people and ideas at the edge of innovation
The Sprout Fund has invested more than $4.1 million in 481 community projects since 2001. Browse the project list to discover more about supported projects, organizations, and inititatives.
The Huellas Latinas Concert Series presented a sequence of five concerts focusing on Spanish and Latin American classical and folkloric music. With each concert dedicated to celebrating culturally important dates and events in Latin American and Spanish history, the series united the community and promoted Hispanic culture through music.
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An artist-in-residence program initiated by The Andy Warhol Museum, the HOMEWOOD Artist Residency invited national and international contemporary artists who represented the diversity of Homewood to take residence in rehabilitated houses and split the homes into living and studio spaces. Artists created projects that reflected the overarching history and culture of Homewood, including a large-scale installation in the Greater Pittsburgh Coliseum that blended the memories and voices of Homewood’s residents into a physical work of art. The project supported artists of color, brought diversity to the contemporary arts community in Pittsburgh, and engaged a community with limited access to the visual arts.
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PIX: The Pittsburgh Indy Comics Expo 2010 was Pittsburgh’s first-ever exposition devoted solely to creator-owned, self-published, small press, and handmade comics. PIX was held at a repurposed storage facility in the Strip District and was free and the open to the public. The event highlighted a flourishing community of comic artists and cartoonists in Pittsburgh and presented work from across the country, and around the world. PIX united the region’s comic artists to create an awareness within the group of its strength and numbers and to encourage its future artistic growth.
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The first festival of its kind, VIA showcased cutting-edge musicians who blurred genres of electronic music alongside artists who worked at the forefront of video, game design, and live music visualization. Over the course of three days, VIA 2010 presented workshops and lectures by internationally renowned artists, programming in partnership with local art organizations, and over 40 hours of performances and installations at the historic Iron City Brewery complex. The festival was a concentrated event that highlighted musical and visual talent from home and around the world.
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The Sky Is the Limit enlisted a skywriter to write messages taken from city advisements in the sky over downtown Pittsburgh. Loosed from their paper signs and billboards, common phrases like “Space Available” evoked open-ended poetic meanings and suggested the promise of new opportunities. The expressions were reproduced to fill ad space in the Pittsburgh City Paper, to perplex readers and to point to the changing nature of the newspaper industry. In collaboration with Pittsburgh Filmmakers, the project was fully documented in photos and video. Large photographic prints of the skywriting were then installed in storefront windows, effectively returning the transformed language to its original context.
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Character Therapy from Interbots, LLC is a program at the Autism Center of Pittsburgh that uses Popchilla robot devices to engage children living with Autism Spectrum Disorders in emotional and communication therapy.
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Papermation from The Schmutz Company hosts stop motion animation workshops for children ages 3-8 at community venues throughout Pittsburgh.
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A pair of Reggae performances at Healcrest Urban Farms, Rootz of Farming Events celebrated urban farming and local food. The performances upheld the ideals of rootz cultures, defined by spiritual and cultural emphases on reggae music, fresh foods, and a healthy environment. The events kicked off and closed the Pittsburgh growing seasons and drew reggae lovers from all over the city.
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The book Building A Better Robot: Ten Years of Roboto was a retrospective look at the Mr. Roboto Project, a cooperatively run performance venue and community space in Wilkinsburg. In ten years, the space hosted over 1,500 events; served as a hub for the Pittsburgh DIY punk, hardcore, and indie rock communities; and provided incubator space to other organizations such as Free Ride! and The Big Idea. Roboto shut down its original location on Wood Street shortly after its ten-year anniversary in preparation to move to a new space. This book looks back at Roboto’s first ten years in words and pictures, analyzing the successes and failures, and providing inspiration and insight to a new generation of activists and artists looking to create their own spaces.
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Public Record was a multimedia documentary poetry project that offered a unique glimpse into the lives of our city’s forebears. It was a book of poems based on text sampled from 19th-century Pittsburgh crime reports-poems about people whose only appearance in the historical record is this single act of transgression. The project included a set of audio recordings of those poems by local artists and used technology to allow audience members to experience those poems, via mobile phone, in the locations at which the events transpired. Created by artist and writer Justin Hopper as an Old and New Media Artist-in-Residence with technology company Deeplocal and underground publishers Encyclopedia Destructica, Public Record took its audiences on a tour of the city, revealing Pittsburgh’s past as the poetic layers upon which we build our future.
Read More →Growth Through Energy + Community Health (GTECH) Strategies received $10,000 from PurBlu Beverages, Inc. to help launch their citywide “ReFuel Pittsburgh” project, a social …
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Walks in the Parks with Robotic Creatures from Ian Ingram led children on nature walks where they discovered small robots that mimic animal and plant behaviors.
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Held in the Wilkinsburg section of the Nine Mile Run Watershed, Love Your Watershed Day advocated for the restoration and protection of the Watershed and Watershed communities. The project engaged citizens in an underserved, low-income section of Pittsburgh, celebrating work that had already been done and introducing progressive new ideas. The event featured free food, music, and live art installations and provided ecological information from local businesses.
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The first Pittsburgh Gigapanorama was an interactive, 360-degree portrait of southwestern Pennsylvania as seen from the roof of the U. S. Steel Tower. Assembled from more than 4,000 individual pictures taken on one chilly October morning, this photograph contained 31.3 gigabytes (10.5 gigapixels) of information, ranking it among the largest digital images ever created. If displayed in full size, the photo would be 50 feet high by 285 feet long. A downsized banner, measuring 48 inches high by 23 feet long, was developed and smaller prints were also made available.
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The Free4All Music Festival was a weekend-long music performance and workshop festival in Polish Hill. The festival coincided with Polish Hill’s Art What You Got festival and featured local and national bands, as well as interactive, family friendly performers.
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