John Burt Sanders’s shifting fields of color and texture catch and keep the viewer’s gaze, reaching from retina to mind to body.

Artist John Burt Sanders and His Perspective

John Burt Sanders has spent more than a decade living and working in Wilkinsburg, but his paintings resist the idea of settling into a fixed visual language. They operate in a state of productive instability, insisting on looking as an active, physical process rather than a simple act of recognition. His paintings do not present images so much as they generate conditions: fields of color and texture that oscillate between subtle modulation and sensory overload, holding the viewer in a prolonged encounter that is felt in the body as much as in the mind.

Sanders grew up in Western New York and studied painting and art history at SUNY Fredonia before pursuing an MFA in painting and drawing at Ohio University. It was during that period, through friends and mentors, that he began spending time in Pittsburgh, drawn by the possibility of sustaining a life as an artist over the long term. Fourteen years later, that possibility has taken concrete form in a studio he has occupied for the past five years: a cavernous upper floor in a late-nineteenth-century building, its soaring ceilings and arched windows providing the scale and light his work requires.

Before it became his studio five years ago, Sanders had long admired the building from the outside. He gestures to a used flat file in the corner, recalling that when he went to pick it up, he realized the address matched the same vacant Wilkinsburg building he had passed for years. Soon after, the upper floor became his studio.

His New Style of Painting

The paintings lining Sanders’s walls mark a noticeable shift from earlier work. He describes them as “unformed,” and the word feels precise. Inspired by the pastel excess of rococo painting—think Watteau or Fragonard—these new works combine that elegance with the glitchy violence of early video games. He notes that in the graphics of games like Mortal Kombat, blood splatters often resemble Rorschach inkblots, abstract forms loaded with projection. The result is a kind of visual embrace of excess and saturation.

Sanders connects these themes to growing up queer and playing video games, noting that he always spent extra time on character selection screens—spaces of fantasy where identities are tried on rather than resolved. For him, the appeal of gaming centers on multiplicity, with new characters continually opening new possibilities. “Abstraction is by its very nature indeterminant,” he says. “That’s why I come back to it.” In painting, as in queerness, formlessness becomes a site of freedom. It holds the capacity for competing impulses without forcing resolution.

That same logic shapes the making of the work. In Sanders’s practice, influences loop back, recur, mutate. Knowing when a painting is finished is intuitive, he explains, and he is careful not to overwork a surface: “Process should never be debilitating.” What matters, in the end, is keeping the work from ever fully settling.

Story by Shawn Simmons
Photography by Laura Petrilla

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Addoley Dzegede often identifies as a textile artist, though her practice continues to expand from that base through inquiry rather than medium. What holds her body of work together is a sustained attention to the histories remembered by and through materials, and what they continue to disclose through use.

Addoley Dzegede Showcases the Art of Textiles

Addoley Dzegede’s work unfolds through close attention to material histories and the ways they travel. Through processes of batik, weaving, dye, and print, the Ghanaian-American artist works with textile processes that already carry cultural and economic weight, allowing those histories to remain active within the work. Her work brings personal memory into contact with histories embedded in cloth.

Pittsburgh audiences recently encountered Dzegede’s work through Nearing Each Other at the Carnegie Museum of Art, where her series Family Album brought together batik portraits drawn from her father’s photographs. The figures emerge through wax-resist dyeing, a technique now closely associated with Ghanaian textiles but shaped by colonial trade routes that carried industrialized craft processes between Indonesia, West Africa, and the Netherlands. In Dzegede’s hands, batik becomes a way to hold layered histories. Family stories surface alongside larger questions about authenticity, inheritance, and how materials come to signify place.

Dzegede arrived in Pittsburgh in 2020, with subsequent years shaped by fellowships and residencies that extended her practice across multiple sites, including a Fulbright fellowship in Rotterdam as an artist-researcher at the Piet Zwart Institute. Since returning full-time in mid-2023, she has continued to work across geographies, bringing that experience into a studio practice grounded in sustained, labor-intensive processes.

Her practice continues to push those questions through technical rigor. The technically complex “warp paintings” in her studio draw from weaving traditions associated with kente cloth, reinforcing blocks of color through tightly controlled structures. Color, for Dzegede, is never neutral. Increasingly, her research has expanded to include the chemical histories of dyes, tracing connections between industrial pigments and extractive colonial practices, as well how chemical components developed for synthetic dyes were later adapted for use in chemical weapons. The research allows material histories to collide, their tensions made visible in the work.

Collaboration Can Lead to New Ideas

Working with others creates space for the artist to move beyond the boundaries of her individual studio practice. Dzegede is one half of LAB-D, her ongoing partnership with artist Lyndon Barrois Jr. Their forthcoming exhibition Twofold presents parallel responses to shared visual prompts drawn from museum collections, each artist working at an agreed scale while allowing difference to remain visible. “We’re interested in seeing what things look like from two perspectives,” she notes. The exchange depends on a level of trust and attentiveness shaped over time.

That openness extends into other shared platforms, including Ask Addoley + Anna, an advice podcast for emerging artists produced with artist Anna Ihle, and her ongoing mentorship with artists in the Brew House Arts residency program. Dzegede describes collaboration as freeing, a way to explore ideas still in formation. Recent work includes an oral history project with her father in Ghana, unfolding through video and pointing toward new modes of documentation.

While Dzegede often identifies as a textile artist, her practice continues to expand through inquiry rather than medium. What holds it together is a sustained attention to what materials remember, and what they continue to disclose through use.

