Cheryl Capezzuti

Cheryl Capezzuti is a Pittsburgh-based artist, puppeteer, and educator – who has been using the discards of American life as sculptural media to explore who we are for almost thirty years. Using dryer lint as the medium – the fibers and debris shed from our lives and typically discarded without thought – Cheryl’s sculptures are archeologically layered and open to personal interpretation. Embedded with tell-tale evidence of daily lives such as ticket stubs, papers clips, pet hair and bandages, to engage the viewer intellectually, emotionally, and playfully. Her work prompts viewers to reflect on the mass amounts of by-product produced by systems of mechanization even as it brings an unexpected aesthetic pleasure to the mundane task of doing laundry. The push/pull between the beautiful everyday-ness of the material and the overwhelming amount of waste humans produce drives my work. These figures speak to all of us: They challenge us to consider what we are missing, speak to the angst of our times and reflect the solitary nature of existence.

Denise J. McMorrow

Denise McMorrow is a Pittsburgh-based artist, writer, depth psychologist, mother, founder of Mountain to Mountain, and creator of The Prayer Tent for the Divine Mother and Sacred Beings: The Divine Mother Prayerbook. Her work seeks to awaken and nourish an awareness of the sacred relationship with Self, Others, and the more-than-human weave of life. Through art, sound, and principles of sanctuary, she creates containers for contemplative indwelling, soul companioning, and remembering through the imaginal and embodied streams of the Sacred Feminine. Her body of work includes painting, sculpture, site-specific installation, and public art, and explores the healing function of art as a bridge between the visible and invisible realms. She received her MFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2002 and her PhD in Psychology from Duquesne University in 2015.

Korey Edmonson

Korey Edmonson is an artist from Pittsburgh, PA, specializing in oil painting portraits and figure work. His work explores realism juxtaposed with abstract and collage, and aims to capture the physiognomy of people while highlighting their experiences and surroundings. He has worked with clients that include YETIxPublic Lands and Patagonia, and was Emerging Artist I and Emerging Artist II at the Three Rivers Arts Festival 2021 and 2022. You can find him painting, teaching on Skillshare or creating content for social media!

Korey is the 2023 PIT Airport Artist in Residence working with airport staff to tell an engaging story using color, composition, and brushstroke.

Sarah Cohen

Sarah Cohen is an artist in Pittsburgh who unabashedly believes that art and imagery has the power to change the world. She believes community mosaics are both social and therapeutic, and she likes to share information about glass production in the region while also giving people a chance to work together and meet new people, heal, and see the power that comes from our own hands and minds. When she’s not making glass mosaics, Sarah continues to focus on nature through her jewelry business, PetalVision Glass, started in 2016, shortly after she moved to Pittsburgh.

Marce Nixon

Marce Nixon is inspired by her lived experience as a young black woman growing up in Pittsburgh, PA. From West African textiles and ceramic history to the ubiquitous orange crate, beneath the adornment of her work are rich meditative marks that sing songs of resistance.

Marce says, the orange crate has been a household staple in Pittsburgh since I can remember. An orange crate, most likely ‘borrowed’ from the corner store, holds some of my best memories from getting my hair braided on the porch to playing basketball with fake gold teeth. Clay is archival, and every time I create I hear my grandma’s laughter saying, ‘they couldn’t erase me’.

Jamie Boyle

Jamie Boyle is deeply influenced by collaborator and friend Crispin Webb, who taught her a bunch of years ago to “put stuff up on the wall and look at it” when she was feeling creatively stuck. Jamie’s mom, Marlene, was a calligrapher, which meant that she grew up surrounded by words and shelves of books about books. Jamie’s father, Chuck, helped draw out her performative side and encouraged her in drawing and laughing from an early age. Jeremy, her brother, helped her find a way towards visual art when she became unable to dance due to illness. Jamie is wondrously indebted forever to her mentor (and first weaving teacher), Ann Hamilton, who offered fierce encouragement in graduate school and beyond. Many people taught Jamie how to use a loom, including Owen Marisol Ruck, Kira Silver, Isa Rodrigues, and José Picayo. Sarah C. Byrd, fashion/textile historian and archivist, taught Jamie how to look for stories in textiles and, presently, challenges (in a good way!) Jamie’s thinking about the world. Cormac Slevin ensures that Jamie is nourished with food and love every day.

Jessica Alpern Brown

Jessica Alpern Brown is a multidisciplinary artist who is known for her multimedia cut paper works and use of innovative materials including acrylic, color shifting vinyl and non-toxic resin as well as sustainable metals and wood. At the core of her practice is a belief that fine art can inspire functional design. Jessica is currently focused on making resilient, durable works that use color and light to bring beauty to ubiquitous objects and overlooked areas. She is represented by the Boxheart Gallery, is featured in the Monmade x CDCP Art Print Collection, and contributed to PIT’s Free the Music project.

Cue Perry

Pittsburgh native Quentin (Cue) “C.B. Perry” graduated from Brashear High School in 2004 with a diploma in applied technology, and then attended the University of Pittsburgh majoring in graphic design. He has been quietly pursuing a career in the arts his entire life, taking an unconventional view of social, political and cultural topics. Perry deconstructs pop culture in a vibrant way, visually representing the colorful randomness present in daily life and promotes thinking outside of the box. Perry has sold nearly 5000 original paintings worldwide, from murals to canvases. His artwork can be viewed all over the city of Pittsburgh, including at PIT as part of the Free the Music project.

