The Magazine of The Heinz Endowments

W I N T E R 2 0 0 2

Andy Warhol Gets ToughPittsburgh’s pop culture museum uses a painful exhibit to promote a civic dialogue on racism.

I N S I D E : Why Design Matters BioBurgh Youth + Art = Work

To our readers

In our cover story for this issue, Andy Warhol Museumdirector Tom Sokolowski recounts the question thatpeople often asked when informed that the museumwould be hosting an exhibit on lynching and racial violence: Why the Warhol?

A little more than a decade ago, when Senator John Heinz,who was then chairman of the Howard Heinz Endowment,and his wife, Teresa, were working to bring the museum toPittsburgh, a similar but even more fundamental question wasasked: Why a Warhol? Why a museum dedicated to the glitzypop culture sensibilities of a single controversial artist?

Teresa Heinz answered that question definitively at themuseum’s opening in 1994. “To me,” she said, “all art posesthe same questions as Paul Gauguin’s masterpiece, which theartist titled, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? WhereAre We Going? Andy’s work asked those questions of our entireculture, on behalf of an entire generation.”

Implicit in those words was a challenge to the Warhol forthe future. A museum celebrating the works of this probingartist could not become a mere repository for his art andremain true to his spirit. Like the artist himself, it would needto be curious, provocative and willing to challenge us withideas about what our community and society stand for: whowe are, what we believe and what we think the future holds.

In various ways, the museum has sought to rise to thatchallenge. Nothing the Warhol has done to date has been sobold—or so carefully considered—as its staging of WithoutSanctuary. But it has presented forums for political candidatesto discuss their support for the arts. It has staged discussions,presentations and exhibits that raise tough questions aboutracism and homophobia. And Sokolowski himself frequentlywades into community debates about aesthetics, civic design,and the role and quality of public art.

All of this can be disconcerting. It can upset people whoprefer their art tame and their cultural institutions austere andquiet; just as it can trouble purists who fret about art beingdragged down by demands for educational value and commu-nity engagement. But, in a very real sense, that discomfort is a measure of the Warhol’s faithfulness to its mission.

By staging Without Sanctuary, the Warhol did not erase the racial divide that exists in Pittsburgh as in so many othercities around America. That was never its expectation. But asour cover story shows, it did challenge people. It did openmore than a few minds. It did shine back a mirror not just onthe past, but also on the culture of the present. In the process,it showed how valuable a cultural institution can be in helpinga community to grapple with an issue for which the only solutions, in the end, are knowledge and understanding.

message

Grant OliphantDirector of Planning and Communications

1To Our Readers

2Without SanctuaryAt Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol museum: brutal art leads to

heartfelt conversations on racism.

18Designing the FutureSpace designs that please architects also need to please

the people who use them.

20The Business of BioscienceEconomic Opportunity grantmaking is speeding the flow

of scientific advances from laboratory to marketplace.

26Art WorksAt-risk youth embrace arts programs as paid apprentices

and learn basic employment skills.

30Here & There

insideVolume 2 Number 1 Winter 2002

Founded more than four decades

apart, the Howard Heinz Endowment,

established in 1941, and the

Vira I. Heinz Endowment, established

in 1986, are the products of a deep

family commitment to community

and the common good that began

with H. J. Heinz and continues

to this day.

The Heinz Endowments is based

in Pittsburgh, where we use

our region as a laboratory for the

development of solutions to chal-

lenges that are national in scope.

Although the majority of our giving

is concentrated within southwestern

Pennsylvania, we work wherever

necessary, including statewide and

nationally, to fulfill our mission. That

mission is to help our region thrive

as a whole community — economically,

ecologically, educationally and

culturally — while advancing the

state of knowledge and practice in

the fields in which we work.

Our fields of emphasis include

philanthropy in general and the

disciplines represented by our grant-

making programs: Arts & Culture;

Children, Youth & Families;

Economic Opportunity; Education;

and the Environment. These five

programs work together on behalf of

three shared organizational goals:

enabling southwestern Pennsylvania

to embrace and realize a vision of

itself as a premier place both to

live and to work; making the region

a center of quality learning and

educational opportunity; and making

diversity and inclusion defining

elements of the region’s character.

h magazine is a publication of The Heinz Endowments. At the Endowments, we are committed to promoting learning in philanthropy and in the specific fieldsrepresented by our grantmaking programs. As an expression of that commitment,this publication is intended to share information about significant lessons and insights we are deriving from our work.

Editorial Team Linda Braund, Nancy Grejda, Maxwell King, Maureen Marinelli,Grant Oliphant, Douglas Root. Design: Landesberg Design Associates

Comments: The staff of h magazine and The Heinz Endowments welcome yourcomments. All print and email letters must include an address with daytime andevening phone numbers. We reserve the right to edit any submission for clarityand space. Published material also will be posted on The Heinz Endowments’web site, which offers current and back issues of the magazine.

Jim Davidson is a Pittsburgh-based writer who teaches journalism at Carnegie Mellon University and edits FOCUS, the faculty newspaper.

By Jim DavidsonPhotography by Lynn Johnson

On the way to The Andy Warhol Museum tosee the Without Sanctuary exhibit of lynchingpostcards and photographs, 15-year-old MattMayger was thinking about his family historyin Georgia three generations ago. He knew hisgreat-grandfather had been a Baptist ministerand a pillar of the community in Athens,Savannah and Marietta. That much wasapparent from the old photographs that hadbeen passed down through the family. Therewas also talk that the Rev. Oscar Nash hadbeen a grand wizard in the Ku Klux Klan inthe 1910s—or so said Mayger’s grandmother,the youngest of 14 children in the family.Before her death a few years ago, she hadtalked about witnessing a lynching as a littlegirl, and about her father’s role in the Klan.

without sanctuaryAt Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum, a wrenching exhibit on lynching helps ayoung man confront his family’s past—and a reluctant community examine its feelings about race.

On that morning in October, Mayger was justone of the 60 students from Greater LatrobeSenior High School visiting the Warholbecause they had volunteered to work on aproject to combat racism. With the faces of

his grandmother and great-grandfather imprinted on hismind, Mayger set about looking for evidence that the familystories were true.

Mayger walked solemnly past 98 postcard images showingthe grisly spectacle of human beings who were whipped,beaten, stoned, stripped, gouged, burned, mutilated, shot and then hanged by their necks from trees, from lampposts,from bridge railings.

The great majority of the victims in the postcards are blackmen, their faces and bodies contorted in death. All aroundthem, in many cases, are the beaming faces of white men andthe occasional child, grinning at the camera to proclaim baldlythe carnival atmosphere that so often accompanies the mobmurders. Mayger examined one photograph after anotheruntil finally coming to the last postcard, where a familiar facestared back.

There, just above white block letters proclaiming “The Endof Leo Frank, Hung by a Mob at Marietta, Ga., Aug 17, 1915,”was a square-jawed man with a brush mustache and fedora,standing nearly a head taller than the four other men gatheredaround Frank’s manacled and lifeless body. “He just kind ofstuck out,” Mayger says, explaining how he linked the manwith a mustache to a family photograph that shows his grand-mother as a girl no older than five. In that image, datable to theearly 1920s, Mayger’s great-grandfather is a tall man with thesame square jaw and the same brush mustache, only a shadegrayer than the one he wore the night Leo Frank was killed.

On that morning at the Warhol, Mayger and about 15 classmates filed into an adjoining room for a “dialogue” withtwo artist–educators trained by the Warhol to help viewersdigest the exhibit. For nearly a half an hour he sat quietly as

others vented shock and other feelings they couldn’t begin toname. Finally, Mayger spoke up and began peeling the familyonion, telling not only about his grandfather’s grand wizardry,but also about his father who “woke up” to the reality ofracism while serving in Vietnam and afterward, moving toCalifornia where people mixed more freely with one another. His father had learned to respect all people, rejecting much of his Southern upbringing, and he had taught his son to do the same, Mayger explained.

