A robot wearing a Santa hat here, a forest of gingerbread houses there and especially elegant blue vases a few windows away -- holiday displays are popping up in empty storefronts all over Downtown.

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Donald Louis Jones at Two PPG Place with one of the robots he created from discarded appliances and machines. Click photo for larger image.

In a marriage of mutual need and benefit, Downtown landlords and the arts community are making vacant retail spaces more inviting by turning them into galleries, where local artists can show and sell everything from painted teapots to steel torchieres.

With the holiday shopping season in full garland and twinkle, many of the works on display have taken on a wintry glow of their own. Nowhere is this more evident than in the windows fronting empty shops at Two PPG Place, not far from the festive ice rink with its towering Christmas tree.

In one window, a large family of toy robots is celebrating the holiday and gathering near an artificial silver tree. One rides a 1940s-style exercise bicycle while wearing a Santa hat. There's a robotic dog and a toy train runs continuously past this celebratory convention of mechanical wonders.

The robots' creator, Donald Louis Jones, is among the artists who have benefited from the efforts of Pittsburgh Art Institute professor Charlene Langer to fill empty real estate with changing tableaus of painting, sculpture, woodblock prints, photography, poetry and crocheted afghans.

As a result of his Downtown exposure in space once occupied by Specialty Luggage, Jones has sold some of his robots, received a few commissions and been invited to show his work at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

Langer has picked up where Gallery on the Avenues, a collaboration begun in 2000 by the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership and the Art Institute, left off. The partnership pulled out of the venture at the end of last year to focus on other ways to enhance Downtown's image.

Langer's persistence and the building and carpentry -- not to mention window-cleaning -- skills of her husband, Bill Holt, have kept the program running.

"We have so much talent in the Pittsburgh area. The public is busy. The public doesn't always have time to go to gallery openings. But that doesn't mean they're not interested,'' said Langer.

Langer admires Jones' work.

"His robots have so much personality. They remind me of those 'I Spy' books. If you look closely, you can recognize all those things he has scavenged and put together. He has been one of the cornerstones in this whole project,'' she said.

The project required coordination and negotiation with landlords plus a great deal of elbow grease, cleaning and painting.

"Many of these spaces were dirty. They needed extensive cleaning. At some points, we had to be like a hazmat crew,'' Langer said.

The response has certainly encouraged Jones, who has been sculpting with steel since he was in high school but began making robots about a year ago.

"I just built things from age 4. This is like an offshoot of my childhood. I've never grown up,'' said Jones, 46, whose father was a fabrication welder at a firm in McKees Rocks.

Now, the Ingram artist forages in thrift stores and at yard sales, where he cadges old parts for his work.

"Most of them, if you start looking at them, you'll see different parts of vacuum cleaners and blenders. Half the time when I'm building these, I'm in hysterics. It's great therapy,'' Jones said.

Anita Falce of Grubb & Ellis, the company that manages PPG Place, said Two PPG's retail level had three empty spaces.

"We did want to fill it. We had a lot of visitors because of the Santa exhibit [in the PPG Wintergarden] and because of the rink. We want it to be a complete experience."

Work by artists from the Pittsburgh Glass Center fills another PPG storefront. And, about 180 gingerbread houses built by students, families and chefs are on display in Two PPG Place.

George Pry, executive director of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, lauded Langer's decision to keep going when the partnership withdrew its support.

"She went directly to the building owners and a few of them wanted her to stay on and she did," he said.

The work of Carol Randolph, a Waynesburg artist who runs a studio there and teaches painting at the Greene Academy of Art in Carmichaels, is on view in a storefront on Fifth Avenue. Randolph has sold a painted teapot, a painted oval papier-mache box and oil paintings on antique fruit crates.

"I haven't sold a huge number but it's very impressive when you tell people that you have your work on display on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh. The whole idea of turning what would be blight, cleaning up the spaces and displaying art, is such a great idea and everybody benefits from it,'' Randolph said.

Neither Langer nor the Art Institute collects a commission on any of the art that ultimately sells.

Carnegie Mellon University students did an installation in a space left vacant by Lerner's on Fifth Avenue, across the street from Lazarus. The students created silhouettes of people by using white paper, and lighted the silhouettes.

"The lights create a shadow pattern from the people onto the blank sheets of paper,'' Langer said.

A building that Radio Shack once occupied at Liberty and Fifth is being used to display portraits of students from the city's Creative and Performing Arts High School.

Property owners, Langer said, have been "absolutely wonderful. I think they like the activity at their sites. There have been a few sites where we did exhibits and later on the space was rented. It gives some vitality to what otherwise would be bleak,'' Langer said.