Author: caitlinbruce

Last Sunday I had a short conversation with Israel about the River of Words project while he drove me to the City of Asylum office to conduct the last of my interviews for the semester. He spoke to some of his inspirations for this collective project, namely, the crucial roles that public names (on houses)…

On February 23rd I had the chance to speak to Diana Jones, a writer who lives in the North Side. Her word is “mandalas,” a Sanskrit term that she suggested translates to something like “circle of life,” an insight she said she has felt more powerfully and palpably in recent years. For her, the project…

My conversation with Gary pointed to the way in which the River of Words projects relates to self identity, and community identity…and it’s various complexities. His family hosts the word “melody,” a term they find an apt descriptor for their musical practice, and taste. He also underscored how the current uncertainty with the Historic Review…

What follows is the transcript of my interview with Deena Kelly. Deena offers some important insight on the way that home is a constantly evolving space of memory, and so, in her view, her words serve as as way to make concrete and visible an ongoing process of memory production and building new social relationships….

On February 28th I had the pleasure of conducting a phone interview with Mona Murphy whose house boasts the word “Library.” Less about creating new connections (due to location of the word, she hazarded), it is a way for her to remember and reflect on the importance of books in her life, her late mother’s…

On February 19 the Office of Public Art (OPA) inaugurated Jennifer Wen Ma’s site specific installation, titled, “A Wintery Landscape Cradling Bits of Sparkle.” This project marks the second of a three-year series of public art installations in Pittsburgh’s Market Square in the downtown. The square, project supporters have argued, is a hub for activity…

What happens when a community gets to pick the labels used to describe itself? How does having public, self-chosen words impact the kind of possible interactions that can take place? When are words not enough? These are some of the questions that emerged during my first day of oral history interviews with River of Words…

River of Words was the first of a series of temporary public art commissions installed in Pittsburgh’s Northside neighborhood, along a public thoroughfare called the “Garden-to-Garden Artway.” The project, led by writer Israel Centeno and visual artists Carolina Arnal and Gisela Romera, natives of Venezuela explored the way words are a “metaphor for neural synapsis…

I find myself in the middle of a three week series of readings on visual methodologies with my Rhetoric and Culture class, in which we slowly plod through Gillian Rose’s chapters on compositional, semiotic, and discursive analysis of images themselves, and discursive analysis of images’ location within institutional apparatuses. We also read Cara Finnegan’s excellent…

I am teaching an upper level undergraduate on Rhetoric and Culture, with the theme of public art and the city. After reading about urban planning, power relations, signage, and South Africa over the first two weeks we now take our first explicit steps towards grappling with the “why public art” question, which takes us to…