And there it was. More than 86 years after the fact, a polite,cheerful teenager from Pennsylvania was implicating his great-grandfather in the killing of Leo Frank, a Jewish factoryowner who had been railroaded and lynched following thekilling of a young woman worker.

Mayger’s discovery—and the ongoing discussion thatfollowed—was likely the most dramatic episode during theexhibit, yet it was not the only occasion for tears of anger andregret as dozens of school groups and thousands of visitorsfiled past the photographs. Without Sanctuary sparked a lot ofcandid discussion on the taboo subject of racial violence, andplayed a significant role in keeping the history alive.

For four months—September 22 through Martin LutherKing Day, including a three-week extension—WithoutSanctuary haunted the sixth-floor gallery of the North Sidemuseum, breaking attendance records and broadening publicperception of the Warhol’s mission as a contemporary artmuseum that does not shrink from heavy issues and hardquestions. With broad support from foundations, agencies,schools, community groups and individual artists, WithoutSanctuary served as a catalyst for a civic dialogue about race in a setting that was civil and even—some sophisticatedmuseum-goers might say—artistic. The horrific imagesprompted the kind of talk usually reserved for front porchesin segregated neighborhoods. Without Sanctuary trampled the polite boundaries of public discourse on race. On its good days—and there were many—the exhibit provokedsome heart-to-heart talks, most of them long overdue.

Two high school students are transfixed by a graphic picture of a lynching victim,

one of 98 postcard photographs in Without Sanctuary, an exhibit at Pittsburgh's

Andy Warhol Museum. A museum record 31,400 viewed the unflinching history

of racial violence in America.

OO

Center. The Warhol, competing in such grand company,gained some new heft by hosting Without Sanctuary. Themuseum already had captured the sense of adolescent whimsythat suffused Pop Art and Andy’s celebrated New York studio,the Factory. Among the permanent exhibits are such items asWarhol’s fanciful drawings of shoes that he completed in hisearly days as a graphic illustrator, and temporary exhibits thathave chronicled the artist’s shopping sprees and the manypermutations of celebrity culture, including the upcomingexhibit of artwork from record album covers.

Slapping Without Sanctuary on top of all the frivolity waslike slapping stories of the September 11 terrorist attacks onthe cover of Andy’s old celebrity-worshipping Interviewmagazine. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest WithoutSanctuary would have made him uncomfortable if he hadbeen running his own museum. While the exhibit certainlyattained the shock value the artist was famous for, the lynchingphotographs carry historical weight he might have been afraidto shoulder. For all of his New York pretentiousness, Andywas a North Sider at the core: eyes-on-the-ground shy andslow to open up to strangers. Without Sanctuary came barrelinginto a neighborhood where generations—both black andwhite—embraced a “let’s not go there” policy in discussingrace relations.

Given its history and surroundings, the Warhol could nothave made the leap to a Without Sanctuary without strongpublic support. Some of that came with civic foundationimprimaturs, from The Ford Foundation’s Animating DemocracyInitiative, The Heinz Endowments, and the Jewish Healthcare,Lannan, Grable, and Three Rivers Community Foundations.About $2.5 million in Heinz Endowments support went

into the creation of the Warhol from 1992through 1994, and the Heinz philanthropieshave continued to support the mission of themuseum. A $25,000 grant from the Vira I.Heinz Endowment enabled the Warhol todocument all aspects of the exhibit, andpartially underwrote the cost of free Tuesday

admissions during the Without Sanctuary exhibit. The Warholstaff showed bold initiative, too, in knocking on the doors of African-American and white power centers and coaxingtheir participation.

“The Warhol Museum does what cultural institutions aresupposed to do,” says Janet Sarbaugh, director of The HeinzEndowments’ Arts & Culture Program. “It challenges us andmakes us think. It evokes all sorts of conflicting emotions andgives us a safe place to discuss all sorts of complex issues.”

Sarbaugh calls the Warhol “a 20th- and 21st-centuryiteration of the Heinz family’s long-standing support of theCarnegie Museums,” which dates back to the 1890s. SenatorJohn Heinz and Teresa Heinz “championed the idea of bringing the Warhol to Pittsburgh and of associating it withthe Carnegie,” Sarbaugh says. “They grasped intuitively why itwas important on so many levels. It was right in terms of theAndy Warhol connection to Pittsburgh. It was right in termsof economic development and tourism. It was right in termsof the North Side neighborhood and it was right in terms ofan institution that represented not only Andy Warhol but alsoAmerican pop culture. I believe that Teresa Heinz still seesthat as one of the most important functions of the Warhol—representing popular culture and interpreting it expansivelyand creatively.”

Sarbaugh acknowledges that a Pittsburgh museum devotedto one artist seemed risky in the early 1990s. With arts dollarsstretched tight, there were voices saying the city didn’t needanother major cultural institution. But Senator Heinz, shesays, “saw the value and stuck with it,” and that decision hasbeen vindicated under director Tom Sokolowski.

Many museum-goers were so concerned about their reaction to the grisly

lynching photographs that they preferred to view the exhibit alone.

Mayger had known his late grandmother, who lived on thefamily homestead in Latrobe during the last decades of herlife. She told the family about lynchings she had seen as alittle girl, so “it wouldn’t have been surprising to see her in thephotographs. I knew she had witnessed them,” Mayger said.After her death, when the family thumbed through herpapers, they wondered what they would find. But like mostpeople in most families, his grandmother did not preserve any evidence, photographic or otherwise, of events later to bejudged horrific and shameful. His own father didn’t go intomuch detail about the family’s history—“He wants to forget more than anyone,” Mayger says. As a result, he says, “I hadnever really given it much thought.”

The visit to the museum not only filled in missing detailsabout the past, but brought the dilemma of racism into thepresent. Mayger, an easygoing student who can joke about hisgrades in sophomore English, was presented with an oppor-tunity to hear a Jewish classmate and an African-American classmate—one of three or four at the high school—speakfrom the heart about racism. Mayger responded in kind.

“We talked about how you can stop it, even though there’s a pattern,” he remembers.

“We talked about how Matt was breaking a cycle,”remembers his English teacher, Allison Duda, who accom-panied the students to the Warhol and also had helped toorganize the anti-racism group, Activists for CommunityTolerance. “He expressed ‘I’m not this way. I’m not like mygreat-grandfather.’” And that was the message, she says, thathe carried 45 miles back to Latrobe and to the majority of his classmates who hadn’t joined the racism project andweren’t on the Warhol field trip.

The Warhol itself is in the refurbished Volkwein MusicBuilding on Pittsburgh’s North Side, a few blocks from thescrap metal yard operated by the artist’s brother, Paul Warhola,under the authentic family name. In fact, the Warhol is posi-tioned at an intersection of old and new. There are immigranteastern European, Irish and African-American neighborhoods.And there is the exquisitely designed PNC Park opening uponto the Allegheny River, a North Shore Park, the new footballstadium known as Heinz Field and The Carnegie Science

“The Warhol Museum does whatcultural institutions are supposed to do.It challenges us and makes us think.It evokes all sorts of conflictingemotions and gives us a safe place todiscuss all sorts of complex issues.”Janet Sarbaugh Director, Arts & Culture Program, The Heinz Endowments

High school students wear earphones as they view video commentaries from

others who have toured the exhibit. The Points of View section offered a video

booth and a public journal where museum-goers could record their reactions.

The goal was to encourage participants to see the exhibit through the eyes of

those with strikingly different racial, ethnic, economic and religious backgrounds.

