Conceptually, the underpinning of this book reveals a fundamental belief in Pittsburgh as an epicenter of creativity. The Irma Freeman Center for Imagination (IFCI) has had countless exhibitions, most with an emphasis on local artists, from the life-like figures of William Karaffa to the abstractions and geometric shapes of Scott Turri to the infinitesimal perfect glass entomology of Michael “FIG” Mangiafico. In the early years, a lot of our shows were coupled with live music, creating more of a scene rather than a fine art market. Mike Bonello, Dennis Childers, and Evan Knauer all cited their music as having an equal importance to their artmaking, and all have played at the IFCI accompanying shows over the years. The IFCI has had a series of exhibitions known as Pittsburgh by Pittsburgh Artists. After the first one, we put out a book of the same name, in 2010. Although my own involvement in the scene began not quite 40 years ago, this book features a number of artists over the age of 80.
Everyone in this book (with the exception of a few) are between the ages of 50 and 100 (at the time of this printing) with many decades of experience. While many people today over the age of 50 begin to feel invisible, here they are the key players, held up and celebrated, and, as at Kennywood, you have to be “yay high” to ride this rollercoaster! Because many of the older artists recall their early years in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I decided that it was a safe bet to say “60 years inside the underground,” as the book encompasses at least that time frame, or longer. Older artists like Mosely, Klawansky, Cooper, and Qualters spoke from the early days of their youth in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when Pittsburgh was kind of a frontier. There was jazz at the Crawford Grill and Manchester Craftsman Guild, beatniks and “happenings” in the East End, North Side, and South Side. Mendelson established one of the only galleries accessible to locals; for 10 years he stayed open next to the Cricket Lounge strip club on Morewood, before moving to Shadyside where he renovated a rat trap of ill repute into a storefront and upscale gallery. At least that’s how the graffiti artist Matt Spahr saw it, as a street painter who was on the periphery of the periphery of what was then the up and coming, somewhat ironically, exclusive Pittsburgh art scene.
Here, we give elders, our local veteran artists, who have earned their merit, a chance to present their work to the public at large. These artists all started out unknown, but there was soon kinship and activity and in the midst of all this was praxis, even if it was unseen by the mainstream. In this book, I document the art scene starting from the 1960s, a time when aspiring local artists had few places to show their work, so they exhibited their art where they could, in church basements, furniture stores, and coffeehouses. Sitting with Thad Mosely as he was looking at this book’s proof, I learned that he had connections with at least a third of the people featured. “Chuck Barr would play his saxophone over at so-and-so” or “Oh I have a piece of Biko’s work” or “Oh I did a project together with Laura Jean” or “I know Chrisinta Springer’s parents.” His vantage point is so personal, spanning multiple generations. In this book there is a continuum of shared experience over sixty years, in which so many artists reference each other. What shines through is a network of artists, galleries, and so on that have common friendships and/ or associations. In many of the interviews and profiles, the artists and art organizers cite each other in their stories, indicating the interwoven yet expansive sphere of the Pittsburgh art scene.
Not all of these artists currently live and work in Pittsburgh, but most of them were born and raised here. Some went to school here and never left, like Joelle Levitt Killebrew, Dennis Childers, Tim Kaulen, and Michael Mangiafico (FIG), or returned, like the prodigal son Robert Qualters. Qualters’ paintings have a bright stained glass like glow of what artists call the “magic hour” or “golden hour” and he explores the many mundane iconic places in the Burg, like the Giant Eagle. Over the years, Qualters sought out other artists to collaborate with in much the same spirit that Teresa Martuccio (aka Tree) exudes in her own collaborative theatrics. We see Cheryl Capezzuti with her team of puppet makers working her giant puppets at the First Night Parade, or Tom Sarver with his hilarious improvised art olympics! Others make a living elsewhere but come back every so often, like Karl Mullen, Rick Bach (known for his metal work and large paintings at Big Burrito. Lauri Mancuso also decorated, painted, and curated art for Big Burrito restaurants). My talented sister Abira Ali made two large bodies of work about Pittsburgh that were both shown at the IFCI, one called Elusive Ground, exhibited along with photographer Dennis Childers’ Every Day Dream, and the other Overgrown in Pittsburgh, exhibited with Joan Brindle.
