Silver Eye opens in larger space
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
It’s fitting that the Silver Eye Center for Photography will christen its new space in Bloomfield Saturday with the exhibition “Past Present Future: Western Pennsylvania’s People and Places.”
After the visual arts gallery closed its South Side location last October following more than 30 years of operation, it’s hoping for a bright future with a larger gallery space amid Bloomfield’s booming visual arts scene.
“For our first show in the new neighborhood, we wanted to do something about Pittsburgh,” said executive director David Oresick, who began in his role at Silver Eye in summer 2014. “We wanted to do a show that spoke to our community, that honored that heritage.”
The exhibition at its 4808 Penn Ave. gallery showcases more than 40 local artists from the past 100 years to reveal a lineage of Pittsburgh-area photography.
The reopening celebration begins at 8 p.m. Saturday. General admission tickets are $25.
Silver Eye also will participate July 7 in Unblurred, a gallery crawl that takes visitors through the Bloomfield/Garfield arts district on the first Friday evening of each month. For July, 18 other spaces will be part of the tour.
“It was a huge selling point in joining the neighborhood,” Mr. Oresick said of Unblurred. He hopes the event will help Silver Eye to grow and diversify its audience, attracting individuals who weren’t intending to visit initially. “We’re a little gallery at the end of the day, so being part of an arts area that has a gravitational pull really helps us.
“You get so much more cross-pollination and so much more diversity,” he added.
The Bloomfield-Garfield Corp., which leased the space to Silver Eye Gallery, has been working to attract innovative tenants to the East End neighborhood to build its arts community.
Silver Eye spent the past several months designing its new space and fundraising.
Mr. Oresick said with its spacious gallery Silver Eye will be able to embrace new trends in photographic art, especially video and new media and bookmaking. It built a special room for video installations and a nook to sell photography books from Spaces Corners, an artistrun bookstore that has its own location in Troy Hill.
Several storefronts down Penn Avenue from the gallery, Silver Eye has opened a lab to increase educational programming.
Looking forward, Mr. Oresick hopes to work with local arts organizations. The gallery’s first collaboration with neighbor Assemble, a community space that runs workshops and other events on art and technology for both children and adults, has already found success.
The collaboration began with Francis Crisafio, one of the winners of Silver Eye’s 2017 annual juried competition. His winning submission, “HOLDUP in the HOOD,” featured photographs of middle school students covering their faces with self-portraits. After the February 2017 exhibition at Pittsburgh Filmmakers Galleries in Oakland, Mr. Crisafio worked with students at Assemble’s after-school program to create collage-style self portraits to contribute to “Past Present Future.”
“Assemble had the perfect audience for him,” Mr. Oresick said, emphasizing Mr. Crisafio’s experience with younger folks.
Despite the new opportunities, Mr. Oresick wants to remain true to Silver Eye’s original mission: Its strength and focus will remain producing top-notch exhibitions.
“We’re still the same Silver Eye,” Mr. Oresick said. “It just feels amazing to have artwork back up on the walls.”
For operating hours and other information, go to https://www.silvereye.org.