The same question arose repeatedly—“Why the Warhol?”Or, as Sokolowski remembers it, “What does the WarholMuseum have to do with issues of race?” His reply was direct:“Where else in town would it be done?” As a young museum,he explains, the Warhol could host an exhibit that did notautomatically presume the curators knew more than theaudience about the subject at hand.

In effect, the museum was repositioning itself. From thebeginning, The Andy Warhol Museum has known who it was—a part of the Carnegie that happened to have a differentfocus and happened to be on the North Side, not in Oakland.Today Sokolowski is delighted that the wider Pittsburghcommunity grasped that Without Sanctuary was exactly whata contemporary art museum should be doing. “Once weshowed people we were not doing this exhibit in a patriarchalway, telling them to take it or leave it, they responded. Andnow people are saying ‘Why not the Warhol?’”

Without Sanctuary opened the week after the World TradeCenter attacks, hardly an opportune time for showing graphic

images of man’s inhumanity to man. Sokolowski feared thesteady drumbeat of terrorist news would send museum patronsrunning for Monet waterlilies or Norman Rockwell familyscenes, but that didn’t happen.

“Here’s a show that’s sober, that’s disturbing, that’s not apleasant experience, and people come to it. One of the mostgratifying things is to show that the public isn’t a bunch ofdullards. People want to think. They don’t want pablum.”

Sokolowski adds, “People really have used the experience in an expansive way to talk about other events.”

O P E N I N G H E A RT S A N D M I N D S

Weeks before the exhibit came to town, theWarhol’s outreach education staff worked toenlist community support for Without Sanctuary,partly through formation of a broad-based communityadvisory committee. The work paid off on opening day—Saturday, September 22—when as many as a thousand

Without Sanctuary trampled the politeboundaries of public discourse on race.On its good days—and there were many—the exhibit provoked some heart-to-hearttalks, most of them long overdue.

WW

“The programming has been exactly right, and it will continue to put the museum on the map,” Sarbaugh says.“Without Sanctuary shows they can take on controversial subjectswith sensitivity and without pulling punches. This gives thempermission to attempt even more as they continue to explorepopular culture.”

James Allen, the Atlanta antiques dealer and self-described“picker” who combed flea markets and ephemera auctions topurchase the Without Sanctuary postcards, said at the Warholopening on September 22 that he was “thrilled to see what is happening here,” with an exhibit that is patently too con-troversial or too disturbing for most museums to considermounting. The Warhol is the third place it has been shown,following exhibits last year at the tiny Roth Horowitz Galleryin Manhattan and then at the New York Historical Society.Without Sanctuary will open this spring at the Martin LutherKing Jr. Memorial in Atlanta, a downtown facility maintainedby the National Park Service, but to date there have been noother engagements.

The core of Without Sanctuary is the picture postcardcollection by Allen, who is white. “This was an Americanstory that needed to be told,” he said at the Warhol opening,recalling how the mother of 14-year-old Emmett Till had, in1955, demanded an open casket for her son, “putting a faceon race hatred and race murder for all to see.”

The postcards, Allen learned, were frequently disseminatedas lynching mementos by photographers who set up portablestudios at lynching sites. The postcards passed from hand tohand and were allowed in the U.S. mail until 1908. Allenfound the photographs in obscure corners of white America,locked in trunks and thumbtacked to service station walls. Thepostcards show graphic images of hangings and other vigilantekillings, all of which are considered lynchings. The postcardsin the exhibit stretch across more than a half-century, from1878 to 1935. The collection preserves images from lynchingsin at least 18 states, including West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana,Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska and California. Most ofthe apparent killers are not hooded vigilantes and Klansmen,but proud white men who are staring straight into the camera,

often with smiles on their faces. “Lynching is not a tale ofspontaneous rage or lower-class criminality or night riders,”Allen said. “It’s always, and most clearly and simply, savagemurder on a savage’s level.” In some photographs, children taketheir lead from the adult men around them and pose proudly.Women are prominent in photographs from such places asMarion, Indiana; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and Okemah,Oklahoma. The Okemah image shows dozens of men andwomen standing on the bridge from which Laura Nelson and her 14-year-old son, L.W. Nelson, have been hanged.

C A P T U R I N G T H E E X H I B I T

Last year, Sokolowski explained to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that Without Sanctuary was arriving in theright place at the right time. “It’s a good way to bringheightened awareness of race to Pittsburgh, where race issueshave not been so openly discussed.”

Top: Students listen to a classmate’s emotional reaction to the exhibit.

Below: Greater Latrobe High School student Matt Mayger becomes a lightning rod

for class discussions after discovering his great-grandfather posing proudly next

to the body of a lynching victim in one of the photographs. For the 15-year-old

Mayger, the historical record has become part of his family record.

LL

“It’s hard to get past the initial shock and the brutality of the photographs, but most dialogues do go beyond that.”Carrie Schneider Warhol Artist–Educator

Students break into pairs to discuss their thoughts on racism as part of

a dialogue session connected to the Without Sanctuary exhibit. Activities

in the sessions included writing out phrases connected to racist

behavior. Students also challenge one another in developing practical

solutions to acts of racism.

“It’s hard to get past the initial shock and the brutality of

visitors circulated through a morning-to-night shindig thatrocked the rafters for as long as the voices of the WarholChoir filled the entrance lounge.

“For me, the most telling reaction was from young people,”says Lavera Brown, executive director of the PittsburghNAACP. The “gray hairs” in her generation, she says, heardstories about lynching and racial violence from their extendedfamilies, but her own children, raised in a more mobile society,have not heard the same stories from their grandparents.

Still, Brown says, some African-Americans initiallyquestioned the wisdom of an exhibit about lynching. “Some people were there when the hoses and dogs were out, and theysaid, ‘Do I have to put myself through this pain again?’ I readthem the letter I sent, commending the Warhol for puttingthis on. I’m of the firm belief that change will not occur if wedo not have white allies along with people of color.”

Brown concluded that the Warhol was the right place to broach the subject. “I probably would not have supportedthe exhibit as strongly as I did if it had been in an African-American museum.” It’s necessary, she says, for the discussionto take place not in a white neighborhood or a black neigh-borhood, but in a place where all will feel welcome.

Terry Miller, deputy director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Pittsburgh, worked hard to organize a dialoguethat was to involve political, corporate and religious leaders.But with only one commitment from the leader of a majorinstitution—Bishop Donald Wuerl of the Catholic Diocese —the Warhol had to call off the event. “I’m sorry it didn’thappen,” Miller says, “but that doesn’t mean it’s off the table.”

Brown served on the community advisory committee thatwas largely thwarted in its efforts to bring elected officials and corporate movers and shakers to the exhibit. “It would becriminal if this exhibit went away and left no continuingimpact in this community,” she says. Mentioning the YWCA’sstudy circles about race as well as programs of the NationalCouncil of Christians and Jews, Brown says, “In terms offollow-up plans, we need to strongly encourage faith-basedorganizations to have continuing discussions.”

D E L I V E R I N G T H E M E S S A G E

“What you’re doing is hard. You’re facilitating adialogue on race,” Sherry Cottom is tellingthe group. Cottom has a long title—trainer/facilitator at the Center for Race Relations and Anti-RacismTraining at the YWCA of Greater Pittsburgh—and on thisFriday morning she’s sitting at a table in a windowless room at the Warhol, bringing a measure of good sense and comfortto about 15 artist–educators. A mixture of staff and contractworkers, all with backgrounds as artists, they are the front-line troops of the Without Sanctuary exhibit. They run the“dialogues”—the 45-minute groups in which students orordinary visitors have an opportunity to discuss the devastatingimages they’ve just seen.