Others lived here but found success elsewhere, like David Pohl, Bill Miller, and Emory Biko, whose powerful and magnificent work Slave Ship graces the front end pages, but who sadly just passed on in 2024. David Pohl makes whimsical vibrant paintings, while his collages place the figure amidst layered abstract forms and multi-dimensional planes. Some worked in the spacious warehouses in Braddock, Greenfield, Soho, Manchester, Wilkinsburg, or the South Side to accommodate their oversized works, like Doug Cooper, Tim Kaulen, Thad Mosely, James Simon, and the late James Shipman. Many came from other towns but stayed and grew deep roots, like Laura Jean McLaughlin and Diane Samuels, one of the founders of City of Asylum and my former teacher. Graffiti artist Matt Spahr started out, like most from his genre, on the hidden canvases of abandoned train lots. Ed “Um” Bucholtz created DIY spaces like performing in the back of a truck, while others took their installations on the road, like Curtis Reaves. Reaves traces the fascinating lineage of his family to his greatgreat-grandparents who had been slaves in North Carolina. Some artists emigrated and ended up here, like Samir Elsabee from Egypt, Karl Mullen from Ireland, my grandmother, Irma Freeman, from Germany, and Andres Tapia-Urzura from Chile. Andres, whom I met in the early days when I worked as an usher at the Fulton, run by Pittsburgh Filmmakers, has risen to become an award winning multimedia artist, exploring issues from politics to technology to identity.
I document the art scene starting from the 1950s, a time when aspiring local artists had few places to show their work, so they exhibited their art where they could, in church basements, furniture stores, and coffeehouses.
Some made their name outside of Pittsburgh but still have an attachment to their city of birth. Many of the more well-known artists, such as Duane Michals, Samuel Rosenberg, and Romare Bearden, have influenced up and coming artists locally and globally. Bearden was adamantly against categorizing and grouping artists together as a social construct (whether by gender, race, or religion) as he saw it as a form of tokenism, like Black History Month. Bearden’s collage Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket (Pittsburgh Memories,1978) was the inspiration for a play by August Wilson. Pop artist Andy Warhol, whom I originally omitted, gained a presence in this book due to the incredible resource of the Andy Warhol Museum and their archivist, Matthew Gray, and because of my friendship with collector Elizabeth Murray-Finkelstein, who was the work and life partner of Nat Finkelstein, a prolific early documentary photographer of the Silver Factory (aka The Warhol Factory). There were teachers that were equally dedicated to their profession as to their artwork, like Samuel Rosenberg, Doug Cooper, Joan Brindle, and Ed Eberle. John Eastman used a variety of surfaces from metal to wood to three dimensional sculpture and ready-mades. Ron Donoughe captures one Pittsburgh neighborhood at a time in his plein-air paintings. Doug Cooper meticulously draws with graphite on individual panels, which become elaborate black and white (sometimes three story tall) murals, showing his unique perspective of his vantage points of hills and valleys, streets and houses, churches and other buildings of note, or places that no longer exist like Forbes Field. vanessa german builds her sculptures with poignant found objects, fabric, and dolls to depict the history of the African American struggle. To combat a world built on greed, racism, and violence, vanessa explores the power of art and love, striving to heal broken communities.
