Pittsburgh has more people dying than being born, a demographic hole that dates back to the 1980s steel collapse and now makes Greater Pittsburgh the worst performer among all 387 U.S. metro areas for natural population decline. On Friday night, a nonprofit called Pittsburgh Tomorrow is trying to counter that trend with art — specifically, a multimedia showcase inside a converted industrial complex in Point Breeze North featuring 19 local artists working in light, sound and movement.
The exhibition, titled “Pittsburgh Tomorrow: A City on the Rise,” runs from 7 to 10 p.m. Friday, Sept. 18, at Rockwell Park, according to TribLIVE. It doubles as the opening act for Pittsburgh Homecoming, a Friday-through-Sunday weekend designed to welcome back former residents and pitch the region to prospective newcomers, per the same report. Doug Heuck, who founded Pittsburgh Tomorrow and spent decades as a journalist compiling data comparing Pittsburgh to other cities, told TribLIVE that the region has the ingredients and puzzle pieces to become the best place to live in the country.
A Data-Driven Push Behind the Art
Heuck's interest in tracking Pittsburgh's trajectory goes back further than his 2023 founding of Pittsburgh Tomorrow. According to Pittsburgh Tomorrow, he spent 20 years as a newspaper reporter and business editor, launched Pittsburgh Quarterly magazine in 2005, and directed a regional indicators project benchmarking Pittsburgh against 14 other metro areas across 75 metrics. That long-running data project fed directly into the creation of the nonprofit and its decision to pair an economic development push with a homecoming celebration.
The homecoming aims to attract boomerangers and prospective future residents, Heuck said, per TribLIVE's report. Out-of-town visitors who register for the weekend get free admission to major cultural draws around the city, including the Carnegie International, Fallingwater, the Warhol Museum and the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival, according to a PR Newswire release. On Saturday, Sept. 19, the group's youth Leadership Corps will also join Tree Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy and the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy to plant 250 trees marking America's 250th anniversary, the release notes.
Why Rockwell Park
The venue itself carries its own layered history. Rockwell Park is an 800,000-square-foot, 23-acre former industrial complex that once housed operations tied to Rockwell International, Westinghouse and Thomas Edison before being redeveloped into a commercial innovation district, according to Trans Associates. Staging a forward-looking art showcase inside a site built on 20th-century manufacturing underscores the exhibit's central theme — a region reinventing itself after its industrial identity faded.
Among the 19 artists is Brendan Burch, whose art project is part of the lineup according to TribLIVE. Burch is an Oscar-winning producer, a CalArts graduate and CEO of the animation studio Six Point Harness, and in 2023 he launched Now What!?, a nonprofit that creates short-form animated stories aimed at boosting civic engagement, per Animate Experience. Other participating visual artists include Julian Glander, Sujin Kim, Kevin Lorenzi, Natalie Westbrook, Jamie Wolfe, Wendy Willis and Kristin Lauth Shaeffer, alongside composer Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Dance, Shadows and a City's Missing Landmarks
Attack Theatre, a dance company also featured in the project, is using Pittsburgh itself as inspiration for its movement piece, per TribLIVE. The project also foregrounds Pittsburgh's arts and cultural vibrancy, and the company's performance will accompany video art created by Johannes DeYoung and his team.
The Post-Gazette's coverage adds detail on the piece's design: Attack Theatre's installation at Rockwell Park features three movement sections built around a receding and rising “wall of shadows”; Michele de la Reza describes the shadows as symbolizing Pittsburgh's three rivers and the local habit of giving directions using landmarks that no longer exist. DeYoung, who learned about Pittsburgh Tomorrow through Heuck, is involved with the project, which explores Pittsburgh through animation and video.
“The artists make familiar things unfamiliar enough to be seen again,” DeYoung said, according to TribLIVE, describing a project meant to present different perspectives on daily life through animation, video, photography and interactive media.
A Tech Conference Sets the Stage
The StartUP PGH conference, running Sept. 14 through 18, is associated with an initiative involving roughly a dozen local economic development groups celebrating Pittsburgh's startup, technology, AI, robotics and life sciences communities, per TribLIVE. Separately, PR Newswire's release describes the initiative as a coalition of roughly a dozen regional economic development organizations working to connect those sectors with national venture investors ahead of the homecoming weekend.
The Friday showcase features food and drinks. Whether a weekend of free museum passes, tree plantings and art installations translates into people actually moving back to Pittsburgh remains an open question — one the region's steepest-in-the-nation demographic decline makes hard to answer quickly.
