Joined by almost 75 Downtown residents, neighbors, and stakeholders, The Sprout Fund proudly announced the finalists in competition for the 2012 Downtown Public Art Project at the Public Art Forum on Monday, December 5, 2011 at the Cabaret at Theatre Square.
After a national search for highly qualified artists with Pittsburgh roots, 97 applications were received and a selection panel of art experts and community leaders selected four finalists to create design proposals for a signature work of public art in Downtown Pittsburgh to be located at the Law & Finance Building on 4th Avenue. These proposals will be debuted during First Night Pittsburgh on New Year’s Eve.
The finalists are:
Kim Beck & Brett Yasko
Artist Kim Beck has exhibited locally at the Mattress Factory, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and the Warhol Museum as well as at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Smack Mellon and Mixed Greens Gallery in New York, and Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo. Her public commissions from Socrates Sculpture Park and the High Line in New York have been reviewed in the New York Times and Art in America. Her collaborator is Brett Yasko, a graphic designer who devotes the majority of his time working with cultural-, community- and arts-related commissions with an emphasis on exhibition and publication design. His work has been shown locally at SPACE, TRAF Gallery, Artist Image Resource, and the Mattress Factory, as well as at The Center for Book Arts, NYC, The AIGA National Design Center, NYC, Northeastern University, Boston, and Forja Arte Contemporáneo, Valencia, Spain. He has done public artwork projects for the Three Rivers Arts Festival, First Night Pittsburgh, and the Mattress Factory.
Matt Barton & Jacob Ciocci
Artists Jacob Ciocci and Matt Barton have shown work collectively and independently in a wide range of galleries and art institutions around the world. Ciocci is a founding member of the Paper Rad art collective and has performed and exhibited at The New Museum and The MOMA in New York, Tate Britain, and more recently the TBA festival in Portland, Oregon and the Penrith National Gallery in Australia. Barton currently teaches sculpture at UC-Colorado Springs, where he is the co-director of Visual Art, and has exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Pittsburgh Children’s Museum, The Carnegie Museum, and the Fine Arts Center – Colorado Springs. Barton and Ciocci’s collaborative works include “Extreme Animalz The Movie Part 1″ commissioned for Rhizome ArtBase 101 at the New Museum, and “Egypt Was A Test” commissioned for the Gestures exhibit at the Mattress Factory. Both artists earned their Masters in Fine Arts from the Carnegie Mellon University School of Art.
Joyce Kozloff
Artist Joyce Kozloff was a co-founder in both the Pattern and Decoration and feminist art movement of the 1970s and has been active in the women’s and peace movements throughout her life. To reach a broader audience, Kozloff produced fifteen public commissions between 1983 and 2003, most of which were executed in ceramic tile, or glass and marble mosaic. Since the early 1990s, Kozloff has utilized mapping as a device for contextualizing her long-term interests in history, culture, decorative, and popular arts. In 1999-2000, Kozloff was awarded the Jules Guerin Fellowship, Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, Italy.
Steve O’Hearn
Artist and Industrial Designer Steve O’Hearn is the co-founder, with Jackie Dempsey, of internationally touring multi-media group Squonk Opera. The Squonkers have received 5 NEA grants, an American Theater Wing and Rockefeller MAP awards, much regional support, and have performed on and off-Broadway. As a visual artist, O’Hearn has been Heinz Artists in Residence at the Warhol Museum, where he had a solo show, and has received 3 International Design awards, and twice at the Prague International. Steve is currently engaged in developing his own artisanal, pro-biotic sauerkraut from his wife’s cabbages.