Funding for this program was made possible by the members of WQED and the Allegheny Regional Asset District.

Thank you.

The arts ecology in Pittsburgh is quite robust and there's a lot going on, a lot of different levels without limit.

I think the arts for the parish, they've been the backbone of the arts in America.

There's a lack of information written about female artists from Pittsburgh.

It's a very male dominated field.

It's very difficult for an artist, and particularly a woman, to be taken seriously.

I think there are more opportunities available today than there were when I was growing up.

I think it's important for young kids to look at art because it's a way to think about life.

If you want to make things that have a purpose and support other human beings, then this is a really good place to do it.

There's a lot of work to be done as far as telling the stories of female artists who have come from Pittsburgh.

I love the titles of the stories Danger, Girl at Work, Heartbreak Haven at the Vivacious Deceiver, Sassy Little Rebel, and Cupid on the warpath.

I started doing covers for pulp magazines when I was quite young.

I was 17, now I'm 94.

And in the 50s, I grew up in Sunnyside, which is a small section of Queens, New York.

My dad had died when I was 15, and so it was just mom and me.

I was an only child, and those with depression days.

I went to the High School of Music and Art, which was an amazing experience.

I actually had a job with the New York Life Insurance Company after I graduated and was very boring.

I had a mom who didn't keep stuff.

I mean, if you didn't use it out of when I took the four years of art work that I had done in high school, I tied them up and I was going to put them down the incinerator and my artwork didn't fit down the chute, so I just put my work on top of everybody's newspapers.

The next morning, there was a tap on the door, and it was the janitor, and the janitor said he had found my artwork, and he took it to the sixth floor, where an artist lived.

And the artist was Rafael de Soto, who was doing wonderful covers for pulp magazines.

And the janitor said that he would like to meet me.

He thought I had some talent.

He got me an illustration to do.

So I quit my job.

And then nothing happened for a while and I thought, oh, big mistake.

But then little by little they came in and I was doing a lot for a number of years.

At that time, I was the only woman that I knew of that worked there.

Women were kind of submerged and men took the spotlight.

She was so talented and prolific that she left this lasting mark.

My name is Heidi Ruby Miller.

I work at Seton Hill University and I teach in the MFA program and writing popular fiction.

I first met Gloria at the Pittsburgh Pulp Fest in 2017, and this is this wonderful convention that has everything to do with old pulp and new pulp.

Gloria was one of only a handful of women that actually got to illustrate for the parks, because it was very male dominated.

She was definitely putting the female form front and center, and it didn't have to be the female form in a very sexual way.

She had this cheeky sense of humor about her $0.10.

This was a ten cent magazine.

Detective tales.

This one was more classy.

It was $0.15.

This is my album of rangeland romances.

The horses are kind of eye on each other over here.

Oh, extra romance thrown in.

What are the things that we always thought was neat about mom's work?

It's so wholesome and fresh.

Even the creepy ones.

I don't know how I came up with these ideas.

If she spelled out the name of her killer with her pearl necklace.

I guess she was pretty alert before she was, but she passed out.

Yeah.

I moved to Pittsburgh in 1948, and because I married a Pittsburgh man, and I was immediately emerged in the art culture here.

I did watercolor.

I especially like to do portraits.

I did landscapes as well.

I think you can tell something about a person from their art.

But I guess in a way they are a slice of history.

I look at them that way and I feel sort of historical self.

I want to do something that's focused on black women and our power, not power that's based on control or fear, but power that's like of the spirit.

It's mystical and nourishing power that brings us all together.

I'm an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer.

That means that my art goes through many disciplines.

My work starts in video.

I'm thinking about narratives and thinking about the stories.

But I want to tell a culture that I want to show.

I take that video and sometimes I will projected on a wall, or I will create a film that you would sit in a theater and watch, or I might set up an installation and projected into water.

I also take some of the still images from the video and cut them up and make collages.

Or make screen prints from them.

I could blow them up large and make billboards.

I have a body of work called There Are Black People in the future.

There's very little African-American presence in science fiction, and that is my favorite genre.

That's when I had the residency through the Warhol Museum in Homewood, and I was working with middle school kids.

We were making sci fi films, and they would say like, oh, this is perfect place to make an apocalypse or a zombie film because it looks like an apocalypse.

And I'm like, this is your neighborhood.

People live here.

And then we started having conversation like, why does it look like this?

While the kids were shooting.

I would pick up objects on the ground like a smashed iPhone.

I started stamping or printing there.

Black people feature on all these objects and then encasing them in resin.

I am archiving this neighborhood like it is this civilization that I want to hold on to, that I want to remember.

John Rubin, who I teach with at Carnegie Mellon, he has a project called The Last Billboard in Liberty.

There was this old Lamar billboard.

He started having artists put text on the billboard.

He asked me if I wanted to put there black people in the future on the billboard.

John Rubin started getting emails from the owner of the building.

Like, we got a couple complaints.

Can you take it down?

