Pittsburgh Public Schools honor black alumni making a difference in arts and culture.
Each year for Black History Month, the Pittsburgh Public Schools showcases black alumni who are making a mark on Pittsburgh and across the world. This year 21 were honored for their contributions to Pittsburgh’s art and culture scene. Here are three of them:
Naomi Ruth Allen
Naomi Ruth Allen got her first role as an actress at age 10, when she was cast as Mary in a local church production of the Christmas Nativity play.
She always had a flare for the dramatic, she joked, remembering that her brother and sister used to send her to plead with their mom for fast food and other snacks. But being cast in the play was different.
“That was a big moment for me as a kid,” said Ms. Allen, now 20 and studying acting at Point Park University. “I really enjoyed the fact that I had the opportunity to express myself in such a different way.”
And then, she saw the movie “Dreamgirls.”
“I was just so in awe,” Ms. Allen said. “From that moment on I was like, ‘I’m gonna do Broadway.’ Because I also sing.”
Ms. Allen is an alto, with a deeper, lower voice, similar to singer and “Dreamgirls” star Jennifer Hudson. “It allowed me to see that my voice could be mainstream and it could be heard,” Ms. Allen said.
She gets much the same inspiration from the 20 other Pittsburgh-born artists like herself, being honored by PPS. A 2016 graduate of Pittsburgh Obama, she is the youngest of the 21 artists spotlighted this year.
Ms. Allen, who lives in Garfield, also paints, writes plays and poetry, performs spoken word, designs clothing and directs.
A graduate degree from Juilliard is her dream, and if she isn’t accepted there she hopes to attend New York University. She wants to perform on Broadway and pursue a career in acting, singing and performing and eventually open a school to teach others the craft and produce shows. Sometimes, when she tells people about her goals to become an actress they note how ambitious she is and ask her whether she has a backup plan, which can be discouraging, Ms. Allen said.
“To see [20] other artists doing the same thing and progressing and being successful, it just really affirms that I can do this as long as I want to.”
Corey Carrington
Corey Carrington always loved rap music.
As a kid, he was always writing rap lyrics and listening to the songs. So, he was immediately interested when some classmates at Pittsburgh Perry started a poetry club.
“At this point I was kind of looking for something to do,” said Mr. Carrington, now 29. “I wasn’t necessarily an athlete and I didn’t really hang out with like the tough kids or anything like that.” He was starting to “go down the wrong road” he said, and had previously gotten in trouble for stealing.
He shared his poems with the club at school, and one of his teachers submitted a piece he wrote to a Martin Luther King Jr. commemorative contest at Carnegie Mellon University. It won honorable mention, and he was invited to come read it. Thus, he said, his spoken word career was born.
“When I did that, I didn’t really understand how big of a deal it was,” said Mr. Carrington, who lives on the North Side.
He studied communications and creative writing at Slippery Rock University. He started doing collagework and digital art after he was invited to teach an “arts activism” course for kids. Now, he produces visual art and performs spoken word under the name “Grits Capone,” emphasizing themes relevant to Pittsburgh’s black community.
In 2016, Mr. Carrington was named the first Emerging Black Arts Leaders Apprentice for the Strip District’s Society for Contemporary Craft. In the fall of 2017, he was invited to curate a show for the Brew House Association.
He has been working for the past several months as a substitute teacher in Pittsburgh.
“I’m very passionate about the youth because I think that they don’t see enough positive images of African-Americans or black men, and if they do see them, it’s either negative or they’re not cool people,” Mr. Carrington said. “Something that’s always been important to me is ‘being cool.’ Being cool to the point where you can influence people and change the narrative of what is cool.”
Dominique Scaife
Dominique Scaife enjoyed a ceramics class she took as a student at Pittsburgh Allderdice but didn’t realize how much impact it would have on her until two decades later.
Ms. Scaife was a busy mom to her daughter and caretaker for her twin brother with autism, with a full-time job in medical coding. Still, she said, she felt a “pull” to buy some clay some time in her late 30s. She bought some air-dry clay at a Joann Fabrics store. Then in 2015, after her daughter graduated from high school, she started to get serious about it. By early 2017, she was invited to show her sculptures at her first exhibition in Philadelphia.
“I think it was just that magic of touching that clay, something never ever left me,” said Ms. Scaife, now 42. “I was searching for different ways to be creative in this rigid adult life that I set up for myself.”
Ms. Scaife said her daughter, London, encouraged her to start showing her art online and selling it after it began piling up in the living room. Her daughter graduated from Pittsburgh CAPA in 2015, and is now a musical theater major and recently started a podcast.
“I raised her to be as creative as she ever wanted to be, and now she’s throwing it back at me,” her mother said.
Ms. Scaife was recently invited to join the Pittsburgh Society of Artists and Women of Visions. Her sculpting started as a way for her to find peace and relaxation in an otherwise busy life, and it quickly grew into something bigger, shesaid.
“It’s just so peaceful and I get to tell stories, especially because all my sculptures are of African-American men and women and children,” Ms. Scaife said. “I get to sit back and just observe my people. I’m sculpting out of who I am, I’m sculpting what I know. It’s coming from deep inside of me, deep in my soul. This is my way of telling the story.”