The hitch is that the images are devastating for the artist–educators, too, and keeping the dialogue on track is doublydifficult. There are ground rules to enforce, known officially as the “dialogue agreement.” Participants are asked to use “I”statements and speak from their own perspectives; to respectone another’s experiences, feelings and points of view; to share airtime; and to listen to one another. But there’s no ruleabout keeping the artist–educator from feeling the pain thatgoes with this particular territory. “I don’t know if I can dothis,” one artist–educator tells the group. “In a professionalenvironment, you can’t sob in your office. But I have.”Another talks about fears the show is taking over her life andher head, and yet another says, “I don’t want to go into thegallery and start wailing my head off.”

Cottom has led some of the Without Sanctuary dialoguesessions, so she knows whereof she speaks. On this Fridaymorning she praises the artist–educators for the good workthey’re doing. She reassures them about feeling upset. Shedelivers practical advice about keeping the dialogues on track,and for dealing with 15-year-olds who make insensitivestatements about the ever-hazardous topic of race, confidentlyassuming they know what “some people” or “those people”

Warhol Museum artist–educator Sarah Williams, center, and Latrobe Area

High School students listen as a classmate makes a point about

generational inheritance of racist behaviors and how family experiences

prove that it can be stopped.

“WW“

The August 1915 lynching of Leo Frank carries its own local significance

for a Latrobe family’s coming to terms with racist ancestors unearthed

in The Andy Warhol Museum’s Without Sanctuary exhibit on lynching.

But the death of Frank, a white, Jewish New Yorker, is viewed ironically as

a pivotal case in the long history of brutal murders whose victims were

overwhelmingly African-American.

In the recently published At the Hands of Persons Unknown, a full and

devastating history of lynching in America, author Philip Dray describes the

Frank case as “... one of the great national criminal dramas, on a par with

the Lizzie Borden trial, the Lindbergh kidnapping, and the O.J. Simpson case.”

Frank, a Cornell graduate in mechanical engineering, sent to Atlanta to

manage his uncle's pencil manufacturing plant, was charged in the

strangulation killing of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old worker at the factory.

Frank was arrested on shoddy evidence and sloppy police work. He was eventually convicted

in a trial influenced by unruly mobs of spectators. The case, writes Dray, “was like a powerful

searchlight illuminating several themes then current in the life of the South—the resistance to

change as represented by a Northern capitalist, a strain of anti-Semitism that had evolved out

of the Populist distrust of the urban North and . . . the continuing will to rely on sensationalism

and mob intimidation, including lynching, to enforce regional codes of justice.”

The chief witness against Frank, a factory janitor named Jim Conley, also turned out to be

the likely killer. Conley, an African-American, testified that Frank had killed Phagan and ordered

Conley to help him burn the body and write two misleading notes about the crime. This played

directly to the jury’s twin prejudices, Dray observes—that Frank, as a Yankee Jew, would be

unable to resist taking advantage of the factory’s female workers . . . and that Conley, as a black

man, would be incapable of devising so sinister a plot without a white man’s guidance.”

The Frank case became a national cause celebre, with newspaper editorials, million-signature

petitions and state resolutions demanding Frank's release. The national uproar, Dray points out,

angered many blacks, who “resented the ease with which the cause of an unjustly accused white

man marshaled such tremendous public sympathy and concern.” It also proved to be a blunt lesson

for black anti-lynching activists about the lack of federal government power in the South.

Less than two months after the courageous governor, John M. Slaton, judged the trial a travesty

of justice and commuted Frank's sentence, vigilantes calling themselves the Knights of Mary

Phagan, stormed the jail, grabbed Frank and drove him to the outskirts of Marietta where he was

hanged from a tree. That group spurred the reinvention of the Reconstruction-era nightriders as the

Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who became famous for their white-hooded costumes, cross burnings

and murderous violence through the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s and beyond.

At the Hands of Persons Unknown

The great-grandfather of

Latrobe Area High School

student Matt Mayger, far

right, mustached and

sporting a wide-brimmed

hat, poses prominently near

the body of lynching victim

Leo Frank in this 1915

photograph.

From

the

col

lect

ion

of J

ames

Alle

n

think. To explain issues of racism to a young white audience,Cottom suggests using the analogy of left-handed peopletrying to cope with a right-handed world. “As a right-handedperson,” she explains, “you don’t know there’s a problem.”

Sarah Williams, an artist–educator who graduated fromSeton Hill College in 2000, has been moved and surprised by what people have said. The best dialogues, she says, happenwhen people seem to forget where they are. “They drop ‘I’m-in-a-museum’ and start telling stories about their experi-ences with racism.” Williams has heard stories about segregatedbuses, and she’s heard children talking about their parents’interracial marriages. “For some people, the dialogue hasbecome a forum for their storytelling. When that happens, it’san incredible thing.”

Cottom has been drawn to the work from the painfullynching stories passed down from generation to generation in her family. But at the exhibit’s halfway point, she had yet to view it. “I’m not ready or willing to let the public see myemotions, and they’re not going to close down the exhibit justso I can walk through it myself,” she said in mid-December.

S I N K I N G I N

After Matt Mayger discovered his great-grandfather’sphotograph in Without Sanctuary, many of hisclassmates were shocked and openly skeptical abouthis disclosure. “They were just kind of like, whoa—they didn’texpect something like that,” Mayger remembers. Suddenlylynching was not just something abstract and distant. Itsheritage reached even into a predominantly white suburbancommunity many miles from the real horrors inflicted uponAfrican-Americans. On that October morning at themuseum, Mayger spoke of his own shame about his family’sracist past—a point he amplified in a story in the high school

magazine, Serendipity—while an African-American studentsaid she felt proud that her people had survived the decades oflynching. The word quickly spread through the group fromLatrobe. “By the end of the day, it had gotten around to all 60kids,” Mayger said. “It got distorted. By the end of the day, itwas my dad in the picture.”

Mayger’s vindication came a week later in Allison Duda’ssophomore English class. Mayger passed around the familyphotograph, along with a copy of the Frank lynching photo-graph that he had downloaded from the Without Sanctuaryweb site. “At first, no one really believed me. But when Ibrought in the picture, what can you say? I had photographicevidence,” Mayger said. Speaking to students who had notseen the exhibit and to a few who had, he again shared thestory of his great-grandfather’s Klan activity and held up hisfather as an example of “how you can stop it.” His father waswilling to break with his own family to break the cycle,Mayger said. Now, he told his classmates, here he is, a mem-ber of the Mayger clan, moving in the opposite direction andhelping to found Activists for Community Tolerance.

“I remember getting chills at that moment in the class,”Duda recalls. “The other students respected him for what hewas saying.”

When Mayger was finished, one of his friends startedclapping. It was an awkward situation at first, the sound ofone person clapping from the back of the room. For amoment, he was alone. Then another started up and thenanother until the room was filled with the powerful, celebratorysound of a classroom full of students thunderously clapping. h

AA

n our efficiency-minded modern era, excellence indesign so often has been dismissed as a luxury, something to pursue if you can afford it and if youhappen to care about that sort of thing. I believe theopposite. I believe that, for our community, design

excellence—adherence to the high standards celebrated by this award— is not a luxury, but an absolute must.

This is a conviction that has long been held by the Heinzfamily. When my late father-in-law, Jack Heinz, had the notionof a revitalized downtown being reborn around a thrivingcultural district, he was adamant that the place itself—the physical design of the district’s buildings and streets and parks—had to be as inspiring and superb as the artistry it housed.

Both he and his son, my late husband, John, were adamanton another point as well: Design excellence doesn’t just meancreating spaces that inspire other architects and other designers;it means creating places that inspire the people who use them.Ultimately, it means creating places that make our cities betterand more desirable places to live in. Not just to look at, or to read about in architectural magazines, but to live in.

