dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
titel: Carrie Furnaces
jahr: from 1980
adresse: Rankin PA, USA
+: «The Carrie Furnaces in Rankin, PA were active blast mills from 1907 until 1978. Today this historic site is also a locus of active artistic production. For example, the now famous Carrie Furnaces Deer, a monumental scrap sculpture, was created by a group of guerilla artists on the site in the 1990s. Various art performances and events have also been staged here. In the years before it was designated as a national heritage site, local artists covered the walls of the furnaces with graffiti. But rather than trying to remove the graffiti, and erase the work of the street artists who created them, Rivers of Steel, the organization that now oversees Carrie Furnace, took a different approach. In 2012, Shane Pilaster, a graffiti artist, began working with Rivers of Steel to preserve some of the graffiti art on the site. The graffiti had been done by some well-known East Coast street artists, and represented a record of the post-industrial life of the site (and the community) in the decades after the closing of the mills. In addition to preserving these examples, the Rivers of Steel also expanded the graffiti by designating legal walls on the site, allowing artists to add to the existing examples of graffiti art. In this way, the organization allowed for the community voice to be heard while also maintaining the mission to preserve the historic structures. Now, Carrie Furnaces is a veritable museum of graffiti art. The walls are covered with silhouetted images of steel mills, steel workers and blast furnaces, cartoon characters, artists’ tags, and even a memorial to two local children.»
(Sylvia Rhor)
