This is WESA Arts, a weekly newsletter by Bill O'Driscoll providing in-depth reporting about the Pittsburgh area art scene. Sign up here to get it every Wednesday afternoon.
Pittsburgh’s process for vetting and approving public artworks and changes to city-owned buildings looks a lot different than it did just a few months ago.
On Tuesday, Pittsburgh City Council approved seven nominees for the new Art & Civic Design Commission. It’s the latest step in a process that began in late November, when Mayor Ed Gainey dismissed all five members of the city’s long-running Art Commission.
The administration then announced plans to revamp the city’s approach, which hadn’t fundamentally changed in more than a century. The proposal, subsequently approved by Council, transforms the seven-member commission into two five-member committees, one to oversee artworks and the other to handle civic design. It also included changes to the Percent for Art program, which sets aside 1% of the budgets of municipal capital projects for art.
Despite the abrupt dismissal of the previous commissioners, the new plans have been greeted warmly by many in the Pittsburgh arts community. The specialized committees were intended to bring more expertise to bear, and the Percent for Art changes — which allow the set-asides to be pooled for use anywhere in the city, rather than limiting them to the sites of the projects that generated them — could boost public art in underserved communities.
The commission doesn’t originate projects, most of which are developed through the Department of City Planning. Rather, it evaluates projects, recommends changes, and then decides whether to approve them. And though commissioners are unpaid volunteers, the responsibility is a big one. In years past, the commission has taken occasional high-profile votes, such as the ones to remove the Oakland statues of Christopher Columbus and composer Stephen Foster from public view. But even votes on less-contested projects, from the design of a new statue in a city park to the look of a renovated firehouse, affect how it feels to live, work in, or visit a given community.
On the civic design side, the new commissioners approved this week include: architect Lisa Carver, of Perfido Weiskopf Wagstaff + Goettel Architects; independent urban planner Ariam Ford; and Green Building Alliance vice president for planning and policy Megan Zeigler, who is a trained landscape architect.
The Art Committee includes artist and educator Christine Bethea, a fixture on the local scene and member of the Women of Visions collective; painter (and yes, former Pirate Parrot) Tom Mosser, known for his whimsical Downtown mural “The Two Andys”; artist Mikael Owunna, whose visionary photographs of Black people have been exhibited from venues around the world to the side of Heinz Hall; and Celeste Smith, a senior program officer for arts and culture at the Pittsburgh Foundation, as well as a co-founder of social-justice nonprofit 1Hood Media.
Two more nominees await votes: Carnegie Mellon University architecture professor Gerrod Winston was nominated for the Civic Design Committee; and Anneliese Martinez, who heads The Andy Warhol Museum’s Pop District Initiative, was tapped for the Art Committee. (A fifth civic design nominee should also be forthcoming.)
In keeping with the Gainey administration’s stated desire to increase diversity on the commission, five of the nine nominees are Black.
During a Feb. 8 interview session with councilors, several nominees expressed their dedication to equity issues. Owunna, for instance, emphasized the need for community engagement “to focus and uplift the community voices” in the creation of public art. Smith said the reconfigured commission must recognize that all communities already make their own art, regardless of what works the city officially approves. “The art has always been there, it’s just what lens are we applying?” she said. “That’s when you bring the racial justice in.”
The new commissioners — eventually, 10 in all — will have a big backlog to deal with. The old Art Commission’s final monthly meeting was in November, with a scheduled break in December; the January and February meetings were canceled while nominees were named, interviewed by council, and voted upon. That means the group will have three months of business to catch up with, not counting holdover projects yet to receive final approval.
However, by design, the new commission will have a big advantage: Each of the two committees will face about half the workload of the old commission, which deliberated over both art and civic design projects, and whose meetings routinely ran three hours or more.
How will this all go for these commissioners, all of whom are new to the process? We’ll know more come their first meeting, scheduled for March 22.
WESA's Weekend Picks
- "Deep River": Internationally touring troupe Alonzo King LINES Ballet marks 40 years of contemporary dance with a performance of King’s own new, spirituals-infused work “Deep River,” at the Byham Theater, courtesy of Pittsburgh Dance Council, on Friday, Feb. 17.
- A classic on 16 mm: This weekend, F.W. Murnau’s classic 1927 silent romantic drama “Sunrise” gets a rare screening on 16 mm film via Pittsburgh Sound + Image, at Eberle Studios, in Homestead.
- Jazz with Nduduzo Makhathini: South African jazz pianist Nduduzo Makhathini and his quartet play the New Hazlett Theater thanks to Kente Arts Alliance on Saturday, Feb. 18.
- "Rising Voices 2": “Rising Voices 2: The Bennett Prize for Women Figurative Realist Painters,” a vibrant group show featuring 11 artists at Downtown’s 937 Liberty Gallery, closes Sunday, Feb. 19.
- Poetry at Alphabet City: Poet Mahogany L. Browne — who was the first-ever poet-in-residence at New York’s Lincoln Center — shares work from her new collection, “Chrome Valley,” in an Alphabet City program honoring Black womanhood, Monday, Feb. 20.
