Creating Legends

Through a variety of arts initiatives, Rivers of Steel celebrates the postindustrial era of the Carrie Blast Furnaces and its influence on a generation of artists and community leaders who continue the difficult work of channeling the site’s energy into creative solutions for the community.

Creating Legends: Graffiti Writers of the Past, Present, and Future is presented in partnership with Hemispheric Conversations Urban Arts Project (HCUAP). Creating Legends brings together select local, national, and internationally-renowned graffiti artists for a weeklong residency and community workshop series celebrating the origins of the graffiti movement and its influence across generations. The project was envisioned to connect Monongahela Valley communities and other neighborhoods in the Pittsburgh area with the Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic Landmark through projects that celebrate graffiti muralism. Visiting artists include pioneers of style-writing Mike 171 and Henry 161, some of the first graffiti artist to be written about in the New York Times in 1971. Known globally as The Boys from the Heights, their style-writing helped launch graffiti as a cultural phenomenon that eventually took over the world.

Creating Legends partner organization HCUAP creates platforms for conversation and education about urban art production (graffiti, street art, and muralism, among other genres), and explores aesthetic and historical connections between postindustrial cities through making, teaching, and public conversation. HCUAP hosted the Boys from the Heights in the fall of 2023.

Community collaboration and creative learning are central to Rivers of Steel’s mission.

Creating Legends is part of Rivers of Steel’s ongoing community learning initiative that centers community collaboration and learning as core to its mission. Creating Legends manifests this approach by creating new bridges between artistic mediums and bringing together national and international artists with local artists and communities.