Emerging Pittsburgh Artists You Should Know

Elevating everyday life is what sets photographer Ed Panar’s work apart from the rest. His images—most of which are of places—are the kind that beg for a second viewing, as his tendency to bring the background of a picture into the forefront leads to interesting visual discoveries on the part of the viewer. In addition to his one-off photos, Panar has published a number of photo books and has had his work hung at The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The New York Photography Festival, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. “Pittsburgh can feel like a hidden city in a forest,” says Panar of the city that inspires him. “Its hilly neighborhoods and labyrinthine network of streets, staircases, and bridges are perfect for exploring on long walks and bike rides.”

A sense of place—whether it’s her native Milwaukee, her adopted hometown of Pittsburgh, or some other city entirely—is a central theme in the work of mixed media artist Lenore Thomas. The importance of geography is evident in Thomas’ recent landscape series, in which she attempts to re-create specific landscapes by coupling color with overlapping abstract shapes.

“The larger series makes reference to my travels and the different physiological and psychological responses I have to being in different geographical locations,” says Thomas. “I am from Milwaukee and the openness of the landscape in the Midwest is very comforting and relaxing to me. Living in Pittsburgh, which is essentially surrounded by hills and small mountains and in a river valley, is less comfortable for me. So when I started making these pieces in 2011 they started with the Wisconsin series (‘This sunrise is like being in love’) and then the Pittsburgh pieces (‘I'm an hour ahead of being more awesome than you’). They have grown to include a series on Rochester, New York (‘By the way this place is a creephole’) and Illinois (‘It's like a carousel of cupcakes’).”

Recently named “Emerging Artist of the Year” by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Mia Tarducci Henry isn’t afraid to cross and mix genres. Though she may be most easily described as an abstract painter, Henry’s output has included everything from oil paintings to sculptures to painted objects. Using both color and humor to convey a deeper message, Henry’s recent “Inside and Out” exhibit “centers around how I translate emotion, how feelings affect me, and how I treat and express myself, which I think are very relatable themes,” the artist told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Two of the show’s installations, Pharmadozen and Low and High, tackle the concept of pharmacology and antidepressants with a wink—and a nod to Pittsburgh native Andy Warhol.

“I used Warhol's soup can as my inspiration for these pieces to point out how ubiquitous antidepressants are today, how relatable they are for us all, and how we seem to turn to them in ever-increasing numbers to provide comfort—which says a lot about where we are today,” she told the paper.

“Pittsburgh is such a great place to live and make things,” says interactive artist and kinetic sculptor Keny Marshall, who has been living and working in Pittsburgh since 1998. “Being so affordable, having literally tons of cast-off industry, surrounded by creative people. There’s always a great sense of potential, and the tools you need to make almost anything happen.”

The city’s industrial past seems to resonate particularly well for Marshall, whose work often teases the ubiquity of technology and combines found objects, hand-built devices, and more traditional art techniques like drawing in a way that creates an immediacy with the audience.

“People, architecture, water, and light are elements that make every city unique,” says installation artist Edith Abeyta. “In Pittsburgh, it can be dystopic and post-apocalyptic, as though we are past the end, yet despite its abandonment, the grassroots collectivity and energy here are invigorating and present endless possibilities.”

More than just a series of site-specific installations to view, Abeyta’s work is typically a participatory event, as was the case with o:ne:ka,’ a project commissioned this summer by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust for the Three Rivers Arts Festival constructed using both wood and 3,000 donated T-shirts. “Interaction and participation are crucial to the success of each piece from the gathering of materials, fabrication of the piece, [and] activation of the work by participants to the re-distribution of the materials at the end of the installation cycle,” she states.

Jim Rugg’s biography states that the artist “makes comics, books, drawings, illustrations, and designs.” This essentially means that his artistic talents know no limits. There’s a playfulness to Rugg’s work, which is pop culture-focused and often a bit retro in style—an updated take on the iconic use of imagery in the 1970s. Among Rugg’s many projects are such books and comics as Street Angel, Afrodisiac, the PLAIN Janes, Rambo 3.5, Notebook Drawings, and Supermag. His work has also been exhibited at iam8bit, Gallery1988, Mondo, and the Society of Illustrators. Rugg is also co-host of BoingBoing’s “Tell Me Something I Don't Know” podcast. And he does it all in Steel City. “The rivers, hills, and four distinct seasons make Pittsburgh a beautiful city,” says Rugg. “When I'm not drawing, I love exploring its unique neighborhoods.”

As a Pittsburgh native, interdisciplinary artist Lori Hepner has witnessed the changing cultural landscape of the city firsthand. “Pittsburgh has turned its coal into LEDs and green tech,” says Hepner, whose work has taken her around the world (including an artist residency in the Arctic Circle, which is where she was when we caught up with her). “I grew up in Pittsburgh and left the vacant steel industry brown fields only to come back to new neighborhoods sprouting from the weeds,” she says. “I’m happy to make art and be in a city that I love to call home. Pittsburgh artists are doing great things in and beyond the city.”

