Casey Droege
Founder of Casey Droege Cultural Productions
Casey Droege, an energetic artist and entrepreneur, recently moved to Stanton Heights and loves the fact that she can walk to work.
But since she started a business called Casey Droege Cultural Productions in 2015, she’s often running faster than a regular marathon athlete.
The 37-year-old woman combines her love for tackling projects with serious art credentials, including a 2004 bachelor’s degree in art from the Art Institute of Chicago and a master’s degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. In 2003, she spent a frosty nine months in Reykjavik, Iceland, studying textiles at the Iceland Academy of the Arts.
Last year, her Lawrenceville company expanded into a Wilkinsburg building. Ms. Droege also completed a major project in 2019 when the Tryp Hotel opened last July just off the 40th Street Bridge in Lawrenceville. While the new hotel — formerly a trade school — was being renovated, she served as a consultant on acquiring artworks by local artists.
“We ended up getting about 35 Pittsburgh-based artists into that space. That was a really large project, and we had a lot of creative freedom, which was really nice,” Ms. Droege said.
With a grant from the Opportunity Fund, she plans to maintain her momentum in 2020 by showing two cutting-edge craftoriented exhibitions at the Wilkinsburg gallery. Each one will run for six weeks and feature work by a Pittsburgh artist as well as one from out of town.
Located on South Trenton Avenue, the Wilkinsburg space — formerly a community-run arts center called Percolate — houses an outpost of her Lawrenceville-based Small Mall, which sells local art. Behind that retail space is a 1,200-square-foot gallery.
Ms. Droege employs seven women at her business, which presents four Six X Ate events, a roving dinner and lecture series that began in 2013. Each fall, her company organizes the annual photo fair at Carnegie Museum of Art in Oakland.
Then there’s community-supported art, or CSA PGH. A twist on the agricultural model, this initiative is part of a nationwide movement driven by artists that commissions artworks that are then grouped and sold to the public as shares.
This year, “Our goal is to do a lot more consulting and help businesses buy art made by local artists,” she said.
To that end, she is organizing a panel discussion and tour in February at the Tryp Hotel in partnership with the city’s Office of Public Art and with Monmade, a trade group that helps artists and craftspeople sell their products.
The goal of the gathering, Ms. Droege said, is to demonstrate to architects, developers and interior designers the value of adding artists to the conversation about design and building projects.