On the streets of downtown Pittsburgh PA in May 2004: street art from Canada, England, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Thailand, Brazil and the United States.

The artists in the show included:

melina rodrigo, pars, laps one, jet-pac, aesia, eula, microbo, joeyfm, juicy, lg, dolla bill k, leon rainbow, faile, bo130, dave evans, khristo, mjar, sfaustina, echoe, chun1, kids, you are beautiful, swoon, the flower guy, bl4ckh4m, horsie, seak m.a.c., abe lincoln jr,, calma and more...

The following is edited from a conversation between Leslie Clague and Horsie, the Pittsburgh artist who helped put on the show.

Was this a collaborative effort?

Yeah...it started with Seak M.A.C (a Pittsburgh street artist). He did some stuff at the Skinny Building with his crew. That project was really well-received and they asked him if he’d like to do something else there. He asked me if I’d like to help him with it.

How did you conceive of the show?

We talked about what we wanted to do and decided to shoot high and just approach the best artists, people who were our favorites. It was kind of crazy to just do that--but they all said yes. The work came to my place; it was so exciting to get all these packages.

I think it was Seak’s idea to put the work on the outside of the windows because it would be more vivid without the glass between the viewer and the work and also just appropriate to street art. Posters get pasted up, not hung behind glass. Al Kovacik of the Skinny Building got a local business to lend us a cherry picker one morning, and we wheat-pasted the work on the windows. We lit the work from inside the building so it was visible at night.

Was it hard to get those down after the show ended?

We got the cherry picker again, and blasted it with hoses and scraped it all off. It took some work...

The show ended up being really big, with two outdoor sites and one large gallery show. How did that happen?

One thing just sort of led to another. We put out an open call on the Wooster Collective site (woostercollective.com), and got such a huge response that we needed another place to show the work. The Skinny Building show had started to generate a lot of excitement and Charlene Langer, who works at the Art Institute and gets art work into empty storefronts downtown, got the Urban Redevelopment Authority to allow the use of the facade of the G.C. Murphy building on Fifth Avenue.

And then we got SPACE gallery for the opening...I actually can’t remember how we got that. I think we just asked Sharmila and she said yes. We had a sort of party at my place where people did collage with work we had received on huge cardboard panels and hung them at SPACE then gave them away at the end of the night. That opening was so much fun, it was packed. We were really excited about showing people these new ways of interacting with the urban landscape and also that this was an international phenomenon.

Did you have any funding?

No, we didn’t have any money at all. All of the artists donated their time and work and paid for shipping themselves, which was incredibly generous.

Have you done any other shows like this?

There was the Stickerthrow... Anera and Abe Lincoln Jr had invited street artists including me into that show at a skate shop in Brooklyn. Afterwards Abe asked people to host the show in their town, I said I’d do one in Pittsburgh, and the panels were sent here. Juicy helped me with it. We did an open call for more stickers (international, national, local) and got a bunch of stuff. The show was at Garfield Artworks. Visitors that night also brought or made their own stickers with the materials we had available and added them to a huge collaborative sticker wall.

So...can you talk in a more general way about street art, what it is?

It can be paper, stickers, sculptures bolted to signs, knitting, posters... lots of different materials. Street is art that happens on the streets that is not aerosol. That’s my definition of it, anyway. That distinguishes it from graffiti.

I like what happens for me when I walk around and interact with the city I live in through art making. The core values for me are freedom, spontaneity, and connection to the place I live in. I haven’t been real active for a little while because I have other things going on but also because I’m more aware of how much I don’t want a record. I want to preserve my freedom, want my possibilities to stay very open. It makes me angry that it’s such a threatening thing to decide that you have a right to participate in the visual landscape in a way that’s not paid for, that’s not advertising. I’m also not saying that I’m done by any means. It ain’t over.

Review of the show in the City Paper

Review of the sticker throw in the City Paper