We take a deep look into what was happening throughout generations of the eccentric crowds at the forefront of the local scene. Alice Winn, dubbed “everywhere Alice,’’ takes us through her labyrinth of art galleries and art venues that came to be by the 1980s, an ethereal trajectory of forums like the Membrane Envelope, the Digging Pitt, and the Gesture Shows at the Mattress Factory. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, innovators renovated buildings surrounded by boarded up houses, crime, and vandalism. We see artists and art venues pondering their humble beginnings, and, in some cases, witnessing their eventual demise, like Lascaux Gallery, Carson Street Gallery, and others; tragically, as shown by Brady Lewis, even giants eventually fell, like the Pittsburgh Filmmakers. Pioneer Kelton Fleming opened the Turmoil Room; the late Susan Spier and her partner Jack Hutchings opened the Garfield Artworks, later taken over by Lauri Mancuso and then Manny Theiner. Jen Quinio opened Modern Formations, and Jen Saffron and Rik Winiski opened Brew House Space 101. Large crowds came to the Black Sheep Puppet Festival (well documented in Tom Sarver’s vivid and playful paintings), Flux, Art Without Walls, Art Show for the Homeless, Ga/Gi, and the Media Tonic event at Filmmakers. Also, there is Art All Night, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Gallery Crawl, and Garfield’s Unblurred on First Fridays, all still going strong. Other important groups include the long-standing Associated Artists of Pittsburgh and the Fiberarts Guild of Pittsburgh.
Places like the Manchester Craftsman Guild, Pittsburgh Filmmakers, and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts were started by groups of artists, growing out of necessity. Some of these became models for institutions all over the world. People were watching and emulating what they saw: how to build creative labs for young artists to hone their craft in classrooms that were based not only on teaching new skills, but also on fostering experimentation.
Looking back over 60 years, we also recognize the spaces that grew into important places of change and gave support, and wall space, like the Foreland Gallery (now AIR: Artists Image Resource); the Blatant Image Gallery and the Silver Eye Photographic Workshop merged (now the Silver Eye Center for Photography); the Society for Contemporary Craft (now Contemporary Craft); the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center which became Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and is now Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media, Pittsburgh Glass Center; and Pittsburgh Cultural Trust galleries like Wood Street, Future Tenant, Space, and Gallery 937. This book also explores gallery owners and collectors—some artists themselves— like artists/curators/collectors Bob Ziller, Eric Holmes, Tom Sarver, Steve Mendelson, and Pat McArdle, who were at the vanguard, bringing new artists as well as older artists into the circuit again, like Chuck Barr and Samir Elsabee. People who remember the community of art makers like Jen Saffron, Edgar “Um” Bucholtz and Lauri Mancuso, were organizers, as well as participants. Organizer Richard Parsakian normalized the divas of drag. Better known galleries brought artists into the light, like Concept Art Gallery beginning in the 1970s, which sold the work of Joan Brindle in the early days. Concept has continued to champion Doug Cooper through the years, along with many up and coming artists. More recently they auctioned the work of members of Women of Visions Collective, including artists Christine Bethea, LaVerne Kemp, Ashley A. Jones, and Ruth Bedeian (who was my mentor as a student teacher). More recently there are special places that have earned their own claim to fame like Randyland, the Glitter Box, Boom Concepts, Bunker Projects, and Babyland.