For Pittsburgh, this has never been more important than itis today. In the modern economy, quality of life plays a majorrole in determining which regions will thrive, and which willnot. And nothing shapes quality of life so definitively—andso enduringly—as the design of the public realm.

That is why, at The Heinz Endowments, we have created amulti-program focus on promoting superior civic design. It iswhy we underwrote the design competition for the David L.Lawrence Convention Center, and why we have aggressivelysupported the efforts of the Riverlife Task Force to helpPittsburgh make the best possible use of its magnificent riversand riverfronts.

And it is why we support the work of the Green BuildingAlliance and others to promote sustainable urban design.Pittsburgh has become a leader—arguably, the leader — inthe green design architectural movement. We now have more

By Teresa Heinz

I

Jack Wolf

Teresa Heinz, chairman of the Howard Heinz Endowment, recently became the first civic leader to receive a gold medal from the Pittsburgh chapter of theAmerican Institute of Architects for her efforts to promote quality design in the built environment. This essay was adapted from her acceptance speech.

A lunchtime crowd takes in the sun in the courtyard behind Pittsburgh’s premier

performing arts center, Heinz Hall. The space is a homage to function but also

designed for people.

of a community goes far below its surface. The hearts ofbuildings, like the hearts of communities, like the hearts ofpeople, are more hidden than manifest. The terrorists’ actsopened for us a frightening window into the heart of darkness.But, everywhere in America the instinctive reaction was over-flowing compassion.

The point of terrorism is to isolate people—to make them fearful, and to make them flee. What we saw happen in New York was the opposite. Instead of fomenting fear and increasing isolation, the attack stimulated the desire forcommunion—for community.

And that desire was nourished, quite clearly, by thephysical infrastructure of the city. As a former garden designerfor two New York parks wrote in The New York Times, Union Square, at most times a neighborhood park, became “a sacred meeting ground.”

People gathered on street corners, met in cafes, found quietsolace in parks. They gazed out on the mutilated skyline oftheir city and discovered enduring beauty—architecture thatstill soared, buildings that still spoke of pride, public spacesthat still inspired hope.

Fred Kent, the director of the Project for Public Spaces, put it very well. He wrote, “The need to gather, to sharestories, to celebrate, protest and grieve in a common place isbasic, human and universal. We must continue to allow—and encourage—the diversity, culture and commerce of theUnited States to thrive in healthy, livable cities, markets, parks and neighborhoods.”

That is why I say the work you do—the work of ourplanners and designers and architects—has never been moreimportant.

I believe Pittsburgh is at the forefront of an emergingnational movement that is recognizing the importance of gooddesign to our lives. You are designers not just of our buildingsand our streets and our parks; you are designers of our future.And in designing the future, excellence should always be our standard. h

Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design-certifiedbuildings than any city in America. That’s an accomplishmentthat should make other cities across the country, if you’llforgive the expression, green with envy.

And it should make us proud. The geography, the history,the economy and the character of the region have, in the past, made Pittsburgh anarchitectural melting pot.Now they are combining toplace us in an architecturalavant garde.

Today, thanks to thecreative collaboration ofbusiness and civic leaders,academics, architects, activistsand, of course, the ultimateconsumers—the citizens—a new vision for our city isrising up around us: a visionof a place that is comfortableand safe, but also excitingand fun; a place where peopleactually want and like to liveand work and go to schooland raise families.

In these newly and soterribly troubled times, suchefforts might seem small and secondary. They are not.

If anything, the events of September 11 and its aftermathhave dramatically underscored their importance.

What terrorism seeks is to destroy community —our beliefin one another and ourselves. Terrorism’s goal is to drag downthe institutions, customs and lifestyles that are at the core ofAmerican life.

I don’t have to tell this audience that the architecture of abuilding goes far deeper than its façade. And the architecture

DesigningDesigning the futureFor architects and planners, civic excellence should be the goal.

If the officers of TissueInformatics, one of the high-techiest of Pittsburgh’s emerging bioscience firms,wanted to give the impression they’re running a no-frills, it’s-all-about-the-work operation, they’vesucceeded.

Each day, a dozen of the country’s smartest computer andbiology wizards bounce their cars over ruts in a dirt parkinglot surrounding a nondescript cinderblock building on thecity’s edgy South Side. They report to a warren of tiny officeson the second floor where comfort and design considerationsare focused on the needs of bioscience engineering’s mostsophisticated equipment. While the office space is comfortableand fosters a close-knit working environment, frills for thestaff are kept to a minimum. For TissueInformatics workers,satisfaction comes in exploring uncharted territory, pushingthe boundaries that separate pure science from the high-techmarketplace.

One apparent nod to people is in the hallway wall art—what appear to be abstract prints of globs and blobs splashedin outrageous colors. But no, even the office décor is all aboutthe work. These are actually blown-up photographs of micro-scopic images of all kinds of tissue—from shavings of ketchuptomatoes to slivers of a human hip bone. Company officershave set an ambitious goal: to become the national informationclearinghouse for digital information extractable from tissue,providing comprehensive analysis of tissue data that willrevolutionize work in businesses ranging from pharmaceuticalresearch to synthetic organ development.

The company, begun in 1997 by three University ofPittsburgh scientists and a business entrepreneur, is one in afledgling pack of bioscience companies emerging in Pittsburgh.Most of the for-profit companies—and for-profit wannabes—have spun off from raw research at the region’s premieruniversities, primarily Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University.

The Business ofBioscience

In the emerging life sciences industry, the stakes are high and the competitionis stiff. But for those companies that succeed and for the regional economiesin which they are located, the rewards could be breathtaking.

By Douglas RootPhotography by Annie O’Neill

Douglas Root is the communications officer at The Heinz Endowments and a member of hmagazine’s editorial team. He last wrote about Pittsburgh’s Nine Mile Run brownfield transformation for the inaugural issue.

more commercial development which leads to more jobs. A market study by two consultant groups on the viability of the greenhouse concept estimated the plan would create5,000 bioscience jobs based on the founding or recruiting of110 companies. Another 10,600 jobs would mushroom from the core businesses in the first few years, with thousandsmore to follow. These job creation estimates also considered the benefits of a Pitt–Carnegie Mellon initiative known asBioVenture, which will find strategic uses for the latestbioscience advances, especially the information treasure trovefrom the Human Genome Project.

The management executive facing the enormous challengeof getting the new Life Sciences Greenhouse off the ground is Dennis Yablonsky, already a familiar face in the region’shigh-tech, entrepreneurial circles as chief executive of thePittsburgh Digital Greenhouse. That two-year-old regionalorganization has been credited with some success in movingPittsburgh closer to experiencing a critical mass of technology-related companies by developing support bases similar to what are needed for the bioscience effort. The choice of the49-year-old Yablonsky, who has run software-related companies

international leader in the emerging field of tissue engineering.For funders like Kelley, it’s job creation at an unprecedentedscale for an economy that just a decade ago was struggling toright itself from the demise of heavy manufacturing like steelproduction. In fact, the job losses have been so great that thePittsburgh region’s current population is the same as it was in1940. “We have a lot of ground to make up,” says Kelley.

One of the surest paths to recovery may be through bio-science, where Pittsburgh universities are being flooded withfederal research contracts. More research dollars lead to

“This region has tremendous assets thatcould make us a center for bioscienceindustries. But we need to have thisorganization backed by leaders from everysector so that it can aggressively go after funding dollars and identifyworthy prospects.”Dr. Peter Johnson CEO, TissueInformatics

TissueInformatics needs to be all-business because, in theemerging life sciences industry, the stakes are high and thecompetition is very stiff. But for those companies that succeedand for the regions in which they are located, the rewardscould be breathtaking. Billions of dollars and thousands ofjobs are expected to flow to those communities that can attractand grow companies able to process raw laboratory researchinto marketable products. That, and the opportunity to pioneerthe development of astonishing medical advances, are thereasons behind the formation in December of an enormouslyambitious bioscience initiative for western Pennsylvania, thePittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse. The new organizationhas been tasked with raising an eye-popping $600 millionfunding pool over the next decade.

