The McKeesport Muffler Man

March 11, 20152 Comments

Figure of a man created from steel parts on wall of Mars Builders Supply, McKeesport, PA

While not technically a “muffler man” in the strictest of roadside America senses, the figure that adorns a brick wall of Mars Wholesale Supply in McKeesport appears to have actually been fabricated out of mufflers (OK, probably loose duct work or other stray sheet metal the crew had laying around).

Regardless, his characteristic stance with one hand up to stabilize an invisible object, the other down to carry its load looks awfully familiar. This guy has a similar steely take-no-prisoners look in his squinting eyes and is a commanding presence on the traffic of Walnut Street (Rt. 148) as it leaves town. “Come in,” Muffler Man seems to say, “I’ll bet you could use some nice joint compound right about now.”

While it may be fanciful to imagine Home Depot’s staff having the freedom to rend macho muffler men or lovely ladies of lumber, we can always hope. They’re losing out on a lot of blogger dollars!

Nun of the Above: Corita Kent at The Warhol

February 26, 20153 Comments

Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent show at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent at The Warhol

Radical nuns making religious pop art? The grocery store across the street both inspiration and source material? No need to tell us twice: the Orbit is there! We may not have known it, but this was the show we’ve been waiting for this our entire lives and we got a first look on opening night.

Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent is up at The Andy Warhol Museum through April 19, and I cannot recommend it more. It is the best Warhol Museum show this blogger has ever seen. (Yes: that includes Diane Keaton’s clown painting collection.)

Sister Corita Kent lived, taught, and created art at the Immaculate Heart Community in Los Angeles in the 1950s and ’60s. The lecture we attended mentioned that Sister Corita was fully booked with teaching and nun duties for much of the year and managed to do nearly all of her voluminous silk screen work in a very brief window between the end of classes in the late Spring and the start of Summer.

art instruction, Immaculate Heart Community

Nuns having fun: screen printing at Immaculate Heart Community

These periods of high production were often followed by cross-country summer road trips wherein the sisters would literally take their art to the people, traveling all the way to the East Coast, setting up roadside cheap art fairs at all points in between, wherever their station wagon landed. Many of the surviving prints still have the tack marks to prove it.

The backstory is intriguing, but the art is fantastic. It’s beautiful and clever, sacred and psychedelic, deeply meaningful and goofy. My favorites are the silk screen pieces from the mid-60s where Sister Corita took familiar magazine advertising and product packaging, distorted, rearranged, and otherwise mutated it, and then usually combined it with Bible verses (you’ve got to get in close to read these) to turn the original message (often literally) on its head.

The color combinations are wild: often radically garish choices of fluorescent pinks and greens that seem like they shouldn’t work, but do. The printing technique is really fascinating as well: words broken into multiple colors and bending text. All this achieved in a low-tech, pre-Photoshop era by cutting, bending, and folding paper and then re-photographing to generate the required two-tone originals.

(My) photos don’t do justice to these fantastic pieces. You need to get in close and read the fine print. The show left me feeling incredibly awake and alive and inspired and envious. Trips to Shur-Save haven’t been the same since. Get yourself down to The Warhol while you still can.

Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent at The Warhol

Un-Graffiti

February 19, 2015January 1, 20161 Comment

"No Dogs!" painted on side of small factory in Millvale

“No Dogs!”, Millvale

If there’s anything that watching television has taught us, it’s that serial killers are everywhere. The Pacific Northwest, the beaches of Miami, Belfast, 1950’s London, you name it. Hell, Chloe Sevigny turned up scads of them right here in Pittsburgh–imagine if she could have finished the season!

We street bloggers can learn a lot from the fictional hunting of these seemingly very normal monsters: trust no one, collect as much material evidence as possible, we all need to take a long look at our own mothers, and mainly that we’re always looking for patterns.

When The Orbit photography staff started going through their deep back-catalog of photos, one such interesting pattern emerged. Photos of places that had all the hallmarks of graffiti: the crude, quickly-executed messaging, raw emotion, paint applied directly to wall surfaces. But these weren’t graffiti in the typical sense; they all appeared to be committed by the owners of the buildings, too in-a-hurry or just too cheap to have a sign created, instead scrawling the messages directly on their own property. We’re calling these “un-graffiti“.

"No Parking Open-Pantry Customer Only" painted on wall in Lincoln

“No Parking Open-Pantry Customer Only”, Lincoln

Not only were there no non-customers parking at the Open-Pantry, there were no customers, there was no open business, and there were no human beings anywhere to be seen for blocks around this former convenience store in Lincoln.

"PAULs" letters on side of building in New Kensington, PA

“PAULs”, New Kensington

PAULs is a little different in that the medium isn’t paint, but rather recycled letters from (likely) commercial signage, fixed to plywood. So maybe this is more like “un-street art”, but I think it counts.