There were a couple other emails from developers, so it was removed, and John and I both wrote statements that we were against censorship.

There were protests, and then we had a community meeting around it.

I was in Houston when I found out that Alicia's billboard was taken down.

I texted Alicia was like, okay, I'm so sorry that your billboard is taken down, but it's kind of awesome.

It presents the conversation.

I was like, why is this problematic?

Yeah, and Pittsburgh showed up.

Yeah, very positively.

The Modernize of the conversation that Alicia is bringing up is really important for the people of Pittsburgh to consider how different communities can start to coexist more together.

What I'm really interested in is the way that stories overlap, the way that culture overlaps, there is like this past, present, and future happening all at one time.

What is going on?

Where is Nan?

Children of Nan is a film series that I started about the survival of black women in America.

The first film is focused on being a black mother in America.

When I became a mother, that's when I really realized how little we think of the most important job in humanity.

I feel like I'm making the best work I've ever made because I'm a mother.

I think it's just, like, crucial for us to be able to share our experiences and share the difference between them.

And that is the most important thing.

I think that's the most boring thing about art.

I have been making digital art since I was in kindergarten, but I'm a visual artist from Pittsburgh specializing in light painting and photography.

My artwork mixes a lot of visual art as well as technology.

I start off with a photograph of a place that I've been.

I'm actually able to put traditional photographs into this digital LED system.

These play back a digital photo, one column of pixels at a time.

So if I walk in a straight line for five seconds and I have my camera open, you would get a floating rectangle of that landscape because I don't walk in a straight line while my camera's open.

I'm able to twist and morph the landscape overtop of itself, so that you get these abstracted shapes.

But the work isn't just pretty colors.

They're actually places where I've been.

This is a landscape of the Arctic Circle at sunrise from kilpisjarvi, Finland.

And these two pieces are both landscapes from Iceland.

This image is a fruit tree against the sky.

You can sort of see that there's the blue from the sky.

And then this is like a tree branch.

And the dots of red are fruit.

This is from the Yukon River.

There was a rainbow.

That's part of Pittsburgh that I think is the most challenging part of the art scene, is trying to get people in Pittsburgh to actually buy art of local artists, so that we can make a living and survive here.

I was invited to a show last year at the last minute, I think, because they realized there weren't any women in the show.

I do feel like that the female artists in Pittsburgh aren't valued as much in terms of what collectors are willing to pay for.

Artists work.

Men, and maybe collectors in general, don't like it when women negotiate.

So that kind of puts the female artist a little bit as a disadvantage.

For me, part of this work is also getting other people excited about making art.

Drawing with your body and light is, I think, pretty magical.

And to see the joy that people have once they realize that, like they just made that.

These are some of the light paintings that we did in Beach View.

The community members were actually given the lights, and then we were making silhouette portraits.

So that that's the people are standing there.

I'm saying, don't move.

There was this lady, I mean, she probably was in her 70s and she was seeing herself in the screen and she's like, it's like I'm flying.

Like she was this little kid again.

My name is Yesica Guerra.

I'm the public art and civic design manager for the City of Pittsburgh.

Laurie, work with us in H. Friendly Pittsburgh on Color Beach view.

That was a project to create a couple workshops in order to create a work of art that is, stay within the senior center.

It is important for everyone to have access to art.

So that's a beauty about public art.

You want the community to accept it.

You want the community to accept it.

You want the community to have some ownership, to want the community to have pride of that piece of art.

I hope his work is growing on the public art scene.

It does need to be pushed.

We need to definitely step up, and this board needs to be given to those artists because they're here.

The students that haven't had the art training may not be able to have the vision of what the future might look like.

Scientists needing to take an art class.

It's one way to get them to think about how to be creative in their own field.

So for science and technology sake, we need kids learning how to be creative and art is a good way to start with that.

Abstract art to me is unusual.

It's different.

It's provocative.

Your whole psyche is involved in whatever it is that you're creating.

It's just very rewarding.

I grew up here in Pittsburgh and Hazelwood community.

Happy go lucky kid.

My father would say, I don't understand what it is you're making, but it's okay if you're doing it.

My work reflects my experiences as an artist.

Being experimental, I'd like to deal with color, texture, and form and texture as well.

Words that I hear in the community I used to hear from my students.

I also would hear them.

Hairdresser.

These are words that are primarily often used by African-American community youth, and I incorporate some of those words in my work.

This is about Michael Brown shooting.

Color shouldn't have any form.

It shouldn't matter whether you're red, black, white, whatever to do.

Whatever you want to do allows you to say whatever it is that you want to be and do.

Power to the people.

Beauty is in the eye of the holder.

Moving on is just accidental life.

Just happiness.

Revisiting something that happened in the past.

This is the one about Ferguson.

Why did it happen?

Why did this have happened?

That's the whole point.

Why was he shot?

I am a real person, and I deserve to be recognized and treated as a human being.

I started out with a big sheet of white paper.

I add color to the paper.

This is my shred of junk mail to create the texture for my pieces.

