Finding Randyland at this year’s Home & Garden Show is child’s play
Hey, kids, wanna make your own Randyland?
You can at the Duquesne Light Pittsburgh Home & Garden Show. A pop-up version of the North Side attraction is a new feature of the show, which opened Friday and continues through March 10 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Downtown.
Amy Scafuri and other volunteers spent much of Tuesday setting up the display by the Children’s Village in the second-floor lobby of the convention center.
It can’t match the scale or visual chaos of the real Randyland, but it shares its spirit, with handmade signs, peace symbols, birdhouses, crepe paper mums, felt roses and paint-spattered buckets filled with a rainbow of stickers, decals and paint markers. The only white to be seen was a picket fence that surrounds
the display, but it didn’t stay that way. Children began decorating it Friday and won’t stop until the show closes March 10.
“This is for the love of art and community,” Ms. Scafuri said. “Everything is handmade from recycled junk. You have to reuse everything. Randy is very particular.”
That’s Randy Gilson, who used a credit card to buy a crumbling old house in the Mexican War Streets and has spent the last 20 years transforming it into a pop-art playground for the eyes. Mr. Gilson, who works as a waiter at the nearby Westin hotel, wasn’t there Tuesday, but a lifesize cutout that Ms. Scafuri borrowed from the real Randyland seemed to approve of this pop-upstart.
“I’m a piece of the community,” he said by phone. “I was doing community gardens and cleaning up the neighborhood. The kids of gang members started helping me. Now
I have a crazy museum!”
Home show executive director John DeSantis, a fellow North Sider, asked Mr. Gilson to brighten this year’s show: “Randy is known for one word: color!”
Mr. Gilson turned to Ms. Scafuri for help. He had met her years ago when she and her mother, Coleen Rush, ran 3G Gallery inside the Westin hotel. He knew she loved to make art with children.
“He’s just a wonderful soul,” Ms. Scafuri said. “How could I say no?”
She and Mr. Gilson began planning and working in his studio in November. In January and February, they held a series of workshops, inviting friends, who brought others.
“We said, ‘Come and play with us!’” Ms. Scafuri recalled.
She and Mr. Gilson will lead the fun on Fridays and weekends, with help from a small army of volunteers, including Paul Whidden, Brenda Nachreiner, Bennie Santucci, Janice Kochek, Chery Stephens, Annie Bee, Anthony and Nola Donia, Jesse Scafuri, Paul and Coleen Rush and Lisa, Sam and Sadie Finck.
Ms. Scafuri said she is inspired by Mr. Gilson, the frenetic creator whose sayings she saves for posterity on a tablet.
“My favorite is: ‘Seeds are dreams. They just take time to bloom.’ Then he gets in your face and says: ‘You get it? You get it?’
“He’s the hyperactive Mister Rogers!”