Pittsburgh’s new $31m Arts Landing combines public art with civic engagement

Arts Landing is a rare miracle in Pittsburgh: a construction project that finished on time. A little less than a year after breaking ground, the $31m public project opened on 17 April—just before the beginning of the National Football League Draft and the opening of the 59th edition of the Carnegie International. A block party this weekend (until 25 April) officially inaugurates the new public space.

Through the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust—a non-profit entity that runs several galleries downtown—the city now has public works on display by the artists vanessa german, Darian Johnson, Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, Sharmistha Ray, Mikael Owunna and Marques Redd, John Peña, Shikeith and the late sculptor Thaddeus Mosley.

But what does public space mean in a place like downtown Pittsburgh? The adjacent businesses to Arts Landing are a space-travel simulation lab, a strip club, a workers’ compensation lawyer’s office and an Aperol Spritz-themed novelty bar (expensive but delicious). But the area also has remarkable architecture and sweeping views of the hills and rivers of the city. For people who visit for the first time, it is jarring how little Pittsburgh resembles its eastern neighbour Philadelphia. Living in Pittsburgh can feel like living in a forested valley that happens to also have a city in it.

Arts Landing leans into this relationship with nature. Many of its works engage with the natural world—like Clayton and Lewis’s Bird Circus, a series of tall sculptural poles for local birds to perch on. Meanwhile, Johnson has contributed sculptures based on animals found in western Pennsylvania: a raccoon, a bear and a snail. These sculptures make up part of downtown’s first playground, on the northern portion of Arts Landing. A large field with a bandshell and seating make up the centre, and a concrete path weaves through the interspersed works of art.

Shikeith’s Hold, located on the project's southern end, is one of the most dynamic pieces in Arts Landing. While many public works tend to be static, Hold uses neon light to create an ever-changing, pulsating image that flickers and dims with night and day. The piece is part of Shikeith’s ongoing Project Blue Space, exploring the role of the colour (and water) in Black American life—the Middle Passage, blues music, the “haint blue” of Gullah Geechee folk tradition. Ghosts cannot cross water, so many homes in the American South have haint-blue doorways.

Shikeith hopes that the meditative experience of watching the moving light on his sculpture has an emotional effect on visitors. “I always say that I’m like the Mary J. Blige of contemporary art, because I’m someone that just prioritises feeling,” he tells The Art Newspaper. “There’s materially to these feelings even without historical context.” Hold is Shikeith’s first foray into public art, and he brought a creativity and freshness to it that makes it stand out.

Hold’s use of bronze and light complements Mosley’s Touching the Earth, a sculpture series originally commissioned by New York’s Public Art Fund for City Hall Park in Manhattan. Their relocation at Arts Landing takes on special meaning after Mosley’s death at age 99 last month. They are both a monument to his life and a reminder of his absence, a bittersweet gate between the living and the dead.

There is a lot of language around vessels and space in Arts Landing. Hold, Lifted and Touching the Earth all engage with how sculpture incorporates negative space. The strategy each artist employed seems to be either to work with the air or with the earth.

Ray designed what are likely the first artist-created pickleball courts in the world, which will open this summer. It was a challenge making murals that will physically be stepped on. “I had to understand the geometry of play and how game logic happens,” Ray says. “Like most artists, I’m bad at sports. But pickleball is intergenerational and accessible on so many levels.”

Part of the reason downtown had few active public spaces before this was the presence of homeless encampments and drug use. Hence there is always a question of whether a public art initiative is a Band-Aid to beautify a space without engaging with what is actually happening here. The fact that Arts Landing has a playground and a bandshell, though, makes for more than just an empty public work and shows promise for real community engagement.

vanessa german’s Lifted, which takes the form of benches made of sculptural hands based on local centegenerians’ tracings, is part of the playground space. “I hope that as people take a seat, supported by the hands of some of the eldest Pittsburgh residents,” german says, “they feel connected to a long line of people whose lives, ideas, labour and dreams built the city around them. A lot of public art happens at such a distance from the public. These benches are the public—the citizen, the life, the hand as a public work of art.”

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Peña produced work for the playground as well, in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum for a residency that produces “tough art”. His piece, Local Time and Weather, allows participants to manually change the time and update the weather. “I hope—and know—that children will run wild with it,” he says, “ignoring all of this and playing with the piece with no regard for the current time and weather.”

Arts Landing is a sprawling project with lofty goals. Creative work cannot always accomplish every civic objective, and heavily context-dependent contemporary art might not land with the average citizen. But the art here does not talk down to the public either. Not a single work in Arts Landing mentions steel or sports or any of the other markers of Pittsburgh kitsch that produce eye rolls from locals. There is a youthful exuberance to Arts Landing. For a city that can feel so mired in its past, this is a sign of forward-looking thinking.