And then I start adding the text on top of all of that.

I just looked at it as a part of my routine.

I graduated from school, I raised kids, I knew that I wanted to do this, so I did it at night.

Pretty much after the children were in bed.

From the time I graduated from college until I retired, I spent as art educator.

Most of the students were males in the art department.

Most of the students were white.

There were black students, but they were not in the majority.

Joanne Bates was one of the original teachers.

It certainly made a difference in the visual arts department.

A huge difference.

I was a founding principle of the Pittsburg High School for the Creative Performing Arts.

The students of art would see what she was able to create.

It's just incredible.

This is what I teach my students to do traditional printmaking.

The whole concept of the magnet school program was for desegregation.

The one that looked like the most successful was the school for the Arts.

One of the unfortunate parts about arts education is this is one of the first areas that's cut in funding.

You can reach some students through art that you can't reach through something else.

It can allow students to realize that they can solve math problems.

They can solve scientific problem.

They can do many of these things through the arts.

I always tried to encourage my students to look at not becoming artists, but becoming artistic thinkers.

If you take all the art away.

What would you have?

I grew up on the Ohio River at a time when there were so many work in steel mills and the industrial landscape, which is been awful for the environment.

It was really beautiful.

I think that my gravitation toward steel was a natural result.

And made this autonomous sculpture because I can't help myself.

I mean, I don't really have a better explanation for it than that.

I feel that with artwork of this type, you interact with it and you see what's in front of you, but you also see a reflection of yourself.

While I was in grad school, I started working with my hands in a way that I'd never had an opportunity to do before, and I started making things that I was calling things, and other people started calling sculpture.

And I remember the day I started looked in the mirror in the bathroom and I said, I'm a sculptor.

And then I set it about a thousand more times.

At the end of that day, I had made that decision, that this is what I was going to do.

Making work at a large scale was going to be in the public, ultimately has to not kill anybody.

It has to stand up.

I don't think it'd be able to make the kind of work that I'm making.

Had I not gone to architecture school, I make small pieces of this type that immediately start putting scale figures next to them, and often the scale figures get smaller and smaller, and in my mind, the pieces get larger and larger.

Generally, the process for large scale commissions is to study the site.

Meet with a collector.

I usually start working in a cheap, easy to work with material like paper.

This.

This particular paper model is was the very beginning that led to, eventually large scale pieces in Downtown Pittsburgh.

Once I've settled on something I'm excited about, then develop the drawings that are necessary to make it in the final material.

I discovered my obsession with geometry while I was in grad school.

I want to understand the materials, possibilities and its constraints, and then I want to push those boundaries.

When I look at these work, I see a lot of visual connections to the movement known as minimalism and an intense interest in geometry.

My name is Madeline Gent, and I'm the executive director of Associated Artists of Pittsburgh.

Associated Artists of Pittsburgh is an artist membership organization with the mission of showing regional artists and giving them a space.

Dee is one of our member artists.

We've shown her work in exhibitions.

What I like about Dees work is it's often a style that's associated with being cold.

But then there's another added element of working with the community and bringing them into her work.

I live and work in Wilkinsburg.

I take my responsibility as a neighbor really seriously.

I endeavor to involve my neighbors in the projects that I make, to the extent that I can.

You can see how rain, just how the air quality has affected the work.

She's thinking a lot about context, about where the work will be placed and whether affects a lot of that.

The piece is transformed over time into that bright, brilliant orange.

The work is kind of living in that sense, that it's not stagnant, that there's constantly things changing about it.

I taught architecture at CMU.

And then taught three courses in the art school.

I think that women are more often encouraged to pursue things that are seen as more feminine, that are safer, that are less intimidating.

But I have found that if you teach a young woman how to take a 4x4 sheet of three quarter inch plywood and run it through a table saw by herself, she will make all sorts of cool stuff.

When I think about my identity, woman is not the top of the list for me.

You know, it's sculpture.

First, and I love it.

It's a life that's hard to explain.

But I have no regrets.

Women have always been here in the arts and because of your gender years.

But as the next person, I would like to think that maybe she brought in some female fans because they could see themselves in those covers.

Pittsburgh was showing up in her work, in her style.

Whenever I went to her studio and I saw her process and her work, I was so excited.

She's using photography, she's using wearable technology.

She's using performance, combining all of this.

The students of art would see what she was able to create.

Just incredible.

We can give attention and understanding and context to these female artists that are working.

It's important to support the work of women artists because if you don't, you're only seeing half the picture.

And the more we know about one another, the better off we are.

I only collect art from young female sculptors because I know how hard it is.

How can you come up with a new idea of technology if you can't be creative?

I belong to a group called visions, which was all African American female artists, because women artists wanted an opportunity to show their work, and I figured an opportunity would be better to have an organization behind them.

When you have a child, like, the whole universe opens up to you.

Every mother is an artist, a brilliant artist.

That was my high school girlfriend and a boyfriend.

Can't remember his name.