Author: Maggie Shaheen
Pittsburgh: a city of bridges, a historical industrial powerhouse, and a 21st-century hub of growing educational, health, and tech sectors. These are just a few common conceptions of this city we call home, but did you also know that Pittsburgh is a world-class city for public art? Long-term residents, college students, and tourists alike may be aware of our city’s incredible cultural offerings housed in museums or other formal institutions, but this summer my eyes were opened to the incredible depth, diversity, and magic that Pittsburgh’s public artworks can spark when exploring the urban environment.
This summer, I was privileged to work as a part-time Summer Fellow for Shiftworks Community + Public Arts, which was formerly the city’s Office of Public Art. Earlier in 2024, the organization reintroduced itself to the region as one of Southwestern Pennsylvania’s leading nonprofits in facilitating educational and creative programming and building resources for artists, clients, and communities. The goal of my tenure at Shiftworks, guided by my mentor Rachel Klipa, Program Manager for Education and Outreach, was ultimately to help gather information for a forthcoming edition of Pittsburgh Art in Public Places, a guidebook with a list of artworks that can be seen on self-guided walking tours of Downtown, the North Shore and North Side.
My first order of business was conducting a walking survey myself of all 120 currently listed artworks. Along the way, I took notes on each artwork, with three main categories of the artwork being present on site, its physical condition, and to what extent the short written description in the guide was accurate. While these may look like simple criteria, many of the artworks have changed drastically since the last edition of Pittsburgh Art in Public Places was published in 2016. Eventually, I compiled a report of my observations and a spreadsheet that will be used for reference as the new volume is prepared. My favorite area to survey was the Children’s Museum on the North Side for its multiple playful, kinetic, and environmentally reactive works such as those in the image above.
For the rest of my role, Rachel tasked me with in-depth research and write-ups of three prominent works of art in the Cultural District that would eventually develop into new guidebook entries. These included Flow (2003/2017) and SQR (2019) by Erwin Redl and Garrison Canal (2018) by Andrea Polli. All of them are large-scale pieces located downtown that share a common medium of shifting LED lights and play a role in the Pittsburgh’s Cultural District’s initiative of creating a “City of Light” through commissioned artworks for public view. To further enrich the research for the project, I also compiled several academic and web resources that could hopefully be added to Shiftworks’ website as a bibliography for people to independently research Pittsburgh murals, sculptures, architecture, and more.
Spending my summer undertaking contemporary art research online was a completely new skill set for me to exercise in a professional capacity and certainly took some adjusting. I am grateful to have worked with Rachel to help navigate the various roadblocks as I sought to determine what information would truly be useful to members of the public. Ultimately, I feel a sense of pride that my deliverables will one day become readily available information hosted by Shiftworks to make the Pittsburgh public art landscape more accessible to the publics for which it is intended.
Maggie Shaheen was a 2024 Summer Fellow at Shiftworks Community + Public Arts, generously supported by Jay Miller.