The Next Page / 'The Lost Pittsburgh School': a project
2012-03-30 03:17:01
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'Joseph Barkoczi'
Untitled, 14th and Smallman
By Stewart O'Nan
For several generations, being a Pittsburgher was like living with a ghost. In the national consciousness, Pittsburgh was a joke, another rundown Rust Belt town, a destination inconceivable to those on the coasts. As David Byrne famously sang of rural America, "I wouldn't live there if you paid me."
Pittsburghers who had to buy their groceries and raise their children couldn't be so blithe. The jobs were gone and the town they knew was bleeding out. The mills stood empty, the great machine sheds abandoned to pigeons, and then, at the stroke of a pen, flattened, the lots by the Mon graded, fenced black fields where nothing grew.
This was George Romero's Land of the Dead, victim of industry greed and parochialism, and the world was content to share that view. Move along, nothing to see here.
The Lost Pittsburgh School project
This project pays tribute to a group of artists about whom little has been said. Like laborers on the wrong end of a strike or soldiers lost in an uneven battle, they were swept from the local ledger.
I came across remnants of their work during the past decade, sifting through gallery back bins, wandering the last of Pittsburgh's undeveloped industrial brown spaces, listening in bars. Preserved in the closets and memory of art lovers such as Ellen Neuberg, Richard Parsakian and Pat McCardle, they were a dream come true for someone who believes that the story of post-industrial America has never been well and truly told, who believes that a mountainous economic tragedy and its lessons are being sifted away into the cultural landscape.
Now, at this point, it must be said that, while the artwork of The Lost Pittsburgh School is real, the artists featured on this page are not. Joseph Barkoczi, Ryan Avedissian, Pamela Luwderowski, The Skids Crews and other members of the school are imagined exemplars of an era, vehicles to help us reconceive what is art, and what is Pittsburgh.
This project barely mentions a large cadre of flesh-and-blood artists who have based their work and lives in this region for 40-plus years. They have hewed a story out of Pittsburgh's roller coaster history that is at once parochial and lean, yet epic and rich as any corner of the country's imagination.
Marie Kelly, Charles Jackson, Bob Knepper, Jerry Kaplan, Ed Eberle, Thad Mosley, Bud Gibbons, Helen Worsing and, more recently, Jim Dugas, Craig Marcus, John Fobes, Ron Donoghue, Kevin Kutz ... the list goes on. Although they've had numerous gallery shows and have made a living here, they've not been given their proper due. I apologize that it is not given in the pages of The Lost Pittsburgh School.
First Published July 31, 2011 12:00 am