Story by Shawn Simmons
Photography by Laura Petrilla

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Ceramist Jeff Schwarz’s current work questions what constitutes value in our modern-day eyes.

Ceramist Jeff Schwarz Thinks Beyond the Vessel

Jeff Schwarz’s practice is grounded in the accumulation of time. Trained as a ceramicist, he treats clay as a working material shaped through use as well as sustained engagement. His studio and home, located in a long-vacant building in Pittsburgh’s Four Mile Run neighborhood, reflects that ethic. Since moving into the building, Schwarz has been slowly restoring it, uncovering layers of architectural history while making space for work that carries its own sense of accumulation and wear.

Schwarz received his MFA from Syracuse University and his BFA from Slippery Rock University, where the program was modeled on Black Mountain College’s hands-on, interdisciplinary learning. As an undergraduate, he recalls digging for natural clay near campus and forming a lasting connection to material and its histories. That orientation toward learning by doing continued in graduate school, where he worked with the Everson Museum of Art. Access to a small museum’s collection shaped his interest in institutional history as well as the ways objects circulate through time.

After graduate school, Schwarz established a studio in Pittsburgh and ran a community-based ceramics center at the Carnegie Library in Braddock. There, he helped develop North America’s first ceramic water filter research center, producing low-tech filtration systems later used internationally to reduce waterborne disease. Testing those systems grounded his work in contexts where material choices then unfolded over time and carried real consequence.

Considering What Art and Creation Are Truly About

Schwarz eventually stepped away from academia after a decade of teaching, frustrated by a broader shift toward efficiency-driven education that left little room for curiosity. Since then, his studio practice has continued to expand, shaped in part by a supportive local network. He points to the work of Brenda Friday, owner of Shoppe B in Lawrenceville, whose holistic approach to curating has provided an important local context for his work. Recent works include amphora-style vessels adorned with inverted luxury fashion logos, objects that hover between historical form and contemporary critique. The work draws on his interest in mimicry and myth to question what constitutes value.

That sensibility extends into the surface of the work itself. Schwarz has described his interest in the scrawled texts and images that layer city walls over time, likening them to wheat-pasted posters that accumulate and obscure meaning. He sees this as a form of making that unfolds across time, where one mark invites another and vitality emerges through exchange. This thinking carried into Burning From the Inside Out, a window-based work shown at Concept Art Gallery in 2020. Built through layered compositions and also activated by changing light, the work transformed between day and night, mirroring a moment defined by suspended time.

For years, Schwarz admits, the act of making felt intimidating. Standing before ancient amphorae, he wondered what could still be added. Letting go of that hesitation opened new ground. Realizing he had nothing to lose by trying, experimentation followed. The response to in-progress work has surprised him, reinforcing a belief he has carried for years: “the reward for good work is more work.”

Story by Shawn Simmons
Photography by Laura Petrilla

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Native Pittsburgher and artist Alisha B. Wormsley’s socially engaged work practice embraces a range of mediums while staying rooted in community.

Artist Alisha B. Wormsley Creates to Enact Social Change

Alisha B. Wormsley’s work is shaped by movement, but it begins with staying put. Her studio space in Pittsburgh’s Cultural District also serves as the primary site for Sibyls Shrine, the residency and collective she founded for Black artists who mother. The space supports making, gathering, and rest as interconnected forms of labor. For Wormsley, this proximity is essential.

Although she grew up in the Pittsburgh area, Wormsley left immediately after high school, moving between New York, the Bay Area, and Cuba before returning to New York for a decade. There, she worked as an educator across several institutions including the Romare Bearden Foundation and the Studio Museum in Harlem, committed to building a life as an artist. When she returned to Pittsburgh fifteen years ago for a residency at the Andy Warhol Museum, it was not out of nostalgia, but the possibility of building something enduring. “Rooting yourself in a socially engaged practice means actually being here,” she says. Place, for Wormsley, is not a backdrop. It is a responsibility.

That ethic runs through a socially engaged body of work that moves fluidly across installation, film, textile, and public art, to name just a few. Her ongoing project There Are Black People In The Future has appeared in museums and public sites internationally while also functioning as a grant-giving platform that supports conversations around displacement and gentrification. The project exemplifies Wormsley’s approach: art that circulates widely while remaining accountable to specific communities. She has no interest in projects that arrive, extract, and leave. Staying allows for consequence.

Drawing From Her Roots

Her work draws from ancestral and speculative frameworks at once. Quilts, tapestries, and glass vessels operate as access points to an archive that understands Black femmes as agents of transmission, care, and continuity. Weaving recurs throughout her practice, both materially and conceptually. Wormsley describes it as an origin point for circuitry, a way of imagining the world brought into being through interlacing. 

Medium choice emerges through experimentation rather than prescription. Wormsley explores and rearranges materials until a form asserts itself. She traces this impulse back to her parents, whose skill at fixing and reconfiguring shaped her from the start. That adaptability extends into her role as an educator at Carnegie Mellon University. Faced with intensifying censorship and students searching for new modes of expression, Wormsley understands teaching as inseparable from the ways she shows up in her community. “I’m a very holistic person,” she says. “All of these elements are a part of my practice.”

Current projects, including a forthcoming Boston chapter of Cosmologyscape, a collaborative installation exploring cosmology, place, and Indigenous and Black futurity developed with Suzanne Kite, extend this worldview into new registers. Wormsley’s work resists rushing toward resolution. It builds frameworks that can hold people, ideas, and futures in common. Above all, it is grounded in the conviction that imagining what comes next begins with where—and how—one chooses to remain.

Story by Shawn Simmons
Photography by Laura Petrilla

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