Pittsburgh's Avant-Garde: 60 Years Inside the Underground Art Scene

Pittsburgh's Avant-Garde: 60 Years Inside the Underground Art Scene

ISBN: 979-8-234-24736-0
By: Ali, Sheila

ABOUT THE BOOK

Pittsburgh’s Avant-Garde 60 Years Inside the Underground Art Scene features the work of 99 well-established artists with strong ties to the city of Pittsburgh. The story of Pittsburgh’s avant-garde is told through images of artworks, interviews with artists, essays by art critics, and artist and art organization profiles. The book includes contributions from individual artists, art collectors, and gallery owners, as well as art organizers, organizations, and critics—and is divided into three parts. Part one focuses on artists and art collectives through images as well as essays by writers such as David Bernabo, Bill O’Driscoll, Adrienne Wehr, and Alice Winn; it also includes interviews with artists such as Duane Michals, Thaddeus Mosley., vanessa german, Robert Qualters, Tm Kaulen, and etta cetera. Part two features unique vistas of the city of Pittsburgh by artists and photographers such as Chuck Barr, Doug Cooper, Bill Miller, Heather Mull, and Mark Perrott. It shows Pittsburgh’s rich diversity in character through its neighborhoods, urban landscape, industrial heyday, as well as its dirty post industrial grit. Part 3 focuses on art organizers, organizations, collectors, and galleries through essays about the history of art spaces, including 20 essays and profiles about such places as AIR, Boom Concepts, Digging Pitt, Garfield Artworks, and Pittsburgh Filmmakers, as well as 5 interviews with such notables as Steve Mendelson, Pat McArdle, and Richard Parsakian. Pittsburgh’s Avant-Garde includes over 600 colorful images. There are only a few existing books on the topic of Pittsburgh artists, one of them being Pittsburgh by Pittsburgh Artists, which I self-published in 2010. Pittsburgh’s Avant-Garde is a great keepsake that offers a window into Pittsburgh’s vibrant arts community and its intended audience is artists, art lovers, and people interested in Pittsburgh’s art history. This beautiful coffee table book measures 10 x 12 inches and totals 424 pages!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sheila Ali

Sheila Ali is the Director of the Irma Freeman Center for Imagination, Curator, an Art and DIY tech instructor. Sheila holds a PA Teaching Certificate for Visual Art (K-12), a BA from Brandeis University, and an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College. For over thirty years she has worked both as a teacher and education coordinator in places such as the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Spring Valley High School in Las Vegas and the University of Pittsburgh. Her artwork and films have been shown at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Las Vegas Museum of Modern Art, the Three Rivers Film Festival, and many other venues. Sheila has received over 25 grants for her educational programming such as from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Penn Avenue Arts Initiative and Artists in the Cities, the Grable Foundation, the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Sprout Fund, the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum, the Makeshop Maker Micro grant program, the Allegheny Arts Revival Grant, PNC Charitable Trust, the Boye Foundation, and the Opportunity Fund. Awards include: Hive Sprout Fund Learning Digital Badge for innovative teaching, Making Sparks awarded by Sprout, National Congressional Recognition for Outstanding Teaching in the Arts, Las Vegas, and the John Hopkins Literary Award. In 2023, she was the recipient of the Aggie Award, honoring her excellence in community activism in Pittsburgh, from the BGC. Sheila has previously published 2 editions of Girl’s Life Magazine and Pittsburgh By Pittsburgh Artists.

Ali, Sheila