Hepner, of course, is doing her own part to help the city’s art scene shine with work that addresses the quick-changing nature of our world, as seen in her current project, “#Crowdsourced Landscapes.”

“For this current project, I’m mixing in social media as a source of inspiration and titles for the work,” says Hepner, who invites her audience to post their thoughts on “how your landscapes might change due to climate change on Facebook or Twitter using the project hashtag to be a part of the work: #CLandscape.”

David Montano is yet another artist who was born and raised in Pittsburgh, and who is marveling at the ways in which the city has become so artist-friendly. “After spending some time in Chicago and San Francisco, I returned to Pittsburgh to raise a family, and have remained here since 2005,” he says. “I love Pittsburgh not only as the city I grew up in, but as a livable, artist-friendly haven with many resources for creative people. We have a reputation as having a strong artist community where collaboration can happen across many diverse artistic disciplines. If you have a dream project, chances are you can make it happen in Pittsburgh. The art community here is not as competitive as you would find in other cities; we all work together to ensure we are all successful. My art is deeply inspired by my city's history and landscape. We've had several renaissances here and right now it’s a perfect time to be an artist here. From the glory days of steel production to the current cultural revolution, there's so much to be inspired by. I feel lucky to be able to live and work in such a close-knit community.” Perhaps it’s this local support that has allowed Montano to comfortably shift between genres, working in a variety of mediums, including oil, acrylic, pencil, crayon, and paper collage.

Artist Julia Cahill isn’t afraid to address serious and far-reaching issues head-on in her work. But she also knows that doing so with a sense of humor is the key to making it more approachable. Inspired by the influence of pop culture and media, Cahill’s work often stems from conversations she has with individuals about specific ideas, such as reincarnation, which is the subject of her in-progress “Reincarnation: Energies” series. “Pittsburgh is full of so many eclectic, creative, and genuinely down-to-earth characters,” says Cahill. “I am constantly inspired by the conversations and encounters that I have with people here.”

Sculptor and installation artist Carin Mincemoyer is putting a thoroughly modern spin on Pittsburgh’s history as an industrial town by utilizing a range of recycled materials in her work, everything from Styrofoam to plastic packaging. She’s intent on examining the sometimes-contradictory role that the natural world plays in our lives today. “A great deal of our time, energy, and resources are spent in the pursuit of objects of desire—be they material or immaterial,” says Mincemoyer. “My work is an investigation of desire and the means by which people attempt to attain the objects of their longing. Most recently, I have focused on the issue of how we relate to what is commonly considered ‘nature.’”

For visual artist, illustrator, and educator John Peña, art is a way of engaging with the world that exists around him on a daily basis. For his current show at The Mattress Factory museum, Peña created a site-specific collection of foam, plaster, and wood “Word Balloons” that give a life-size weight and attention to the beauty of everyday speech. As for his geography, Peña says that “living in Pittsburgh is incredible!”

He continues: “It’s an affordable, mid-sized city that has great resources for artists. It's big enough to have lots of diverse events and small enough that if you like something someone is doing, you can reach out to them and chances are they'll respond. I love that type of close knit-scene.”

“Even though I was born and raised in Manhattan, I have developed a true fondness for the city in which I now live and work,” says abstract painter Andi Irwin, whose work is often rooted in the concept of communication. “The Net of Gratitude (pictured) is ​a painting inspired by social media and apps that were developed in Pittsburgh and/or are centered on the city in some way. I am excited to be creating in a city whose history includes Andrew Carnegie and Andy Warhol, and whose future is imprinted with technology, art, innovation, and powerful female artists and influencers.”

Counting Steve Jobs among one of his greatest inspirations, graphic artist and researcher Nickolay Lamm is making an art out of telling the truth. Using facts as his foundation, Lamm has created a fascinating range of work that seeks to illustrate facts over fiction and/or perception. Last year, he created a new kind of Barbie doll—Normal Barbie—that was modeled on the average measurements of a 19-year-old female.

In 2014 he debuted Lammily, a line of realistically proportioned dolls with the tagline “Average Is Beautiful.” In the spring, a crowdfunding campaign saw more than 13,600 backers spend $501,384.00 to pre-order more than 19,000 Lammily dolls. But body image isn’t Lamm’s only artistic concern—the distribution of wealth is also one of them. “My ‘New York City Inequality’ project was influenced by Pittsburgh,” says Lamm of the graphic map series that illustrates wealth inequality in a way that is impossible to ignore. “I remember I was standing on top of Mt. Washington, which overlooks the Pittsburgh skyline, and wondered what the skyline would look like if we could see inequality.”

