T
he Westmoreland Museum of American Art in collabora-
tion with the City of Greensburg brought Janet Zweig’s
“Analog Scroll” art installation to the Bridging the Gap
public art project, funded by an Our Town grant and fea-
tured on the North Main Street Bridge in Greensburg. The
installation utilizes three-dimensional letters held by tracks fastened to
the concrete walls of the bridge. The work currently features verses of
a site-specific poem, “Main Street Bridge, Greensburg,” by writer Jan
Beatty from Pittsburgh. Verses from Beatty’s commissioned poem have
been manually advanced along both sides of the bridge, with some text
removed and some added every two weeks throughout 2017.
Bridging the Gap is a public art project to revitalize the North
Main Street Bridge that connects The Westmoreland to downtown
Greensburg. Working with Pittsburgh’s Office of Public Art, an
Artist Selection Panel—comprised of local residents, museum staff,
representatives of the city and PennDOT—considered dozens of artists
for the commission. In the end, Janet Zweig was selected to design and
create the public art project.
Zweig is an artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York, working primarily
in the public realm. Her most recently installed public works include
a performance space in a prairie on a Kansas City downtown green
roof, a series of kinetic works in Milwaukee, a generative sentence on
a wall in downtown Columbus, a sentence-generating sculpture for an
engineering school in Orlando and a memorial in the lawn of Mellon
Park in Pittsburgh. Other public works include a 1,200-ft. frieze at the
Prince Street Subway Station in New York, and a system-wide interactive
project for 11 Light Rail train stations in Minneapolis, incorporating
the work of more than 100 Minnesotans. Her sculpture and books have
been exhibited widely in such places as the Brooklyn Museum of Art,
Exit Art, PS1 Museum, the Walker Art Center and Cooper Union. She’s
received numerous awards including the Rome Prize Fellowship, NEA
fellowships and residencies at PS1 Museum and the MacDowell Colony.
Currently, the artist teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and at
Brown University.
Pittsburgh writer Jan Beatty met Zweig several years ago at Ragdale—
an artist residency outside of Chicago. The two have kept in touch since.
“It was fun to work together on the project,” says Beatty. “Although,
because we are both so busy with our own work and jobs, we worked
long distance by phone and email. Janet is an amazing, world-recognized
artist, and it was an honor to work with her.”
Zweig asked Beatty to be part of the project. “It was her plan and
idea,” says Beatty, who has been named one of 10 women writers for
“required reading” by The Huffington Post. She is the managing editor
of MadBooks, a small press that has published a series of books and
chapbooks by women writers. For the past 20 years, Beatty has hosted
and produced “Prosody,” a public radio show on NPR affiliate WESA-
FM featuring the work of national writers. She has lectured in writing
workshops across the country, and has taught at the university level for
more than 20 years at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon
University and Carlow. Beatty directs the creative writing program at
Carlow University, where she runs the Madwomen in the Attic writing
workshops and teaches in the MFA program.
“When I wrote the poem for the bridge, I spent some hours on the
Main Street Bridge in Greensburg, and I watched the people passing
over the bridge—in cars, trucks, and on foot. Although I’ve been in
Greensburg many times over the years, and I’ve crossed that bridge,
there were so many things I couldn’t have noticed if I didn’t stop and sit
or stand there,” says Beatty. “I took notes, wandered around, and talked
to some people passing by. There was a lot more activity than I expected,
and there was a range of ages, a diversity of people in terms of race and
background. I included landscape, descriptions of trees, rocks and the
bridge itself. After a number of hours, I drove around, taking notes and
looking at what surrounded the bridge.”
Zweig’s installation utilizes both the east and west sides of the North
Main Street Bridge. The three-dimensional text extends the length of
both sides of the bridge, producing an experience of serialized poetry
that slowly unfolds over time. The artist worked with Sign Effectz,
Inc. in Milwaukee for the fabrication of the 253 letterforms to be
used throughout the life of the project as well as the rods for the letter
fastening tracks. The project has been installed by Minnick Signs of
Greensburg.
Funding for the project was provided by the National Endowment for
the Arts, Westmoreland County Tourism Grant Program, Community
Foundation of Westmoreland County/Revitalizing Westmoreland,
Rivers of St