Pittsburgh is a city that slowly reveals itself to you. If you don’t like to cross bridges, talk to strangers, pick through flyers at coffee shops, read the calendar in the local newspapers, and subscribe to neighbourhood (ec)centric listservs, you may miss it. Well, maybe not miss it. But you will walk away only hearing the greatest hits and not any of the b-sides. Unfortunate.

That’s not to say we don’t have a fantastic collection of greatest hits that you should rock out to regularly. My Pittsburgh Art Scene Greatest Hits mix tape has Carnegie Museum of Art, Wood Street Gallery, The Andy Warhol Museum, Mattress Factory, Silver Eye Center for Photography, and Society for Contemporary Craft. Is there another city in the United States with less than 350,000 people that has this much going on in the visual arts? I’m not sure. And if you expand that mix tape to include architecture, performing arts, and literature, you add Fallingwater, our green and living buildings, August Wilson, Terrence Hayes, the Pittsburgh Symphony, The Cynics, Art Blakey. Add sports and pop culture as greatest hits bonus tracks and you have Pittsburgh’s professional football team, the Steelers, and Night of the Living Dead.

What more could a girl want when she moved to Pittsburgh in 2003? I hate to say this because, if you are not from Pittsburgh, there is kind of an unwritten rule about having to say you love it no matter what, but it took me two years to genuinely like it here. Maybe three. When I moved here, I was consulting for Americans for the Arts out of Washington DC and working on Trappings with Tiffany Ludwig as a part of our collaboration, Two Girls Working. During my first two years in Pittsburgh, I travelled the majority of the time, and was only here in short spurts of two to six weeks. While this contributed to me getting lost quite often, it also helped me slowly put my new home in perspective. I was constantly comparing Pittsburgh to the other cities I was travelling to. Every time I came home, I liked it more and more. I was finding the b-sides. I was learning that Pittsburgh was a good place for artists and others who wanted to start things up. I was meeting people who were working to transform Pittsburgh, using it as a base for national projects, finding funding and collaborators to make things happen. I learned that this is not new for Pittsburgh; it was only new to me. Pittsburgh has been drawing innovators and new ideas for many years. People collaborate here more than any other place I have lived in.

In 2005 I worked with some new Pittsburgh colleagues to start the Office of Public Art, a public-private partnership between City government and the local arts council. Simply, we work with the public and private sector to make public art dreams come true. This opportunity opened up entire layers of Pittsburgh networks and colleagues to me; people who had been working, from a few months to decades, on civic design, arts infrastructure, and community development. Public art revealed the benefits of Pittsburgh’s tradition of public and private sectors working together. Our beautiful Romare Bearden mural placed in the Gateway Centre light rail station assumed form in the way Jenny Holzer’s mesmerising installation escalates the convention centre. The public sector saw the value of high-quality art and design, and the private sector contributed to make it happen by raising funds and providing expertise.

I love Pittsburgh the most when I can find (or make) threads that tie things together, connecting people, ideas, research, places, innovations. The Miller Gallery has been one place for me to find those threads. In 2005 it was the place where Two Girls Working launched its travelling exhibition with help from numerous resources for individual artists in Pittsburgh. More recently, when Astria Suparak became the Director of the Miller Gallery, the exhibitions began to focus on social practice. As an artist and a public art administrator, that kind of work is very appealing to me. I am interested in how artists engage with the world outside of museum and gallery systems.

Pittsburgh is a place where artists can self-generate projects that change the use of buildings, engage directly with communities, and address civic and social issues: sometimes all that at once. The Brew House Association, Mattress Factory, Waffle Shop, Ujamma Collective, Pittsburgh Glass Center and Gist Street Reading Series are all examples of big and small places or projects initiated by artists. Some have become institutions in the city, others have closed their doors to move on to new things. But as in any other city, change in Pittsburgh is also directed by government and private development. Pittsburgh is a place where you can sometimes weave those forces together.

The City of Pittsburgh is in the process of producing a twelve-layer comprehensive plan. In 2009, Morton Brown, the City’s Public Art Manager and I were thinking about how artists could be a part of the plan. We invited colleagues from the Department of City Planning and the Urban Redevelopment Authority to take a tour of the exhibition Experimental Geography curated by Nato Thompson in 2009 at the Miller Gallery. The abstract concepts we were talking about in the office about ‘artists engaging the community’ and ‘artists helping people see the city through different lenses’ became real as we toured the space. The Road Map, 2003 by the trans-national collective Multiplicity is what brought the potential of having an artist as one of the comprehensive plan teams from abstraction to reality. The artwork is a four-channel video that documents two journeys in Jerusalem. The first is by someone with an Israeli passport, the second by a Palestinian citizen. The video shows the disparities in the commute, revealing to the viewer how transportation is affected by geography, nationality, and politics.

My colleagues were inspired by how an artist was able to reveal these issues in a way that it encouraged discussion between the video’s viewers. What could an artist do on the Pittsburgh plan team to help inspire dialogue about the city’s present and future? How could an artist engage many different communities to promote equality in Pittsburgh? It has taken almost three years to set it up, but we will find the answer. The Department of City Planning’s Request for Proposals process for DESIGN PGH and ART PGH, the urban design and public art layers of the plan, mandated that an artist be on the team – not to create works of art, but to develop systems for engaging community dialogue for the current and future layers of the plan. Jon Rubin, who started Waffle Shop, is the artist on the consultant team.

What I am most excited about right now in Pittsburgh is the depth of activity in the arts: from big institutions to start ups. There are many galleries and performances featuring emerging work; people are inventing new venues and events, such as Pittsburgh Photo Fest, and artists are taking over vacant storefronts downtown, such as Fraley’s Robot Repair and Awesome Books. There are new grant programmes or fellowships for emerging and established artists. But I’m not just enthusiastic about what is being presented here; I’m excited about what is being made here and seen in other places. New York City has seen Vanessa German’s exhibition in Chelsea, heard Kelli Stevens Kane’s reading at St. Mark’s Church, and read The New York Times articles about Girl Talk and Squonk Opera. After ten years, artists are still what makes living in Pittsburgh interesting for me, and the arts are a major contributing factor in the changing perception of Pittsburgh in two directions: how we see ourselves and how others see us. Our mix tape is going viral.