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For Pittsburghers of a certain age, the art exhibit “Pittsburgh’s Avant-Garde” is a walk down memory lane. For anyone younger, it’s a time capsule of the city’s artistic riches.
The Irma Freeman Center for Imagination show features works by 60 of the most notable artists who’ve worked in town during the past few generations, dating to the 1960s.
On entering the Bloomfield arts center, you’re greeted by a visionary quilt by Ruth Bedeian, a puckish Robert Qualters self-portrait, a Thad Mosely abstract sculpture, a larger-than-life Cheryl Capezutti biped fashioned from lint, and a characteristically gritty sculptural assemblage by the late James Shipman.
And those are just some of the works in the Center’s front room. The back chamber spotlights dozens more, from one of Ryder Henry’s retro-futurist spaceships made from repurposed materials to a ceramic piece by Laura Jean McLaughlin, a mind-boggling abstract painting by the late Jim Dugas, and Tim Kaulen’s small-scale sculpture of a few of his iconic street-art geese.
Because most of the pieces date from the past decade or so, the exhibit isn’t technically a retrospective. Freeman Center founder Sheila Ali, who curated it, let the artists (or their estates) each pick one work to represent them.
But the larger point, Ali says, is to remember the era or the several eras when those artists emerged and helped define what artmaking in Pittsburgh could be. The show is a companion to and teaser for a book project of the same name covering 60 years of local art.
That project sprang from Ali’s series of “Pittsburgh by Pittsburgh Artists” shows at the gallery. Her plan to publish a catalog of work from those shows grew into something more ambitious. Six years of work followed.
The exhibit, which opened Dec. 6 with a big reception, will remain up into March. In between comes a series of talks and hands-on workshops, culminating in February with the publication (date TBA) of a massive hardback with hundreds of images covering all of the artists in the exhibit and more, plus texts drawn from both contemporaneous sources and new writings. (Full disclosure: One of the many pieces in the book is my 2019 WESA feature story on self-taught artist Chuck Barr.)
Ali grew up in Pittsburgh and was introduced to the alternative art scene in the ’80s; in 2009, she launched the Freeman Center, naming it after her late grandmother, a prolific self-taught artist.
She acknowledges her own taste and experience are the framework for both book and exhibit.
“Most of the people in the show have had their own shows here,” she says. She already knew many of them, in other words, and in the course of her research met most of the rest. The oldest of the artists represent a time that’s passing.
“Seven people have died while I’m doing this project,” she says. Many others are in their 70s or 80s.
Ali expects criticism about artists not included in the exhibit or book, and even about some who are.
And indeed, critics who’d argue some of the works are not “avant-garde” have a case: Not all of them pushed the boundaries of form or content, even in the time when they were first created.
But as Ali says of the book, “This isn’t an encyclopedia.”
She notes the presence of artists such as the late Joan Brindle, whose work was featured in the first-ever Freeman Center exhibit – the first time, Ali said, it had been exhibited since the ’70s.
“I just really like giving props to people who didn’t get it but deserve it,” she said.
