HCUAP street artists share color and culture with Pittsburgh

If you’ve been out and about in Pittsburgh’s East End in recent days, you may have noticed some new murals adorning previously empty walls. These new artworks emerged from the latest edition of Hemispheric Conversations: Urban Art Project (HCUAP, pronounced “hiccup”), which brought in its latest cohort of international artists from as far as 8,000 miles away.

HCUAP executive director and University of Pittsburgh communications professor Caitlin Frances Bruce says the project emerged from conversations around Pittsburgh’s fragmented street art landscape — and plentiful empty walls.

“The idea was that, if we could bring artists here that are doing more permission-based work, it might sort of expand the parameters and expand the conversation about what’s possible,” Bruce tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “There are a ton of amazing artists here, but because of the history of graffiti’s criminalization and stigmatization in Pittsburgh, those conversations haven’t been as inclusive as possible.”

Bruce co-founded HCUAP with artists Shane Pilster and Oreen Cohen and brought on graffiti writer and muralist Max “Gems” Gonzales in 2018. The organization has since grown and worked in collaboration with artists from farther afield, including many from Latin America. This year’s cohort drew from overseas, with artists Musa71 and Harry Bones visiting from Spain and muralist and “anthropreneur” Venazir Martinez coming all the way from the Philippines.

Martinez’s recently completed mural in Bloomfield, taking up a large wall near the busy Bloomfield Bridge intersection, is among the most immediately visible to locals. Depicting a woman dancing the pandanggo sa ilaw, a Philippine tradition that combines Spanish dance with local elements and illuminated candles, the mural’s subject seems to sashay along Ella Street toward Liberty Avenue. Martinez points out the red thread running through the woman’s baro’t saya (or traditional Filipina skirt and blouse), an element she has incorporated into other murals.

“Ever since I started doing street art, it’s really about a red thread that binds us all,” Martinez tells City Paper after putting the finishing touches on a bright green palm frond. “It weaves through different cultures and different stories of the people that I meet. And, along with the red thread, I illustrate nostalgic emblems, cultural memory, traditions that signify a space.”

Martinez says it was important both to weave in elements of Pittsburgh and uplift her own culture in a city where Philippine presence has historically been small. Her art also addresses the ways colonialism influences the present day — and the ways it can be subverted, much as the pandanggo and baro’t saya were adopted and reworked by native Filipinos.

“You’ll see that there’s this big tapestry of multicultural, indigenous traditions,” Martinez says. “It’s like this synthesis of people, Filipinos, trying to discover more of themselves through their indigenous groups and being able to live that Spanish influence on a daily basis.”

Martinez, Musa71 and Bones all spent time visiting Pittsburgh institutions including the Carnegie Museum of Art and Maxo Vanka Murals, gave an artists talk, and participated in a paint jam in Garfield that resulted in a locally-focused mural. Barcelona-based Musa71 says the time spent in the community was invaluable — particularly at a time when overseas perception of America has been damaged by violence and democratic backsliding. “We learned that not everything that you have on social media is true,” she says. Bones similarly says he found the Pittsburgh community “impressive.” 

The artists worked with community members to source elements for a mural on the side of the Pickleball Warehouse in Homewood, including nods to photographer Charlies “Teenie” Harris and composer Billy Strayhorn and a depiction of the Westinghouse High School Bulldog mascot. “It has so [many] specific things, and also it has enough access so people can fill with their own ideas and their own feelings about what it means to them,” Musa71 says.

“Within HCUAP, I think it’s great to see that people get more exposure to graffiti and public art as being a normal part of life,” HCUAP writer and curator Emma Riva says. “Because I think in different cities, in Chicago, in New York, in parts of Latin America, it’s much more normalized.”

Bruce concurs: “Having the capacity to kind of zoom in and out of a place you live in, and think about it in a different way through other folks’ reactions and interpretive lenses, it’s really cool.” 

With the public-facing work of the 2025 cohort nearly finished, Bruce and other HCUAP team members are turning their attention to an expanding archive of the project, a planned oral history of past work, and preparations for next year’s 10th anniversary cohort.

“We’ll be figuring out next year’s roster of visiting artists, and then working on our publications, and also working on building out our archives,” Bruce tells CP. “What is really important about this whole culture is that it’s a process, as Venazir says, of building relationships that also involves context … so you’re not just coming to a city, painting, and leaving.”