June 2003

Have space, Will garden
Stephanie Flom thinks Pittsburgh is ready for an outdoor museum of enviromental art. Her Persephone Project bets neighborhoods into the act,too.

By Christine H. O'toole

A smoggy lawn by Bigelow Boulevard. A vacant lot in Polish Hill. A trafficked intersection in the Hill District. To most, these are urban eyesores. To Stephanie Flom, they’re a perfect canvas for public art.

Her brainchild, the Persephone Project—named for the ancient Greek goddess whose emergence from Hades every year heralded the coming of spring—uses plants as its artistic medium. But Flom isn’t going after a simple punch of color amid a blank landscape. She aims to plant seeds for thought.

The major component of the Persephone Project is the Artgardens, an outdoor gallery of environmental artworks—large-scale creations made of plants and natural materials. Alongside the big pieces, though, the Persephone Project also wants to reach out to neighborhoods and local artists. Three community-based gardens have already been created; two more will follow this year.

Gardening is a practice with a Rodney Dangerfield problem: Too often, it gets no respect. Flom hopes to change that. “Some people have an intimacy with the garden—they’re passionate about pulling every weed and knowing every flower,” she says. “Those who can sit back and see it as a medium at a distance are the artists.” The Persephone Project, first of its kind in the nation and funded by the Sprout Fund, Heinz Endowments, Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts, Mellon Corp. and other donors, just might drive the point home.

The first clue to Persephone’s unconventional approach to landscaping is its base of operations: not at a garden center or conservatory, but at Carnegie Mellon’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, known for its support of eclectic, creative projects linked to biology, ecology and robotics. The second is the involvement of Flom herself, a local arts powerhouse known for her work with the Dance Alloy and the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater. And the final tip-off is the role of national artists like Daniel Ladd and Lily Yeh. Last year, the two created the first installations in the project’s main site, Frank Curto Park on Bigelow Boulevard.

To motorists zooming past at rush hour, Daniel Ladd’s piece is a blur of sycamore saplings huddled together. Lily Yeh’s seems like a gathering of totem poles. This is a garden? This is art? Yes.

The grand vision behind Persephone has some local artistic precedents. Ladd’s work will remind some observers of Winifred Lutz’ “Urban Garden,” a permanent installation created over the past decade atop exposed foundations at the Mattress Factory; it also brings to mind James Loney and David Ludwig’s “Labyrinth” of espaliered yew trees, a 1997 installation in the Cultural District.

Another large Pittsburgh work of environmental art was more controversial: Bob Bingham’s late-’90s experiment at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, in which the Carnegie Mellon-based artist allowed vegetation to overgrow the formal gardens overlooking Fifth Avenue. Flom learned an important lesson from the public reaction to Bingham’s urban prairie. “You have to find a site that isn’t currently loved—not take away someone’s favorite Frisbee-throwing hill.”

That’s why the Curto location, suggested by Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy, works for Phase One of the project. The neglected mile of city-owned green space along Bigelow Boulevard offered Flom the acreage she craved, as well as a site for an entrance and parking area below the garden.

Ladd’s work, “Three Arches,” is designed to be seen at a distance. As the three pairs of grafted sycamores he planted last year grow into each other, they will frame three different views of downtown: a large-scale artwork with its roots in gardening. “The ‘Three Arches’ are planted as a landmark,” Ladd says, “a reference point… into and out of downtown Pittsburgh. They allow passersby to witness the passing of time.” The creation mimics a real-life grove of sycamores that grows in the city’s Sheraden neighborhood.

Lily Yeh’s Curto Park piece, “Goddesses Adorned,” comprises a trio of curved-wood shapes (a byproduct of trees felled by last summer’s microburst) standing at the center of a labyrinth of flowers. It is the first of the Persephone Project’s community gardens: designed by local artists, with both plants and care contributed by local volunteers.

Yeh is the visionary founder of North Philadelphia’s Village of Arts and Humanities, which has transformed vacant lots through murals, mosaics and greenery. Her art-based community-development efforts link high-flown aesthetic theory with the simple desire of a community to beautify its space. That syncs with Flom’s plan for Persephone’s community sites, which she has dubbed “Magic Penny Gardens”—likening plants to the Malvina Reynolds folk song: “Lend it, spend it and you’ll have so many.”

“My goal was to clean up the neighborhood, to soften the landscape, with hopes of its being contagious,” explains Michael Friday, a volunteer on the Polish Hill garden designed by sculptor Paul Bowden. (The third garden is Jorge Myers’ Centre Avenue site, featuring “found objects” from the Hill District.) “I’d been involved in cleaning out vacant lots and planting them. This seemed like a natural extension of that work.”

As neighborhood residents have
donated plants to Flom’s effort, they’ve often been moved to recount the stories of how they received them in the first place, and why they’re passing them along. Participant Kathy Boykowicz, with a lapful of scarlet roses, recalled that a neighbor had nurtured an unusual rose cutting from an uncle’s funeral wreath into a flourishing bush. When it eventually crept through a fence, Boykowicz claimed ownership, eventually sharing some canes from the plant.

The role of memory will be explored further in the Magic Penny garden outside the Carnegie Library in Munhall, where the gardens will be designed by members of the Steel Valley Arts Council and maintained by Good Grief, a bereavement-counseling service.

“We’re making the point that grief isn’t always handled by verbalizing,” says Good Grief co-director Cheryl Massino. “It’s things that people do. The garden demonstrates that.”

Other gardens are planned for Wilkinsburg, to be designed by potter Gary Pletsch, and Lawrenceville, the vision of Jan Loney. Both artists are neighbors of their projects.

Will the results please other neighbors?
Perhaps.

“Public art is, in and of itself, a can of worms,” notes Carnegie Mellon’s Bingham. “No matter what it is, at least half the people are going to dislike it.” Bingham worked on the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry team that created the design for Nine Mile Run, now being implemented by the Army Corps of Engineers. “Education is definitely a key component. You really have to help people with signage and programs [to] get people talking about it, having conversations about it.”

If that’s the key to success, then Persephone’s in good shape—because Flom thrives on dialogue. While she plans future plots together with artists and community groups, she also is designing her own installation for the Curto Park Artgarden. “Sun and Moon,” a 60-foot crescent, features the flowers of the same name.

Flom’s vision is that commuters will see the sunflowers facing them as they travel to town, and the moonflowers greeting them as they return in the evening. “I’m hoping,” she says, “that the choreography of the plants draws people in.”

Chris O’Toole last wrote for the magazine about childhood depression. She is willing to donate some hyperactive Black-eyed Susans free to good homes.