July 2019 - Parks & Recreation - 35

In 2009, residents rallied to preserve
and reimagine a deteriorated hillside park. The Parks Conservancy
and the city of Pittsburgh worked
with residents to renovate the neighborhood park into a place that conveys and reinforces the community's
hopes and dreams. The renamed
August Wilson Park, opened to the
public in 2016, marries new play
equipment and natural features
with historic and contemporary artworks that incorporate traces of the
Hill District's rich cultural legacy.
For the art installation ´:H&DPH
IURPWKH6WDUV,µ artist Alisha WormsOey
worked with neighborhood children
to create drawings and collages that
explored themes of time and place.
Wormsley's imagery of children
turning into stars is printed on
windscreen fabric and mounted on a
pathway fence. Two telescopes allow
visitors to see far across the city and
up to the sky. At the park entrance, a
viewfinder with a Steel City-inspired
welder's mask contains both vintage
and current photographs of people
and places in the neighborhood. All
three viewing fixtures, painted with
figures from the children's artwork,
allow people to experience different
aspects of the neighborhood, including historic images of the community
at play. Wormsley says, " The project
recognizes the past, present and
future happening simultaneously. "
In 2009, the Parks Conservancy restored Mellon Park's Walled
Garden in honor of Ann Katharine
Seamans, a young artist who had
frequented the park to stargaze with
friends. When her family offered to
donate a commemorative artwork in
the Walled Garden, the Parks Conservancy requested a fully integrated
work rather than a standalone piece.

Foreground: Welder's mask turned
viewfinder offers glimpses of the community's
past, while Alisha Wormsley's " We Came from the
Stars " banner (background) looks to the future.

The garden, designed by Vitale and
Geiffert, is a work of art in its own
right, so it was imperative for the
new installation not to conflict with
the garden experience. Artist Janet
Zweig placed 150 fiber-optic points
of light into the garden lawn. The
lights represent the stars and planets
above Pittsburgh when Annie was
born. That date and the star coordinates give the work its title: 7:11 AM,
11.20.1979, 80° W, 26°, 40' N.
By day, visitors may discover
some of the 150 granite discs that
surround the lights, each engraved
with astronomical coordinates and
a short phrase that expresses the
most interesting thing about that sky
object. After dark, visitors see the
night sky twinkling from the lawn.
The artist's careful consideration
of material, environment and audience, in addition to Annie's spirit,
resulted in a holistic work that can
be understood not only as a commemoration, but also as a sublime
counterpart to an already beautiful
and tranquil natural environment.
In 2016, the Parks Conservancy
opened the Frick Environmental
Center, the world's first municipally
owned " Living Building " that is free
and open to the public. The center is
situated in the Nine Mile Run Watershed, home of the city's largest
free-flowing stream. The entire design
project used an ecological approach
to net zero water management on
the site, including the capture and

IMAGE COURTESY OF ALISHA WORMSLEY

Conservation Through Art

infiltration or reuse of all rainwater.
From the point of conceptual design,
the team included water artist Stacy
Levy as a collaborator to explore and
identify ways to tell the rain story in a
playful and engaging way.
Levy's artwork offers space for water interactions while capturing rainwater from the center's roof and conveying it to a wetland treatment
area. A veil of rain sheets off the long
eave, just beyond the glass gallery
wall, onto a gravel bed, to be piped
under a stair tower and dropped down
into a channel through the amphitheater.
´5DLQ5DYLQHµ presents layers of stone
slabs as a three-dimensional topographic map that reflects the park's
geology and stream valley. According
to Levy, " The artwork gives a placebased experience to the visitor, and a
sense of the patterns of 'water at work'
in the park. " The shallow stone
layers allow for easy access to explore
and play, encouraging use in all
weather - especially in the rain!
Artists who draw people into the
story of a place help to conserve
that place. They create a channel
for people to tune in to nature and
culture. By aligning project goals
with artistic intent, such works offer
powerful experiences that can lead
to new awareness and a heightened
sense of the value of parks.
Susan M. Rademacher is Parks Curator for the Pittsburgh Parks
Conservancy (srademacher@pittsburghparks.org). Gavin White
is Community Projects Manager for the Pittsburgh Parks
Conservancy (gwhite@pittsburghparks.org).

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Parks & Recreation

July 2019 - Parks & Recreation

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