During the winter of 2023, the Ronald Greaves Chair appeared on the streets of Downtown Pittsburgh, attempting to address a clear cry of urban need: a bus stop on Liberty, at which, daily, many, many times daily, people waiting for the bus squat on an emergency firehose attachment, one foot off of the ground, due to the lack of public seating.
For about a month that followed, the chair lived an interesting life, disappearing for a few days, and then migrating across the street. It became equipped with a parasol and made one of the local dealer hotspots quite cozy for a time. Then the police cracked down on that spot and the chair disappeared as well.
If the Eames Chair can be iconic, why not the Ronald Greaves Chair?
Borne of dumpster waste, which is ample here, and with a vast underserved homeless population, the Ronald Greaves Chair aimed to represent a replicable possibility: the supplies to address some problems are within reach, with the addition of a few screws or hammer and nails. Perhaps those need to be given out, made available in little dispensers, rather than dog poop bags.
But it certainly isn’t just the homeless population this seating is intended for—public seating is a much broader problem. There isn’t enough seating anywhere Downtown. And there’s probably more there than the rest of the city. Often when there is some, it gets removed because someone overdoses on it, or even because someone sits there too long. Commuters aren’t taken care of here. And the sense of imagination and ownership of the common space is desperately atrophied.
Hence the attempt to place something obviously homemade and readily available into that realm and see what happens.
A replica of the Ronald Greaves Chair was brought to Space Gallery, shoved in a window, its back to the gallery viewers, along with an accompanying piece that sat outside, lassoed to a beam within the building. Here, the pieces were guaranteed acceptance, but at what price was the question? Security filed an incident report about the piece outside, deeming it a danger to the building; the chair in the gallery, allowed to remain clean and pristine, with the esteem of an artwork, was also deprived of function. Inaccessible to the visitor though, it operated in the space in an analogous way to hostile architecture, seemingly catering to a need but in fact preventing users from actually having an enjoyable experience.
”Am I a bike rack or am I Dr. Love?”
I find that the public art that is being fostered in Pittsburgh is, mostly, too cute. The openings and resources to participate are incredibly limited/ing, and favor mid-to-late career artists with an established name in the realm already. The priorities are also off. Downtown: tons of nonfunctional bike racks, that sit in an object-space where they aren’t really looked at as art, nor do I ever see a bike locked to one.
What the aim of Public Art Organizations ought to be is generating spaces of permissibility, in which artists are invited to play with the medium of space and human interaction, to experiment and observe the results. Free graffiti walls are one known avenue, but imagine Market Square if the center of it were just open to the regular placement/displacement/replacement of art. The good stuff sticks around. But cultivating spaces where artists can determine if and how they want to do public art is a missing laboratory.
The seat outdoors is filled every hour I’m Downtown. A bus stop was detoured directly in front of it, which is certainly contributing to its popularity. But, even as it has gotten beaten down—water damaged, drinks spilled on it, papers left on it, dirtier, no armrest—it’s there and it meets a need and it doesn’t really matter how polished it is. In fact, I think its rudimentary look adds to its appeal for folks. (It’s also surprisingly comfortable). People will remove the junk to take care of it. If it were some powder coated, geodesic orgy of fabrication, people might not think it belongs to them. But the Ronald Greaves Chair does.
And so will the next one, and the next, and the next one.