The goal, according to the new leadership team, is to use thefunds to provide seed capital for dozens of TissueInformatics-style companies—and to help grow those already under way.

The ten-member governing board, co-chaired by PittChancellor Mark Nordenberg and Carnegie Mellon PresidentJared Cohon, draws from the top leadership ranks of thebioscience industry, from economic development groups andfrom government and academic research. But taking a strate-gic role in funding the organizational and start-up process areregional philanthropies, including the Economic OpportunityProgram of The Heinz Endowments, which has committed tolong-term funding.

“A Life Sciences Greenhouse is just the kind of well-thought-out structure that is essential if we’re going to be ableto jump-start the industry here and not lose the opportunityto some other city,” says Dr. Peter Johnson, chairman and chief executive of TissueInformatics and founder of thePittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative. “This region hastremendous assets that could make us a center for bioscienceindustries. But we need to have this organization backed by leaders from every sector so that it can aggressively go after funding dollars and identify worthy prospects.”

Johnson, a plastic surgeon and cell biologist at theUniversity of Pittsburgh Medical School before foundingTissueInformatics, is just the type of medical researchentrepreneur a Life Sciences Greenhouse would be positionedto attract, says Brian Kelley, Economic Opportunity Programdirector at The Heinz Endowments. “To flourish in thisregion, talented bio-researchers need to be able to access localventure capital and research lab management expertise to turntheir results into a business plan. Given the strength of thenational competition, if we’re going to be successful at this, we need to make the process as accessible as possible—fromfunding to business development to marketing,” says Kelley.“We need a one-stop shop in turning university research intocommercially viable products.”

What’s behind all the strategizing over bioscience entrepre-neurs? For Johnson, the goal is to position Pittsburgh as the

TissueInformatics staff prepare tissue samples for digital imaging and for

extracting genomic data. Images are processed and analyzed by way of proprietary

software packages that map structural and functional features.

While some of these challenges appear daunting, theprospectus refers repeatedly to Pittsburgh’s enormous strengthsin bioscience research and its position on the front lines of significant medical advancements like transplantation special-ties and clinical treatment methods. The report describes theseas powerful assets in helping Pittsburgh to develop its still nascent bioscience industry base.

“The final, unfinished business in Pittsburgh’s biosciencestory is taking full advantage of its research and health carebase to help further diversify Pittsburgh’s economy and creategood, well-paying jobs for the region’s workers,” the Battelleconsultants wrote. “At the end of World War II, Pittsburghwas advised to diversify into aerospace, electronics defense,and R&D, but failed to heed the call. It would be unfortunateif, 50 years later when presented with the opportunity to be a leader in the bio and digital revolutions…the region againfails to take dramatic action…not just for jobs, but for ahealthy quality of life.”

Bioscience boosters say that the Life Sciences Greenhouseinitiative is the first concerted effort in years to take the kindof dramatic action urged in the report. “This is the first timethat universities are at the center of the economic developmentcycle,” says The Heinz Endowments’ Kelley. “This is clearly amassive repositioning of regional, academic, economic devel-opment and state funding assets. This is not easily done, andit’s a long way from getting done.”

Johnson of TissueInformatics likens the challenge topicking the tumblers on a lock. The single-minded focus hasto be in place, as does the community will to be patient, hesays, as each element needed to grow the industry falls intoplace. A final “tumbler” involves increasing the availability of venture capital for local bioscience businesses, a processJohnson believes will occur during the next two years. “It’sonly when that last tumbler falls and the lock springs open,”he says, “that we’ll experience the explosive growth we all want to see.” h

“We can’t afford to sit on the sidelines andlet other cities go after this new sector.We’ve done more detailed research on thisproject than on anything else I can thinkabout, and all the evidence says the time to execute is now.”Dennis Yablonsky President & CEO, Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse

in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, was an early joint decision bythe two university heads. Carnegie Mellon’s Cohon and Pitt’sNordenberg were so impressed with Yablonsky’s managementof the Digital Greenhouse that they pushed the board to hirehim on a split-time basis between the two endeavors. But thebulk of his time will be spent setting the best conditions forgrowing the Life Sciences Greenhouse.

It will be Yablonsky’s critical first test to land a $40 millionchunk of a $100 million funding pool set aside last year byformer Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge—part of the state’s proceeds from settlement of its lawsuit against tobaccocompanies. The Ridge administration plan was to fund bio-science greenhouses in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and centralPennsylvania, an initiative still under way despite Ridge’sdeparture for Washington and his replacement by Lt. Gov.Mark Schweiker.

Sure to give Pittsburgh’s Life Sciences Greenhouse a quickstart out of the gate is its powerful university partnership, along-established federal research grant funding stream in thehundreds of millions of dollars annually and early underwritingfrom the foundation community. “This region is fortunate to have a foundation support base that is much larger than aregion the size of western Pennsylvania would normally attract,”says Yablonksy. “The fact that [foundations] are committed toinvesting in the region and that they know how importantthis kind of initiative is to Pittsburgh’s future makes my jobmuch easier.”

Yablonsky likely will be making more requests for philanthropic backing as he embarks on fundraising trips toWashington. He’ll also be traveling to other regions to attractprivate venture capital groups. Some critics have worried thattoo much of western Pennsylvania’s funding “asks” are beingtied to bioscience. But Yablonsky disagrees. “We can’t affordto sit on the sidelines and let other cities go after this new sector,” he says. “We’ve done more detailed research on thisproject than on anything else I can think about, and all theevidence says the time to execute is now.”

Yablonsky cites an exhaustive prospectus prepared byCleveland-based Battelle Memorial Institute’s TechnologyPartnership Group for an 18-member steering committeeexploring the idea of a greenhouse. The plan, he says, is sothorough, so solidly backed up with detailed economic information on the region and its ability to generate bio-science industries “that we’re miles ahead of where we were at this point with the Digital Greenhouse.”

Still, the prospectus identifies six areas that Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania will have to improve upon to comeout ahead of other regions in the competition for bioscienceinvestment dollars and companies:

• Upgrading the region’s technology commercialization capabilities;

• Enhancing the region’s research and development base,especially in core focus areas like tissue engineering;

• Establishing a critical mass of firms through entrepreneur-ships and alliances with the pharmaceutical industry;

• Creating a business climate supportive of the biosciences,including addressing capital gaps;

• Developing a bioscience brand name and image for the region;

• Assuring that the talent and workforce are present to sustain bioscience development.

John Freund, a senior laboratory technician at TissueInformatics, confers with a

colleague on a project that could lead to new drug targets or develop new indicators

to allow for earlier diagnosis of disease. If there is going to be a bioscience boom

in the Pittsburgh region, research scientists and computer programmers will have

to collaborate closely in the workplace.

T he world-renowned DanceBrazil dance troupe performed three world-premiere works in New York City’s Joyce Theater last year. One of them,Unspoken ...Unknown, is a duet in the African-Brazilian form of Capoeira,a mix of pure dance blended with the raw athleticism of martial arts. Its history is represented in the movements imported to Brazil from Africa.

Created by DanceBrazil artistic director Jelon Vieira, Unspoken ...Unknowntells the story of a friendship between two teenagers. As friends and fellowCapoeiristas, the two male dancers share everything—hopes, dreams and theCapoeira circle. The story line is a metaphor for how young people are drawnto Capoeira, in part because of the urban coolness inherent in the heart-pounding gymnastics and defensive fighting technique. But students also arecaptivated by the power of the movements to convey complex feelings ofconflict, anxiety and isolation that teens often find difficult to verbalize.

