Historic Site
2021
Historic Site is an 8-foot-tall cast bronze plaque, that is installed on the façade of an 120-year-old building, next to Gallery Closed. This large plaque is a contemporary companion to a small existing bronze plaque on the building’s façade, commemorating its first use as an incline train station.
Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, whose studio is located in the building, spent a year researching everything that could be documented as having occurred on the site. The artists scoured all archives available to them, and spoke to experts including an anthropologist, two architects, several archivists, the author of the book on Pittsburgh inclines, a curator of the anthropocene, the director of the National Aviary, a big cat specialist, a botanist, a cinema historian, a city historian, an entomologist, a geomorphologist, a local historian, a curator of invertebrate paleontology, the official historian of Isaly's, two librarians and many neighbors, among others. Please scroll down for research process images.
The resulting information was compiled into a lengthy text that begins 600 million years ago and extends indefinitely into the future. The text was cast in bronze, taking its visual cues from the existing plaque, with the same typeface, format and material, and was even made in the same foundry, 34 years later.