Some artists have been in the scene a very long time, like abstract painter and photographer Jean McClung and photographer Mark Perrott, while others featured in the Pittsburgh Vistas section are relatively new to the scene, recognized for their documentation of Pittsburgh, like Analog Liberation, Cara Gaetano of Ethereal Aperture Photo, Jaime Bird, Hong Zhao, and Dan Peindl. Sarah Zeffiro creates emotive colorful abstractions. Eric Calfo premiered his and Justin Funk’s film Slag at the IFCI where a crowd-filled room of skateboarders shouted and cheered as they watched well-known local skaters dropping in at iconic Pittsburgh street spots. There’s break dancing international performance artist Bill Shannon, as well as those keeping the dream alive with spray paint cans like graffiti artist Brick, and Matt Spahr, turned muralist. You never know what you will find in Pittsburgh, like the chance of discovering a Keith Haring (artist superstar and former student of Ivy School of Professional Art). Haring left a large piece of wood panel with his signature tag in a construction yard that Steve Mendelson retrieved, and hung it on his wall, thanks to his lucky stars. The world of art making, controlled by the fine art dealers and the museums, separates the high brow from the low by exercising systemic exclusivity. Yet those same “art snobs”’ would sometimes “discover‘’ an artist, if they left the doors of perception a crack open for a few artists to slip through, affording opportunities through the annual Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Exhibition at AWM and CMOA and the Pittsburgh Biennial or the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Some artists made it to the other side, like Vanessa German, Duane Michals, and Thad Mosely, who is still making art at the age of 98 (at the time of this printing) and has finally been recognized as the master that he is. For the first time in his career, Mosely’s studio is not overcrowded by his sculpture forest; it now belongs to New York, London, and Paris. The once avant-garde have become the new art stars, but make no mistake, we are proud of them, and they remember their roots, be it McKeesport, the Hill District, or Homewood.
Pittsburgh artists are settled in their castles, manors, and grounds, with fortresses of industrial glass and broken mirror mosaics, jerry-rigged plumbing, and former coal fed furnaces. We make art in our affordable 19th century houses, with our unlatched doors and open windows and tended gardens. We live surrounded by our art, made in warehouses, turrets, garages, and basements.
We all know how hard it has been, and still is, to sell artwork in the city of Pittsburgh, yet it is also hard to stay away, even if that means giving up your dream of being a successful artist, and instead settling for being an artist with a day job. We also get a glimmer of Pittsburgh images made by various artists, including those who never made it to see their work appreciated, like Jim Brindle (who committed suicide in 1969, but whose work was instantly recognized by the collector Graham Shearing five decades later). The three Jim Brindle works included here were from a Carnegie Tech study of downtown Pittsburgh in the early 1960s.
In this book we present sound artists, glassblowers, welders, and printmakers; abstract, landscape, portrait, hyperrealistic, impressionistic, and visionary painters; fiber, comic, collage, and performance artists; sculptors, casters, curators, puppeteers, photographers, filmmakers, muralists, mosaic makers, and ceramicists. There are encaustic artists, papermakers, weavers, and metal workers. Artist groups like the Industrial Arts Co-op made large anthropomorphic secretive sculptures, and miniaturists like Ryder Henry and Diane Keane invented their own tiny worlds, and the multi-award winning Diane Samuels created an incredible retelling of the Arabian Nights. The Subrosa performative arts collective, which formed in 1998 with some members shared by the Critical Art Ensemble, intersect research, activism and art with one outcome being a giant soft sculpture they created and exhibited of female genitalia. Faith Wilding, a leading member and an original member of Woman House, was also my hero; her classes in Feminist History at Carlow College schooled me like no other. We see the journeys of other political activists like etta cetera, Mary Tremonte, and filmmaker Chris Ivey. World altering artists relate to art from their own reality and quest for justice, such as tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE and Christina Springer.
There is African influenced art and African American artists like Ashley A. Jones, Christine Bethea, and Emory Biko who explore the Black experience through both art and artifact. We give space to the African American women’s group Women in Visions, which presently has over thirty-six members; founding members include the well-known sculptor Selma Burke. Artists such as Mike Bonello and David Harris (aka Camera Dave) express themselves in psychedelic, multiple exposures of still and moving pictures. We see the disintegrating metals of weather exposed surfaces by Brian Richmond, and the deep hues of cyanotypes, handmade by historic photographic processes of Sue Abramson, a longtime fixture at Pittsburgh Filmmakers as a teacher and a longtime member of the Silver Eye. Karen Antonelli combines photography with gouache, an opaque watercolor, resulting in images that resemble painted on emulsion and reveal breathtaking views of Pittsburgh’s natural worlds. We see the classic black and white photography of Mark Perrott; the early punk rock clubs documented by long-time scene photographer Larry Rippel; the enchanting iconic street scenes by Heather Mull, and the incredible documentation of art adventurers IAC by Rob Long.
