take their minds off what they’re there for, for even 30 seconds.

Sadly, David Breeden passed away in 2006. He left behind over 89,000 pieces of beauty to help us forget our problems. We contacted his widow and she graciously told us a little bit about this piece. She explained that they had participated in the Three Rivers Arts Festival and Shadyside Art Shows for at least 10 years, and that David (who attended CMU) had a great affection for Pittsburgh. Elizabeth Breeden said the piece is named for David’s belief that women are naturally of a higher order in nature than men and are the older in the natural order (Mother Nature, matriarchal religion being far older than patriarchal).

Elizabeth also said As we installed it, we realized that the pedestal needed to be thicker and the crane operator became the most wonderful partner. He left his crane holding it, while we bought concrete and poured and finished another pedestal around it and waited for it to set up.

The sculpture is located in the median on Liberty Ave in Gateway Center, between 2 and 4 Gateway Center.

A Turn of the Century by Seward Johnson

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A Turn of the Century by Seward Johnson ©1995, 2001 The Sculpture Foundation, Inc. www.sculpturefoundation.org

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is where the 1883 Renoir painting titled Dance at Bougival resides. It was one of a series of three paintings Renoir did of couples dancing. In Dance at Bougival The couple twirl in an outdoor cafe scene near Paris. This is the painting that has been brought not so much to life, but to three dimensions and bigger than life, by artist J. Seward Johnson. His 20 foot tall bronze depiction of the dancers in Renoir’s painting graced PPG Plaza for a short time in 2014.

A Turn of the Century by Seward Johnson ©1995, 2001 The Sculpture Foundation, Inc. www.sculpturefoundation.org

A Turn of the Century is part of Mr Johnson’s Beyond the Frame series of sculptures. The series is done from Impressionist paintings, and on his website the artist says

I find it so moving to watch people interact with these sculptures. That is one thing that these pieces do – they invite an intimacy with the paintings that the paintings themselves don’t allow simply due to the limitation of scale, depth and access.

A twirl around the sculpture:

A Turn of the Century by Seward Johnson ©1995, 2001 The Sculpture Foundation, Inc. www.sculpturefoundation.org

 
A Turn of the Century by Seward Johnson ©1995, 2001 The Sculpture Foundation, Inc. www.sculpturefoundation.org

A Turn of the Century by Seward Johnson ©1995, 2001 The Sculpture Foundation, Inc. www.sculpturefoundation.org

Agnes R. Katz Plaza Sculptures by Louise Bourgeois

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While the sculptures in this plaza are the work of Louise Bourgeois, the plaza itself was a collaboration between the artist, landscape architect Daniel Urban Kiley, and Theater Square’s architect Michael Graves.

The 25 foot high fountain that takes center stage here has heated water, allowing it to be one of the few fountains in the city that stays on all year. Even the cold winter we had for the 2013–14 season wasn’t enough to stop the water from flowing. The Pittsburgh hills inspired its shape, and in New Landscape Design, Robert Holden says the surrounding pool edge is intentionally small so that viewers can get close to the sculpture."

A Post Gazette article from the dedication of the plaza in 1999 (written by Caroline Abels) quotes Ms Bourgeois’ assistant as saying that the artist intended the two streams of water to represent a couple whose lives mesh.

Around the plaza there are three different pair of benches in the shape of huge eyes. There are other simple granite benches throughout the parklet, but these are well, (forgive me) eye catching. While they are not unique to this plaza any longer, they were originally designed specifically to complement this fountain. In 2006 the artist donated copies to the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, to be positioned around another fountain that she designed. Ms Bourgeois made several versions of eye shaped benches. Eye Benches IV (which she loaned to New Orleans in the wake of Katrina), have lights in the eyeballs.

Eyes were apparenty a prominent theme in Ms Bourgeois art over the years. We found a quote by the artist in a blog edited by Jason Farago where she said: Eyes relate to seduction, flirtation, and voyeurism

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We were unable to find any reference to a title for the fountain. In fact the only reference we found to a title for the benches were in the articles about the Seattle sculpture park, where they are named Eye Benches I, II, and III. The titles for the artwork might have been overshadowed here by the name of the Plaza. Agnes R. Katz plaza was named after a local supporter of the arts. Her children donated much of the funding for the plaza and did so in her honor.

Adjutant by Kim Beck

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Often the annual Three Rivers Arts Festival ends up leaving a new piece of public art in the city. In past years several sculptures have become permanent parts of the city scape. In 2015, with help from volunteers attending the festivities, a new mural was added next to Point State Park.

The canvas for this mural extends over 800 feet, running along the Heritage Trail between Point State Park and the convention center. Under the Fort Duquesne Bridge, a coating of grey paint provided the background for the paint by numbers project. Artist Kim Beck stenciled the design onto the wall and labeled the areas with codes for black, white and shades of grey to be filled in by the volunteers.

The silhouettes were inspired by a journal entry of Henry David Thoreau: There they stood in the midst of the open river on this shallow and weedy bar in the sun the leisurely sentries lazily pluming themselves as if the day were too long for them. They gave a new character to the stream. Adjutant they were to my idea of the river, these two winged men.

The mural is supposed to be temporary, but we haven’t found anything saying just how temporary. Riverlife is trying to finish their plan to develop and beautify our shores. They’ve accomplished a lot so far, but this spot is one that they’re still working on.

Some photos of the finished mural: