First Friday in the East End of Pittsburgh

2005 crispian garfield artworks snake
Originally uploaded by ambrose1.

Friday night was another First Friday, so Kate and I took the boys around to see the Penn Avenue galleries and goings on. As I have mentioned before, Crispian especially loves the gallery events. Myles is starting to warm up to them, too, but more on that in a minute.

Our first stop was a first for us on this gallery crawl. Richard Rappaport had an open studio in his studio/home. He has a row house a block and a half down the street from Kate's. I haven't heard of him, but he had a show at Garfield Artworks last month (I don't know--maybe he is like a Lee Bontecou, had some early glory and has been laying low ever since). He's a painter, mostly nudes and abstracts, pretty painterly stuff. The canvases he was showing all over the house dated from the late 60s to the late 80s with one or two more recent pieces. He had one painting that was 20 something years old that he has scraped a great deal of the paint off of and was going to re do some of the details. The main reason I wanted to describe this part of our night was to talk about his amazing living and working space. It appears to be in transition, with most of the woodwork and floors completely stripped down. He has this 2 story row house that he has removed most of the walls from and has even created a cut-out in the second floor, about 10 ft by 10 ft. With the enormous skylight above this hole, during the day the place must fill with natural light, everywhere. If he were in New York, he could meet his mortgage payments (if he has any) just by renting out corners of this house as studio space.

Our next major stop was at Garfield Artworks. The show this month is "Stadiumtrash and the Love Crusade." This collaborative show was interesting because of the, ummm, range of artistic, ummmm, sophistication. The entire concept was for each artist to create T-shirts for Stadiumtrash. I like the general idea of this type of show, but they aren't always successful artistically. I hope they don't let it die with this show, because I really think they could have some fun with more Stadiumtrash. Ladyboy's silkscreen was cool and hip--it may be worth the $10 to go back and get one of the prints because it would look good in my theoretical rec room. Actually, it isn't my style, but it was probably one of the best pieces in the show. There were a few very large stuffed animals. Of the two, Myles liked the big pink unicorn more and he danced under it (when I say big, I mean floor to ceiling big and when I say pink i mean oooh yeah pink). In fat Myles would not stop dancing to the Tribe Called Quest cd they were playing (I think we have reached a point that he equates looking at art with dancing because the next morning at Crispian's soccer match Myles pointed to a student mural and started dancing). He had all the moves. Crispian's favorite part of this gallery is actually shown in the picture above. Behind that large, stuffed cobra they had a PA system and the children specifically were invited to hiss into the mic. At first Crispian was very timid, hissing barely audibly. But then after a few minutes and another little boy joining in---let's just say he is half Ambrose and he did have a microphone in front of him, 'kay?

Our other major gallery stop of note was Modern Formations. This is probably the slickest gallery at this end of town. They were showing Mike Budai, a local poster/flyer artist who also has some very interesting cartoon-inspired work. The back room of the gallery was devoted to his posters and flyers and was set up, of course, like the bulletin boards in coffee shops and hang-outs, covered in all these bills. Some I actually recognized and was like, oh he did that. The front room was a showing of his cartoon-y prints. I really liked these. They were colorful and fun, with witty titles (like Crispian's favorite, of a robot about to eat an enormous amount of ice cream, is "metal Gets Cold Really Quickly"). It was just fun, fun, fun--the type of art I think I would like to hang in Myles room-fun, original art. Did I mention it was fun?

I didn't pay much attention at the Edge Studio about the unveiling and the demo of Maphub. I was pretty worn out, fading fast and the two PBR's I had at the earlier galleries weren't helping. It seems to me a sort of geographical blog, though. Kate paid much better attention than I, so you can ask her. I've signed up, so I will try it soon? Maybe it will be the coolest thing since bread.

I wish I could tell you a lot about the Glass Center. We always want to go there for the demos, but we miss them. We were able to find someone to let us in after they locked the doors just so we could see the Birthday Suit show, a collection of pieces from last year's Glass Center Students. Glass is so amazing. I know, it is basically silica, but I am completely in awe of it. Kate keeps wanting to try to get into a class at the Glass Center, which would be totally kick-ass. I would fear the heat too much.

To end our night we headed over to the Quiet Storm. If you are from Pittsburgh but haven't been here in a while, you may have heard of the Quiet Storm as a dangerous "nuisance" bar. When Collette lived in this same neighborhood twelve years ago she was afraid to go in there. The bar had been shut down within the past few years and a coffee shop/vegan lunch counter/outside art venue/classic slacker hangout sprung up in its place. A couple of years ago Kate, Crispian, Randy, and I were playing soccer at the local elementary school and I ran over to the Quiet Storm to get some milkshakes. As I walked back to the playground, a 40-ish African American woman sitting on her porch asked me where I got the smoothies. I told her I got them at the Quiet Storm. She about jumped out of her chair, "The Quiet Storm? The Quiet Storm's got smoothies?" and then she yelled into the house to some man asking him if he knew the Quiet Storm had smoothies. And this was half a block away from the coffee shop. Perhaps she didn't notice the police cars not being called up there every night anymore? Anyway, Friday we stopped at the Quiet Storm for desert. One guy was walking around to the people that were sitting at the coffee bar and the tables asking them to pay cover for the band that was going on in half-an-hour. He got to us and asked if we were going to stay for the band, and I pointed to Myles sleeping in a stroller and Crispian and said, no I don't think so. He told us he really did have to check, because some people do bring their small children to the shows there. Whoa!