Scott Kowalski

Scott Kowalski’s abstract piano piece for PIT’s Free the Music project is inspired by the vibrant and spontaneous nature of jazz music. The mix of bold colors and dynamic shapes creates a sense of movement and rhythm, much like the improvisational nature of jazz. He captures the energy and soulfulness of the genre in his piece, allowing each viewer to interpret the piece in their own way, evoking different emotions and reactions, much like how jazz music can mean different things to different listeners.

Carolina Loyola-Garcia

Carolina Loyola-Garcia is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and performer from Santiago de Chile. She has been living in Pittsburgh since 1997. She works primarily in media arts, including documentary films, single-channel video art, video installations, video design for theater, and digital photography and imaging. Her work explores topics related to social justice, the dislocated identity that results from colonialism and migration, and questionings around issues related to aspects of human existence such as relationships, the transient nature of the postmodern experience, memory, and the tense interaction between economy and the environment.

Liz Hammond

Liz Hammond is an interdisciplinary artist who has been involved in the Pittsburgh arts and theater community since 1995. She is a fabricator, designer, performer, and producer, who has partnered with many established companies, venues, galleries, and theaters throughout the city. She has collaborated on creating large scale public art sculptures and events. She is well versed in many aspects of theatrical production both on the stage and behind the scenes. As for sculpture, she enjoys working with fabrics, clay, plasters, and metal.

Marlon Gist

Marlon Gist is a native of Sewickley, Pennsylvania and now resides in Aliquippa. He was introduced to art by his late father, David Gist Sr., who was an exceptional and well respected artist in the Pittsburgh Region. Marlon attended The Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio where he learned to perfect his wide range of mediums and styles extending from abstract to photo-realism. Marlon is currently the featured artist and curator at “Art and Soul Cafe and Gallery, located at 1125 Penn Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15222.

Brian Fleetwood

Brian Fleetwood is a Santa Fe-based jewelry artist and citizen of the Mvskoke Nation of Oklahoma whose work draws upon scientific themes of ecology, biology, and taxonomy. Through collaborative processes and an exploration of materials not typical to jewelry, Fleetwood creates colorful wearable objects that seem to be growing on the wearer like flora or fauna. The artist’s designs, rooted in Mvskoke teachings about the relationships between living things, reflect the diversity of forms found in nature and invite us to adorn ourselves with its beauty. Fleetwood holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, and is currently teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Rick Bach

Rick Bach has been drawing for as long as he can remember. He explores all media from works on paper to metal to wood and his style ranges from architectural to figurative. Bach’s motivation is to entertain and provoke while pushing the boundaries between conventional and absurd, functional and useless. The artist currently resides in Washington, DC, while maintaining a studio in Pittsburgh.

Dr. Amber Epps

Dr. Amber Epps is a multidisciplinary artist that creates using various found and discarded objects from nature and other unexpected places such as thrift stores. The work that she creates is inspired by spirituality, humanism, occult, social justice, and prison reform. Amber also creates word art, developing pieces based on writings drawn from raw emotion, current and past life personal experience, and the things she sees through her “other eyes.” Also known as HollyHood, the “mom of Pittsburgh hip hop”, Amber produces events, DJ’s, and performs at venues both inside and outside of Pittsburgh. Additionally, she has opened for artists including Ja Rule, Warren G, GZA, Sugarhill Gang, Rakim, and KRS-One.

Julie Lee

Julie Lee (she/her) is a Korean-American artist, creating photographic and video work that explore themes of ancestry, care, and the photograph as existential affirmation. She explores these themes through the family album, specifically in the matrilineal lineage that comes with her and the women around her. She hopes for her work to speculate and encourage new ways of seeing and being seen, conjuring historical and psychological reconstructions of the sisterhood around her.

Brad Berkstresser

Brad Berkstresser is a local photographer and owner of Bradley B. Photography, specializing in urban landscape images. He has been photographing Pittsburgh and neighboring cities from the air and on the ground for the past three years, after discovering his penchant for aerial photography by accident after purchasing his first camera drone to fly for fun. From there, the hobby “took off” with owners of his work residing across the United States. Some of his favorite things to photograph include the many bridges Pittsburgh has to offer – especially at sunrise and sunset – the iconic Duquesne Incline, and the colorful homes of various Pittsburgh neighborhoods such as Lawrenceville and Mt. Washington.

Sandy Kessler Kaminski

Sandy Kessler Kaminski moved to Pittsburgh PA from Columbus Ohio and fell in love with the landscape and the inhabitants. Since then, she has applied her artistic energies to community-based art projects and private commissions. Sandy’s public artwork can be seen throughout Pittsburgh. Her art is in private collections: Webb Law, Magee Women’s Health, Del Monte and Citizens Bank to name a few. Sandy was recently an Alloy Artist with Rivers of Steel at Carrie Furnace Historical Site and is currently working on a project as the Artist in Residence for Shenandoah National Park.

Tim Engelhardt

Tim Engelhardt is a Pittsburgh based contemporary artist whose work stylistically stretches across a variety of mediums, drawing inspiration from the world around him. Believing that each of his murals tell a story, he worked in collaboration with the Badging Office team to arrive at this fresh and vibrant image. A graduate of The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Tim worked for 12 years as a graphic designer before starting his career as a studio artist and muralist. When not working as a public artist, he can be found in his studio working on a variety of paintings and drawings