That power, which drew hundreds of young people to the New York dancetheater, is on full display in a program now under way in Pittsburgh. Theperformances here are less grandiose—they are played out in school gymnasiumsand bare bones community centers—but no less energetic. And here themetaphor is being translated into real life: Capoeira devotee Justin Laing, whoteaches out of the Nego Gato movement, uses his art to connect withPittsburgh’s at-risk teens.

Pittsburgh’s Youth ArtWorks is designed to take teens through student instruction and paid apprenticeships to eventually turn them into full-time employees as mentors and instructors to new students.By Douglas RootPhotography by Ellen Kelson and Suellen Fitzsimmons

WorksWorksArt

Nego Gato instructor Justin Laing

helps a student with his form in

a Capoeira movement. Laing is

teacher, counselor, coach and

mentor to at-risk youth in an arts

employment program that is just

beginning to come into its own.

Tresa Varner, assistant curator of education at The AndyWarhol Museum on Pittsburgh’s North Side, who directs themagazine publishing program, says the arts instruction processis labor-intensive. Youth often come into the program full of ideas but unprepared for the amount of work involved inmaking them happen. “We’re trying to encourage creativewriting, poetry and photography,” says Varner, “but we’re alsoshowing them that the creative process can’t happen withoutbasics like showing up for work on time and staying focused.”

Backing up Braun’s small-scale, success-building strategy is independent evidence that says the arts-for-pay mix has asignificant impact on youth who stay with the program. AnOMG Center for Collaborative Learning’s evaluation of YouthArtWorks, commissioned last year by The Heinz Endowments,gave the four main programs high marks. Findings were basedon class visits, benchmark comparisons with similar programsin other cities and feedback from apprentices and mentor–instructors. In an assessment interview process where partici-pants remained anonymous to encourage candid judgments,one 16-year-old apprentice artist said her experience withDance Alloy had given her a sense of purpose for the first timein her life. “I never knew I had such a strong connection withchildren,” she said, “and a passion for teaching them to lovedance as much as I do.”

The evaluation also was supported by YouthWorks’ partnersin city and county government, and by the Three RiversWorkforce Investment Board, which administers federal fundsfor the region. The consulting team did identify some challengesfor the program, in particular a need to formulate a detailed

plan to expose students to a wider range of creative andadministrative opportunities in the arts. But overall, theyfound the programs promising.

“Youth ArtWorks has the potential to be a powerful,positive influence in young peoples’ lives,” the OMG evaluatorswrote in their report. “That potential can be achieved byensuring all sites reach the status of the few best-practice sites.An additional challenge for the consortium is to take theprogram to scale without compromising that quality, for that is required if the program is to make a difference for asignificant number of disadvantaged Pittsburgh youth.”

The evaluators also cited instructor–artists for taking qual-ity seriously. The difference they make in the lives of YouthArtsWorks apprentices often has as much to do with helpingthem develop life-coping skills as in improving their talent forpainting or music or dance. The arts can serve as safe ground,the instructors say, for students to open up on serious issuesrelated to home life, school performance and relationships.

“Many of the students refer to me as ‘Mr. Justin,’ which isa mix of the informal and the formal,” says Nego Gato’sLaing. “I like that because it says I play several different rolesfor them, some deeper than others.” h

Nego Gato is just one of the arts opportunities available to at-risk students who

are put on a track to become paid apprentices. Left to right: publishing a home-

town version of artist Andy Warhol’s famous Interview magazine at Pittsburgh’s

Warhol Museum; practicing ballet and modern dance at Dance Alloy’s Friendship

studio; talking over technique in the Steelpan Careers Training Program in the city.

Nego Gato is one of four arts-centered programs inPittsburgh’s Youth ArtWorks, which promotes the use of thearts as a tool for youth development. Its thesis—supported byexperience both here and elsewhere— is that arts instructorslike the 31-year-old Laing may sometimes influence youthdevelopment to a degree that many larger and more expensiveyouth intervention programs would be hard-pressed to match.

Youth ArtWorks is a component of YouthWorks, a youthemployment and training initiative that receives significantsupport from The Heinz Endowments. The ArtWorks programwas started three years ago, based on the model of “Gallery37” in Chicago. That internationally respected, youth arts-employment program has served several thousand youngpeople each year during the past decade. Youth ArtWorks isdesigned to take teens through paid apprenticeships in creativeand commercial art forms. The end goal is to provide themwith significant work experience and the job skills necessary to be successful in any work environment.

In addition to Nego Gato, students can find modern dancetraining at Dance Alloy’s Penn Avenue studio. For aspiringwriters, photographers and graphic designers, there’s TheAndy Warhol Museum’s Urban Interview magazine publishingprogram, where students get job training, writing and

technology skills, and a portfolio of work to help them infuture job searches. New this year is the Steelpan CareersTraining Program, which prepares young people for jobs inmusic including performance, instruction, composition and management.

The Pittsburgh arts-employment program is just beginning tocome into its own, with funding that allows about 50 apprenticesto be served each year. “Our goal is to develop quality programsat a reasonable cost and have a lot of success stories at this smallerscale so that we can make the best case for moving to the nextlevel,” says Robin Braun, YouthWorks operations manager.“We’ve discovered that one of the key factors ensuring success isto have one person dedicated to assisting every program withproposals, contracts, planning and program implementation.This allows Youth Artworks to be well managed while freeingup instructors to do what they do best—teach.”

Laing, who works full-time in the Pittsburgh city schools,community centers and at the University of Pittsburgh, says the management assistance from YouthWorks is critical. “I get to spend more of my time helping students improvetheir skills, and that’s more opportunity to transfer that focus,discipline and caring into other areas of their lives.”

“I get to spend more of my time helping students improve theirskills, and that’s more opportunity totransfer that focus, discipline andcaring into other areas of their lives.”Justin Laing Instructor, Youth ArtWorks

Heinz Endowments Partners with Meet the Composer

Two Pittsburgh-based composers are now

offering their talents to regional schools

and cultural groups after being awarded a

three-year Meet the Composer New Residencies grant. Efrain Amaya and

R. James Whipple will work with Gateway to the Arts, Renaissance City

Winds, Shaler Area School District and WQED-FM, the area’s classical music

station. Amaya and Whipple are part-time faculty members in Carnegie

Mellon’s School of Music. Their appointment resulted from a regional

competition made possible by The Heinz Endowments in collaboration with

the national Meet the Composer organization.

Meet the Composer, founded in l974, was created to increase opportunities

for composers by fostering the creation, performance, dissemination and

appreciation of their music. The New Residencies program focuses specifically

on building composer/community collaborations. Amaya and Whipple will

compose works for the Shaler Area School District, help students write their

own works and create special programs for WQED-FM.

Clean Energy Choice Window Openedwith Heinz-Sponsored Ad Campaign

Duquesne Light Company’s early payoff ofwhat is known in the industry as “strandedcosts” has provided a limited opportunity for a regional media campaign to convinceconsumers to invest some of their savings inalternative clean energy suppliers.

In a series of catchy TV, radio and printads, the Mid-Atlantic Renewable EnergyCoalition will begin this month to pitchDuquesne Light customers who are seeingsignificant reductions in their monthly bills,thanks to the end of a customer surcharge.The state’s Public Utility Commissionallowed the stranded costs charge for yearsbased on utilities’ unprofitable investmentsin power plants before the onset of electric-ity deregulation. In November 2000, thePUC voted to end the stranded costs whenDuquesne Light reported its investment hadbeen recouped. The utility also agreed to caprates for distribution of electricity through2003. Those two actions will bring the

average consumer bill down about 16 per-cent according to PUC calculations.

