As part of a Making Mass Media class, Carnegie Mellon students created billboards. Amos Levy's "Drawing of Pittsburgh" is on a billboard on Brighton Road near Highwood Cemetery, North Side.

By Marylynne Pitz
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all."

-- Ogden Nash

Even the late Ogden Nash, whose witty wordplay attracted armies of admirers, might have liked the billboards appearing this week in Oakland and other city neighborhoods.

	"Snowballs from the Freezer" is a group project that is on a billboard at Bigelow Boulevard at Craig Street in Oakland. Click photo for larger image.

A whimsical picture called "Snowballs from the Freezer" shows 10 Carnegie Mellon University students dressed in black business suits playing in the snow on Schenley Park's Anderson Playground.

This image, which showcases youthful joie de vivre while reminding us of a winter that is, thankfully, past, might have inspired Nash to write some cute couplets. It's also a puckish admonition to pack some fun into your life, regardless of your daily uniform.

These students, enrolled in the first Making Mass Media class, were thrilled to have a canvas that is 22 feet long, 12 feet tall and seen by thousands of people every day.

Their professor, Christopher Sperandio, arranged for Lamar Outdoor Advertising to showcase the image, which is actually made up of a dozen different pictures taken on a snowy Sunday in February.

CMU's art program has a tradition of working with community groups, Mr. Sperandio said. The course, he said, is relevant because "we live in a culture now where people tune into the Super Bowl to see the ads. We didn't have a studio class that addressed this subject."

"Despite it being the school of Andy Warhol," added senior Amos Levy, a class member.

David Shirey, a sales manager for Lamar Advertising, said the company cooperates with such projects when it's possible.

Creating the Oakland billboard was an exercise in collaboration.

The students -- most of whom are seniors -- focused on crafting an image with a message that could be read quickly by passing motorists.

Rachel Renee Stewart's "Splat," a giant bug splat on a windshield, is on Brown's Hill Road at Beechwood Boulevard, Squirrel Hill. Click photo for larger image.

"What would catch their eye and lift their spirits?" said student Nathan Lee, articulating the question he and his classmates asked themselves.

Class members also considered using the billboard as a directional device to send motorists on a hunt and toyed with the possibility of re-creating a scene from the Whiskey Rebellion.

Inclusiveness played a key role.

"We wanted an image that had most of the class in it," said Blake Unger Dvorchik.

"We thought of wearing trench coats open with paintings in the linings. The image itself was just so much more important," he added.

Each student's talents came to the fore, with Rachel Renee Stewart, a nature lover, suggesting Anderson Playground as a good site. Ariel Coronis was the organizer.

Genevieve Barbee carefully considered the role of clothing in the image and thoroughly enjoyed the students' shopping trip to the Goodwill thrift store on the South Side.

Ultimately, the class shot 125 pictures at Schenley Park, edited those down to 30 and then isolated portions of the digital images they liked to create the composite.

Lee used the computer software PhotoShop to create the composite. He also hypersaturated the reds, blues and oranges to create strong color contrast.

Once the image was created, Megan Pentz came up with the title.

"It's kind of a greeting card from a different season," said Andrew Shedd, the lone junior in the class.

Three other images created by students in the class were chosen for display on local billboards by Elizabeth Thomas, now the MATRIX curator at the Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, Calif.

Unger Dvorchik created a blank piece of plywood with a small piece of square white paper slightly off center. The billboard is on Brighton Road on the North Side.

"It's in a setting so removed from where art is traditionally shown. It's conceptual. It's not going to be immediately clear to people what the point is," he said.

The crowd pleaser might turn out to be Levy's line drawing of the Pittsburgh skyline, which resembles the dust jacket of a children's book by Shel Silverstein.

Levy finds inspiration in the liveliness and spontaneity of graffiti art.

"I feel like most billboard images are overworked and too slick," he said. In 20 minutes, he sketched the city using squiggly lines, decorating the sky with a moon and stars. This billboard appears on Brighton Road near Highwood Cemetery.

Rachel Renee Stewart wanted to make something motorists would read in a flash -- a giant bug splat. She found a high resolution image of a butterfly and then removed the wings. She printed the image onto photographic paper, then threw paint at it 10 different times.

Stewart used the technique of collage to place her butterfly, which is an homage to Abstract Expressionism, into the center of a gritty image that shows a car headed toward Downtown Pittsburgh.

"It's all about the collision of opposites -- being inside vs. outside," Stewart said of the image that appears on Brown's Hill Road in Squirrel Hill.

All of the students, CMU faculty and local artists will screen their art on the Jumbotron at PNC Park on April 20. Each artist's work will appear on the screen for one minute between 7:30 and 8:30 that evening.

When the Jumbotron starts to flash, Sperandio said, "People on Mount Washington will wonder what's going on."