The artist’s canvas is sometimes paper, metal, fabric, digital, or found objects, like the painted cardboard and garbage can lids by Chuck Barr. Chuck’s charming and colorful paintings are equal only to the jazzy and beatnik style he had of greeting you, even at 89, “Hey, man! That’s cool, cat!” I remember seeing his house with artwork along the stairs to his porch, on his walls, and buried in dusty piles on tables stored throughout the house and basement. I remember it being brought out of its cobwebbed storage by Pat McArdle, who created a market for it at auction. Barr loved having his work appreciated after so many years. He was thrilled to have his first solo show at the IFCI, though he passed shortly before his 90th birthday.
Jim Dugas died during the IFCI run of perhaps his first show since his two-person exhibition at the PCA in the 1970s. He died surrounded by his own art, a hoarder of sorts who lived and worked and even bought back his work, much like his idol, Albert Pinkham Ryder. It was said that he lived in three feet of filth, with old food, garbage, and uncashed checks. He also painted in layers, just as Dugas had, always working on multiple artworks at once, and often taking 10 years to finish a single piece. Ruth Freeman Klawansky was known to leave behind old art supplies and artwork wherever she lived. Bill O’Driscoll from WESA did a piece about the work (including a work as early as 1957) of her and her mother (Irma Freeman) being found in the trash by a lady who, incredibly, later that same year found additional pieces by Klawansky at the Goodwill; and, incidentally a print was also found in a thrift store by my friend Eric Zographos around the same time. Most recently among old frames I pulled a glass framed painting, completely obscured by a thick layer of dust, while looking for frames to hang my Aunt Ruthie’s memorial exhibition. To my surprise, barely visible by the naked eye, I recognized the style as it turned out to be her own painting. I literally “pulled a Ruthie!”
The late artist Richard Schnap, partner of Alice Winn, created poetic visions from intuitively selected collage elements. Bill Miller meticulously cuts and pastes linoleum scraps to form large intricate beautiful collages; others are inspired by their gardens, like Joan Brindle and Katy DeMent. Artists James Shipman, Rich Bach, IAC, and Ed Parrish worked in metal, finding their muse in the industrial and post-industrial landscape, which Pittsburghers have claimed as their own; this same landscape appears in the fiery paintings of Chris McGinnis. There are inventors of bizarre imaginations, like Spaz, who was busy interacting with mail art and zines, in early as the 1980s, even before it was a thing. Then there are computerlike generated images like those of Scott Turri, who redefines computer art, as his materials are not actually sourced from computer technology but rather reflections of domesticity, seeking inspiration during a lockdown, worldwide pandemic. Scott also played in a punk band with Richard Schnap in the 1980s. Similarly, the hundreds of carefully, perfectly painted squares of Ken Batista give the illusion of low-quality pixelated images at first glance, but are, in fact, intensely laborious. For many years Ken had his own folk music radio broadcast on WYEP, now on WRCT. He is an early collector of sounds as well as color. This older crowd was in the scene long before my generation and generations after mine appeared, one of a new era that is political, gender transformative, artistic, and musical: putting on plays, variety shows, and protest marches, like artists Teresa Martuccio, etta cetera, and Mary Tremonte.
The success of these individuals is less about the arts market and more about a celebration of life, with friends, old acquaintances, and memories of yesteryear still playing in the background. Pittsburgh artists are settled in their castles, manors, and grounds, with fortresses of industrial glass and broken mirror mosaics, jerry-rigged plumbing, and former coal fed furnaces. We make art in our affordable 19th century houses, with our unlatched doors and open windows and tended gardens. We live surrounded by our art, made in warehouses, turrets, garages, and basements. We find the light and the life and a reason to carry on with the knowledge of our outer limits because we grasp these fleeting self-congratulatory moments in the sun: this is a toast to our idiosyncratic lives, inside the underground.
