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Artists' Pittsburgh memories live on
Wednesday, February 28, 2001
Artist Romare Bearden remembered Pittsburgh in his paintings. He was not born in Pittsburgh, but he lived with his grandmother in East Liberty and attended Peabody High School.
He was so affected by memories of steel mill workers and his grandmother's boarding house that he chose to recapture them on canvas. Bearden's image of the city lives on in the mural "Pittsburgh Memories," a history of Pittsburgh's Point, located at the Gateway subway stop Downtown.
Pittsburgh playwright August Wilson credits Bearden's art with influencing the development of characters in his plays. Wilson was born in 1945 and grew up in the Hill District. He left school in the ninth grade when his history teacher falsely accused him of plagiarizing a paper on which he had lavished particular care.
Wilson's interest in writing developed early, And in 1968, he co-founded the Black Horizons Theatre in Pittsburgh. His friend Charles Purdy convinced him to write plays. In 1981, Wilson's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" premiered at the O'Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Conn. He won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for "Fences." His other plays include "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," "The Piano Lesson" and "King Hedley II."
Writer John Edgar Wideman also captures the essence of growing up in Pittsburgh. His characters are based on family members and people he knew during his childhood here. Born in 1941 in Washington, D.C., Wideman was raised in Homewood and graduated from Peabody High School. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania and was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University in England. His novels "Damballah," "Hiding Place" and "Sent for You Yesterday" all take place in Homewood.
-- Excerpted from the History Center's "Beyond Adversity" by Patricia Pugh Mitchell
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