"Wrap Your Garbage" painted on side of building in Lawrenceville

“Wrap Your Garbage”, Lawrenceville

This message obviously predates some heavy-duty rewiring of a commercial building on Butler Street. On this day there was no problem with unwrapped garbage.

"Quit Paintin...... Dumb Shit on Garage" painted on garage door in Bloomfield

“Quit Paintin…… Dumb Shit on Garage”, Bloomfield

This one is the mother of all un-graffitis: a homeowner’s desperate plea/demand for the scofflaws of his or her Bloomfield neighborhood to cease and desist their assault on this small cinderblock garage. The request seems to have gone unheeded.

Update: since this photo was taken the entire garage was repainted a deep blue and I don’t recollect any new tags on it (yet).

Flowers in February

February 14, 2015February 27, 20161 Comment

Pop des Fleurs test installation, Arsenal Park, Pittsburgh

On this grayest of days, in the midst of the most miserable of months, even the hardest of core ice-in-his-veins bloggers is tempted to just stay holed-up inside with his hot coffee, British crime dramas, and cauldron of thick stew.

But no! Not with beautiful flowers blooming a mere two blocks from Chez Orbit. Flowers? In February? In Pittsburgh? Indeed! Possibly (or maybe not) coinciding with this most contrived of holidays, the miracle workers of the Fiberarts Guild of Pittsburgh have created their first test installation of the Pop des Fleurs project at Arsenal Park, in Lawrenceville.

Pop des Fleurs detail

The Fiberarts Guild were the masterminds behind 2013’s incredible Knit the Bridge project which brought together tons of volunteer knitters of all types from all over the county to ultimately cover the Andy Warhol (nee 7th Street) Bridge in knit and crocheted panels.

Pop des Fleurs has similar goal of taking fiber arts to public spaces, but with the very deliberate timing of bringing bright color to the outdoors in deep bleak winter. The project team is looking for makers to create the flowers either on their own or in a number of public workshops and events.

The test installation will be up for just three more weeks (through March 8). Find a cold, snowy day and get your keister over to the park for a blast of magic.

Old Glory

The Chewing Gum Graffiti of Bigelow Blvd.

February 12, 2015Leave a comment

“Matson”

The intrepid cityscape blogger walks everywhere, even if he or she is just getting started in this game. There’s just no other way to have one’s ear to the ground without keeping his or her feet on the ground (or something like that).

The walk from Lawrenceville to Oakland usually passes through Bloomfield, by way of the Millvale Street Bridge, but on the alternate route up and over the Bloomfield Bridge one gets to pass through the long stretch of Bigelow Blvd. at the northwest corner of Oakland: Zarra’s Italian restaurant, some new hotel, and The Royal York apartments (former home of Lord and Lady Lagrosa).

Out in front of The Royal York stands an old stone wall, hip high, with a curious assortment of graffiti, executed in chewing gum. I’ve been following these expressions for the last several years.

There are a couple really interesting things about this particular strain of graffiti. For one, it’s a really slow burn: it plays out over weeks, one stretch of gum at a time, rather than the more immediate gratification of spray paint “bombers” who get in and get out (seemingly) without time. Second, what is this (gender neutral) guy going after? Matson? Who the hell is Matson?

“Canandaigua”

Canandaigua? I can Google with the best of them, and that particular search term turns up a small town in the Finger Lakes region of New York state, not far from Rochester. The assailant’s home turf? It seems like a possibility. I like my home town just fine, but you’ll struggle to find me spelling out “Blacksburg” along any public surfaces, let along in chewing gum.

“Go Bills”

This would ultimately read “Go ‘Cuse”

Go Bills and Go ‘Cuse. Finally something to work with. Here, we’ve either got somebody who is crazy about the legislative process or a big fan of western New York state college/professional athletics. Now, I can’t cotton to any version of the Buffalo Bills since their horrendous move to the red fielded, aerodynamic buffalo, but I empathize with their haven’t-been-good-since-the-Reagan years, astroturf-enduring fan base. Hell, maybe they could go north and win a Grey Cup, like Baltimore. If your team strategy is exporting missionaries to Steelers country with cases of Doublemint, hats off to you.

Vastly superior old Buffalo Bills “bison” image

The Toynbee Tiles of Smithfield Street

February 1, 20155 Comments

It doesn’t get much more “street art” than the mystery “Toynbee Tiles” that have appeared embedded in the macadam of city streets throughout the country (and the world!) for the last several decades. They’ve been tracked pretty thoroughly and their story and the search for their creator was spellbindingly told in the terrific documentary film Resurrect Dead (2011).

We don’t have the kind of quantity that exist in Philadelphia or Baltimore, but Pittsburgh still has a bunch. Smithfield Street (downtown) is the best spot to collectively see a run of the local ones, all of which are photographed here. There’s approximately one on each block from Boulevard of the Allies to Sixth Street.