4 Pittsburgh residents, including controversial artist, named Guggenheim fellows

It was an impressive showing for Pittsburgh as three artists and one historian from the Steel City were named 2022 Guggenheim Fellows.

The announcement came Thursday night and among the winners was an artist whose sign — “There Are Black People In The Future” — created excitement and controversy when it was mounted atop a building in East Liberty in 2018.

Other winners included two University of Pittsburgh professors in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, and the co-founder of an artist-run North Side gallery.

Larimer artist Alisha Wormsley’s message appeared on a large billboard on top of the Werner Building at the intersection of South Highland Avenue and Baum Boulevard. Building owner We Do Property Management had the message removed according to Wormsley, who created the installation — called The Last Billboard — with Carnegie Mellon University professor Jon Rubin.

Wormsley is an adjunct professor of art at CMU.

She was among 180 people chosen from 2,500 applicants for the award, which provides grants to the winners.

Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those “who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”

The grants are worth between $35,000 and $45,000 and can be used in whatever manner the recipients decide.

The two Pitt professors are Keisha N. Blain, an associate professor in the Department of History, whose specialty is African American history, and Yona Harvey, an associate professor in the Department of English.

Blain is author of the book “Set the World on Fire,” which won the 2019 Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians. She is also the author of “Until I am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America.”

Harvey’s poetry collections include “You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love,” winner of the Believer Book Award for Poetry, and “Hemming the Water.”

“I’m honored. I’m thrilled. I think I’ve accepted it as real now,” Harvey said on Twitter. “Congratulations to all Fellows. Thank you thank you thank you.”

The other winner is Ed Panar, co-founder of Spaces Corners on the North Side.

A Johnstown native, Panar’s photography has been included in exhibitions such as “Interface” at the Cleveland Institute of Art and “The Next Big Thing” at the Detroit Museum of New Art in Pontiac, Mich.