Aluminum Plates from Pittsburgh back in the studio

We have just received the aluminum plates from Bill Strickland's Manchester Craftsmen's Guild after a four-month show at the Federal Courthouse in downtown Pittsburgh. Last summer we visited MCG to do the project with all the summer students in the program but have yet to see the results until now.

We asked the kids on the project to tell us something about themselves and what they loved about where they lived. Although they worked in all media, from design and ceramics to video, all of their finished art was photo transferred onto translucent aluminum plates to be mounted on the section depicting the blue steel beams of the West Side Highway. The variety and beauty of these pieces is incredible, and they offer some great opportunities for how to juxtapose them on the beams. What a thrill to see some of them in place in the Sharon studio a year later. 

This summer, Eugene Korsunskiy and his crew from Bike & Build traveled across the country completing Habitat for Humanity projects as they went. As you can see in the picture of their contributed pieces, they covered a lot of ground and worked on a lot of sites. I have to believe that in order to accomplish this they did all their biking after dark. Starting in Charleston, South Carolina on May 26th and ending in Chico, California on August 7th, they never failed to send us a memorable piece from each stop. When the head of Eugene's hammer finally separated from its shaft, "doing what it loved best," as Eugene said, everyone signed it and sent it to us, to be forever immortalized in the mural. These pieces are definitely among the most creative we have received; as significant, they all came to a Fed-X drop by bike!