The goal of the $500,000 ad campaign is to reduce consumer dependence on fossilfuels. The coalition calculates that theaverage Pennsylvania residential customerswitching to renewable energy prevents anamount of pollution each year equal todriving the family car 20,000 miles. Thecampaign, developed by Elkman/Alexander& Partners of Philadelphia,is being underwritten by The Heinz Endowments andfour other foundations.

“TV ads can be veryeffective in moving con-sumers toward the idea ofinvesting in cleaner energygenerators, but their highcost is beyond the reach ofmost environmental groups,”says John Hanger, executivedirector of Citizens forPennsylvania’s Future—

PennFuture, an Endowments grantee.“That’s where the foundation communitycan make a significant difference,” saysHanger, also the energy coalition spokesman.The coalition is made up of environmentalgroups, green businesses, nonprofits andgovernment agencies working to build con-sumer interest in renewable energy sources.

here&there

New Web Site Unveiled

In 1995, The Heinz Endowments becameone of the nation’s first foundations to go online with information about its guide-lines and grantmaking. In January, theEndowments unveiled the newest generationof www.heinz.org, encouraging southwesternPennsylvanians with the thematic messagederived from its grantmaking: Dream Big.

The redesigned site attempts to provideusers with a one-stop, easy-to-navigateresource for reading about the Endowments’activities or learning about its areas of focus.

The site is specially designed to guidegrantees, prospective applicants and otherfunders.

In addition to background on theEndowments’ history, staff, founders,programs and guidelines, the new site offersa historical timeline, a resource library and a grants database that can be sorted by program area or by organizational goal.There are also links to grantees, fundingpartners and other sources of information.

The Endowments recently completed astrategic planning process that reaffirmed the foundation’s commitment to the regionand identified three organizational goals that now guide the efforts of all five of itsgrantmaking programs. Those goals arefeatured prominently on the site’s homepage:“Our dream is for southwestern Pennsylvaniato prosper as a premier place to both liveand work, as a center of learning andeducational excellence, and as a home todiversity and inclusion.”

You can visit www.heinz.org to learn moreabout the Endowments or to comment onthe site’s design, content and relevance toyour work and interests.

Tom Gigliotti

“This is just the kind of thing thatPittsburgh went through 50 years ago andwhy our experience is so valuable to indus-trial cities all over Central Europe,” saysLinkages program director William Lafe,who organized the visit of a recent Pennsyl-vania delegation to Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Heinz Endowments’Environment program director CarenGlotfelty and program officer MelisaCrawford participated in the delegation.

Because of southwestern Pennsylvania’simpressive track record in re-use of formerindustrial sites, several of the delegation’smembers were center stage at a regionalbrownfields conference in Ostrava, CzechRepublic. The international seminar wasorganized in part by The BrownfieldsCenter, a collaborative partnership betweenthe University of Pittsburgh and CarnegieMellon University.

The benefits of the Linkages programflow both ways, says Glotfelty, not just fromPennsylvania to Central Europe. Onechallenge being addressed by the programinvolves upgrading wastewater treatmentsystems in small rural communities throughout Slovakia with low-cost, ecologi-cally sound designs, an effort that could be instructive for the Pittsburgh region. In Allegheny County, which has a terrainsimilar to Central Europe’s, more than 83 communities are facing a multi-billion-dollar bill to repair antiquated sewer systems.Part of this problem includes small, finan-cially strapped, rural communities that relyon failing septic systems.

Pennsylvania’s Department ofEnvironmental Protection has begun toevaluate the potential for transferring theapproach being developed in Slovakia backto southwestern Pennsylvania. “We want to pull together the people doing low-costwater treatment demonstration projects inSlovakia and bring them to our region,” says Lafe. “I think people will be surprised atwhat they can show us about sorting outpriorities and developing workable policies.”

Central Europe Links To PittsburghEnvironmental Gains

In the United States, Pittsburgh sometimeshas to battle an outdated image as America’s“Smoky City,” but in Central Europe, theregion is known as a model of environmen-tal transformation. Dozens of cities there arehoping to learn from the region’s experiencein overcoming a heritage of industrialpollution.

To help, The Heinz Endowments issupporting the Central European LinkagesProgram, which works with nonprofitorganizations in three industrial cities inCentral Europe to carry out environmentaldemonstration projects. Western Pennsylvaniaexperts in energy conservation, urban plan-ning and brownfields development havehelped implement more than seven projects,several of them potential models for national initiatives.

One involved introducing the concept of community volunteerism with a park-building project in Spalene Porici. Moretechnical expertise was needed in anotherproject involving the transformation ofresidential heating systems in the tiny townof Marklowice, Poland. Officials there are in the throes of figuring out how to replacecoal burning heating systems with cleanerbut more expensive natural gas furnaces.Linkages participants proposed creating arevolving loan fund that allows residents to borrow money for installation in order to increase the pace of conversions and havethe entire community breathing easier.

here&there

The residents of Spalene Porici of the Czech Republic

built this community park after coaching from a

southwestern Pennsylvania delegation on organizing

a volunteer project. The Heinz Endowments’ Caren

Glotfelty and Melisa Crawford are joined by Central

European Linkages program director William Lafe

in a tour of “At Snakes,” the name given by children

to a series of serpentine play structures.

What should Pittsburgh do with what thehistorian David McCullough has describedas a “once-in-a-century” opportunity torevitalize its riverfronts? That question drovePittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy’s creationtwo years ago of the Riverlife Task Force, a coalition of waterfront property owners,and philanthropic, civic and business leaders.

Now, Riverlife’s answer — a recentlyunveiled plan for developing the downtownwaterfront as a single, continuous park — hasbeen awarded the 2002 American Instituteof Architects Honor Award in the categoryof outstanding regional and urban design.The jury called the plan for Three RiversPark, which was developed by Boston urbanplanning firm Chan Kreiger & Associates ina process funded by The Heinz Endowmentsand other area foundations, “a compellingand exceptionally well-communicated visionfor the rebirth of Pittsburgh’s riverfront.”

The plan was one of four projects select-ed from 63 submissions in that category. The

way and delivered the city to this moment.At the dawn of the 21st century, Pittsburghis ready. It’s time to build Three Rivers Park.”

Riverlife’s plan was the product of 18months of detailed design work, includingmore than 120 public meetings with neigh-borhood and community groups, river users,and other organizations with a stake in thefuture of Pittsburgh’s three rivers and itsmiles of waterfront. It lays out the principlesthat will guide development of the park, its specific components, design standardsand anticipated next steps.

To view the complete Vision Plan, or the overview published by the task forceas a circular in the Post-Gazette, visit www.pittsburghriverlife.org.

national Honor Awards, which are the profession’s highest recognition of excellencein design, will be presented in May inWashington, D.C. “The plan presents abold, simple vision in a clear and compellingmanner and unequivocally establishes theriverfront as public domain,” the awards jury wrote. “It is significant for the breadthand simplicity of its vision and the care withwhich details are addressed. … Of equalimportance, the planning process appears tohave forged a community consensus suffi-cient to implement the recommendations.”

The jury’s finding echoes the sentimentexpressed by local community leaders andmedia in the days following the plan’s releaselate last year. “It’s an idea so disarminglyobvious, for a city built along three rivers,that it’s a wonder Pittsburgh hasn’t attempted it before now,” the PittsburghPost-Gazette editorialized. “But three and a half centuries of history, pioneering,growth and industry have both gotten in the

Rivers of OpportunityWaterfront Development Plan Wins Top National Design Honor

Jack Wolf

T H E H E I N Z E N D OW M E N T S

Howard Heinz EndowmentVira I. Heinz Endowment30 Dominion Tower625 Liberty AvenuePittsburgh, PA 15222-3116

412.281.5777www.heinz.org

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