Artistry is a way of life for Vanessa German, who is an actress, playwright, performer, and educator in addition to being a sculptor. German’s intricate sculptural pieces are a powerful mix of found and handcrafted pieces that contain elements of ancient African tribal art, Congo power figures, and American folk art. Named “One of 30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 That You Should Know About” by The Huffington Post, the self-taught artist says she creates her deeply personal pieces with “the technology of soul.” Based in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood, German lets her environment inspire her. “How beautiful and rich and sincere is my neighborhood?,” she asks. “Filled with abundant and brazen life force, spirit, creativity, and fire: Homewood is my Harlem. Everything that is possible is possible here.”

Making the invisible visible is all in a day’s work for sculptor, painter, and installation artist Toby Atticus Fraley, whose work often addresses our past but does so in a totally forward-thinking way. Fraley’s The Lost Sound Search Engine 3 is his rendition of what is best described as a sonic time machine, a construction that is able to find traces of sound—some of which are purported to be dozens of years old—floating through the atmosphere. From 2011 to 2013, Fraley’s Robot Repair Shop—a stuck-in-time storefront for the manufacture of robots—was a fixture of Pittsburgh’s Cultural District. Most recently, Fraley unveiled Contrails, an innovative bike rack that has been installed in the Cultural District (the artist’s first permanent piece in Pittsburgh). “My goal with this project was to not just make a bike rack, but also design a piece that could stand on its own as a new piece of public art for the city of Pittsburgh,” says Fraley. “The fact that it can act as a bike rack as well is just an added benefit.”

Kim Beck’s uniquely honed interest in architecture, landscape, and suburban spaces has landed her work at a host of enviable organizations and places, including the High Line, Walker Art Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, the Warhol Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Omi International Arts Center. Through drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, books, cutout sculptures, and installations, Beck rethinks the idea of the built environment, with images that are both entirely familiar yet rendered in new and thought-provoking ways.

A clock is anything but a clock and a cabinet is anything but a cabinet in the hands of master furniture-maker Mike Korsak, which would explain why so many of his wood pieces have been showcased at galleries and museums around the world. As functional as they are beautiful, Korsak employs traditional joinery and craftsmanship and uses native woods, including cherry, maple, and walnut, to create true works of art.

Jennifer Nagle Myers is challenging her audience by creating visual and performance art pieces that attempt to reimagine—and, at the same time, redefine—the status quo of the world, with narratives, objects, performances, photographs, and works on paper among her arsenal of tools. Often confronting issues related specifically to women, land, the environment, and the American Dream, Myers believes that living in Pittsburgh for the past several years has been a boon to her creativity.

“Pittsburgh is a city on the edge,” says Myers. “All of its failures and contradictions inform and inspire my work because I have no other choice than to sit in my front-row seat and examine, with both eyes wide open, the great tragedy and trauma our country is experiencing right now through the eyes of this one city. You can see it so clearly here, from poverty to extreme energy, extraction to racism, and police brutality to a tech boom. The most beautiful, vibrant, loving people live here, too. All this goes into my work.”

There’s an obvious sense of play at the heart of Barbara Weissberger’s work, which has been exhibited at PS1/MoMA, DUMBO Art Center, and White Columns. “‘Collage formations’ is the term I have coined to describe my photographs of impermanent arrangements created in the studio,” says Weissberger, a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. “The arrangements, like collages-in-space, combine things made and found with mirrors and humble details of the physical space, such as electrical outlets and stray marks on the walls and floors.” Of the city in which she chooses to work, Weissberger states, “Pittsburgh is having something of a flowering right now. This is an exciting time to be working here as an artist.”

A native of Tokyo, Kaoru Tohara brings just the right amount of outsider perspective to his fine art photographs and 3D pieces, turning familiar scenes and objects of his daily life in Pittsburgh into grander statements on the uniqueness of place. “Several years ago I moved to the top of Mt. Washington in Pittsburgh overlooking the point where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers flow together to form the Ohio,” says the artist. “From the street level, Pittsburgh does not look like a city. It looks like it was formed without order and plans. It is dark and cold, and the downtown streets are often empty. People have told me the photos look ‘sad.’ But from the top of Mt. Washington, I can see nearly the whole city. When I drive down the mountain over the Liberty Bridge to the junction of 5th Avenue and the Boulevard of the Allies, I am often reminded of the streets in Downtown Tokyo. Pittsburgh’s streets follow the natural contours of the land. The man-made environment reflects its unique geography and the history of the people who came to work in the coal mines and steel mills. I want to capture the scent of the people who exist behind the buildings, streets, bridges, and tunnels.”

One man’s trash is another man’s mesh sculpture. Proving that art can be found everywhere, metal sculpture artist Atticus Adams is single-handedly redefining the way you’ll look at your screen door. Re-purposing a range of recycled materials, including the aluminum mesh found in screen doors and windows, Adams is fashioning these fabrics into a range of abstract pieces with the help of bold colors and additional rich textures. “Pittsburgh has an industrial history,” says the artist. “It's a city that has transformed itself into something new. Living here is very inspiring when your medium of choice is an industrial metal mesh.”