Empowerment Through Art
Every three years Guild Members of the Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media are invited to submit work for a juried group exhibition called The New Collective, which is held at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
This year 12 Artists from the PCA Member Guilds were selected to be in the exhibition. I am honored to be one of the twelve chosen. I will post details on the exhibition as they develop.
I will be at the fair in the Park this year in the Children’s Tent and bring two projects from Studio Blue at Shuman Center and Studio Blue at the Construction junction
Attached are posters that are going into the Children’s Tent booth at A Fair in the Park September 6-8 Mellon Park. I am on the Craftsmen’s Guild of Pittsburgh board and will not be participating as an artist this year but instead will be bringing two exciting projects from Studio Blue to the Family/Children’s Booth at the fair. It will give me opportunities to talk about Shuman / Studio Blue and creative involvements both in and out of Shuman Center. The fair patron participation is in the thousands and many of you know me so I will be able to do a lot of promotion for the activities which I will be overseeing.
One of the activities will be part of the current Allegheny County Family Division Courthouse exhibition called “Why Art?”. The patrons of the fair will have the opportunity to color two blank posters billboards that are gifted by Shuman Center When the two are completed the posters traveling on the rear of buses in the month of September and will proudly join the exhibition at the courthouse I should have them at the courthouse by mid-September in time for Juvenile Justice Week Awards.
Also, the furniture project I am bringing to the fair will be a new community project called “GOT H-ART?” taken from the Got Milk theme which is not universally used for many venues. I will be able to create many community-based projects based on the principle of utilizing the “heart of the creator to benefit the heart of Pittsburgh”. A piece of furniture donated by Studio Blue at Construction Junction will be offered to the public to take part in painting the piece…. there will be hundreds of blank hearts drawn on the furniture and patrons can each paint one heart ….and within each heart a message or initials of the person who painted it.
I have partnered with Crossing Limits on this project so it will fall nicely into the “I too am Pittsburgh” bus poetry project in which 60 poems and artworks will travel on the inside of Port Authority buses all launching in October. This project has already received a lot of press.
Shuman Center has created all 60 artworks. that will highlight all 60 poems. Shuman residents also created 15 of the 60 poems submitted by the Pittsburgh community residents that will be publicly visible.
FACES OF THE PIPELINE AND POINT PARK VIDEO MAKE NATIONAL PARTNERSHIP FOR JUVENILE SERVICES NEWS
COUNTY EXECUTIVE RICH FIZGERAKLD SPEAKS AT 2019 DIVERSITY AWARD CEREMONY
COUNTY EXECUTIVE RICH FITZGERALD AT AWARD CEREMONY TWITTER
This year I will be joining Crossing Limits, Port Authority and 60 talented Pittsburgh poets as
You can find the video here.
Talisman, Memory Boxes and More!
Gerry Florida is an award-winning assemblage artist who refers to as a “Master of Imperfection”. Her creations deliver underlying messages of rebirth, recovery, and reclamation through an array of salvaged, recycled, and contemporary materials that she employs in her work. Her intrigue with the “beauty of imperfection” has led her to work on behalf of at-risk populations locally and nationally fostering the belief that integrating failures, accepting imperfections, and embracing differences is the path to living in harmony with the imperfections surrounding us and to living in sync with the real world and the one we can create.
