Artful Echoes of Pittsburgh’s Renaissance: ‘Eyes on the Point’ at Benedum-Trees Gallery

Art shows have stories behind them. This one has a backstory that goes ‘way back.

Seventy-five years ago, on a sunny day in May of 1950, a crowd gathered in downtown Pittsburgh to watch the swing of a wrecking ball. The target was only a little old house, perhaps once used as a storefront, now vacated and boarded up. But people wanted to see the first stroke of the massive urban renewal project that grew into the city’s Renaissance. 

Among the spectators that day, one might have encountered a man who looked like a typical business-suited, middle-aged office worker. In fact, Glen Davis lived a life that embodied the era’s changing times. And he was about to play a singular role in chronicling those times. 

A sculptor and painter, Glen Davis was known for his artwork in avant-garde styles. He also held a day job that linked past and future. Davis was the company accountant for Michael Benedum, who had made a fortune in oil drilling, and who remained active after turning 80. Having launched his first oil ventures in the previous century, Davis’s boss was one of the last surviving entrepreneurs of the long industrial boom that had built Pittsburgh into a city capable of rebuilding itself. 

Benedum, who’d outlived his colleague Joe Trees, worked in a suite on the 15th floor of downtown’s Benedum-Trees Building. Davis had his accounting office right below on the 14th.  Although this perch was outside the demolition zone, the high windows gave a view of cranes and crews starting to move across the urban landscape a couple of blocks away. The scope of the project was vast. It involved clearing the entire Triangle area from present-day Stanwix Street out to the Point, an area once a nerve center for industry and freight shipping, which had devolved into a ironbound jumble of old railroad sidings, warehouses, and other structures either obsolete or past their prime. Plans called for everything to be replaced by modern office towers nestled around public plazas and a spacious riverfront park.  

Davis, for his part, felt called to witness this epic transformation up close. He owned a 35mm camera, which he wielded with an artist’s eye. During lunchtimes and off-hours over the next few years, he roamed the Renaissance work areas, capturing images of an old urban core being obliterated and new forms rising. 

The images filled many rolls of film. But for decades, most of them made it no farther than Davis’s personal files. Today a representative bunch are on public view at last. 

‘Time Capsule’ Exhibit in a New Gallery

Today the Benedum-Trees Building has an art gallery: a large, airy room at street level, newly adapted for exhibitions. And the show that’s now hosted there through August 30, Eyes on the Point, is most unusual. Visiting the gallery feels like stepping inside a Glen Davis time capsule. Along with a generous selection of his Renaissance photos from the 1950s, you are immersed in samples of his artwork. 

Stark photographs of scenic rubble—e.g., a lone Greek column left standing while the old Wabash Railway station was being torn down—mingle with clustered displays of intricate sculptures and vivid paintings. One tall sculpture—a mini-tower crafted from metal wire and shards of flat metal—echoes the repetitive, angular geometry seen in nearby construction photos of the IBM Building (now the United Steelworkers Building) going up. 

Intriguing contrasts and parallels resonate through the show. If you open your senses you’ll be struck by the recurring resonances of old and new, of destruction and creation. Here’s a sequence that may illustrate the effects:

And there is more. In addition to photos mounted on gallery walls, the show includes hundreds printed smaller and presented in albums. You can choose from 11 albums lying on tables around the room, then settle into a chair and browse. Striking Renaissance images (including those above) can be found in album pages, and so can other surprises. One album holds Davis’s rayographs—artistic photo designs made by direct exposure to light, without a camera, as popularized by the artist Man Ray. 

You can even peruse an album of Davis’s cat pictures. He was a childless cat person, an identity ahead of its time. He also photographed actors and celebrities who appeared on his home TV screen. The grainy pictures reflect an odd obsession with the then-new medium, though they invite you to pick out your favorite stars of yesteryear. Meanwhile the album of Davis family photos is worth a look. The 1911 snapshots of little Glen as a scowling, howling infant suggest that his parents had a sense of humor, or at least tolerance, and there are pictures in which a grown-up Glen eschews the tantrums, smiling warmly.

Allow ample time, too, for browsing the artworks. Eyes on the Point has scads of small to medium-sized pieces arranged on pedestals, tabletops, and window ledges. As you study the groupings, fascinating details and patterns emerge. (Which happens with the photos as well.) The trick here is not so much to hunt for individual artworks that might blow your mind, as if they were golden needles in a haystack. This reviewer found it best to just let their cumulative impact come through.  

The Man, the Curator, the Singularity

Technically, Glen Davis was an accountant making art on the side. Yet it would be wrong to write him off as a mere hobbyist. When young, after earning a University of Pittsburgh degree and learning business skills, he had studied for a time at a New York City art school started by the French painter Amédée Ozenfant. In the postwar 1940s, when Pittsburgh’s art scene revolved around guilds and groups to a large degree, Davis became an early member of The Abstract Group (now Group A). He was furthermore included in a major 1947 exhibition of abstract and surrealist art at the Art Institute of Chicago—as were artists such as Alexander Calder, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock. 

Davis went on to win accolades in shows closer to home. A 1958 clipping from the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, displayed in the gallery, calls him “the star” of a regional abstract exhibit. However he always stopped short of pushing for artistic status. 

According to Pat McArdle—the art collector and curator who conceived Eyes on the Point—Davis never had an agent or gallery representing him. Nor, while alive, would Davis agree to a one-person show. “He believed that those were for working artists, who depend on their art for a living,” McArdle said in an interview. 

McArdle himself is sui generis. Dealing mainly in outsider art (but he doesn’t call it that, preferring to speak of “self-taught” artists), he has organized eye-popping shows. Last year, at the Hermann Memorial Museum in Bellevue, he drew throngs of art fans to a venue off the beaten track by staging eight big exhibitions in a span of eight weeks, each themed differently. 

McArdle had gotten to know Davis in the late 1990s, when the latter was nearing 90. After Davis died in 2001, McArdle was asked to appraise his artistic estate. Instead, “I bought it,” he says. “All of the art and his archives,” which contained the photographs. Most existed only as negatives; some were in undeveloped film. 

The idea for Eyes on the Point came recently. “I wanted to find out when the Renaissance physically began,” McArdle recalls. “And when I saw May 18, 1950, that’s when it hit me: This year is the semi-sesquicentennial”—a rare term meaning 75th anniversary. McArdle thought the occasion deserved commemoration. The new Benedum-Trees Gallery provided a fitting location. Putting together the show required a good bit of work, with plenty of help. Images from old negatives had to be selected, scanned, and printed. Several photos other than those by Davis were included, for historical context. McArdle assembled the photo albums and chose the artwork to display.  

The result is a one-of-a-kind show. As McArdle notes, Glen Davis was hardly the only person photographing the Renaissance. Numerous photographers have documented Pittsburgh’s history while it happened; McArdle cites the Detre Library & Archives at Heinz History Center and the Pittsburgh Photographic Library as good sources for collections of their work. 

But there was only one Glen Davis. And only by visiting Eyes on the Point can you have a singular experience—an artist’s-eye view of how Pittsburgh formerly looked and how it changed … combined with a sampling of what the ever-evolving visual arts looked like at that time, as expressed by the same individual … and a dive into the personal life of that person. 

Eyes on the Point is not exactly a hyper-focused, clean-machine show. Not the kind that marches you step by step through a historical narrative or the development of an artistic movement. But a great deal of careful selection has been done nonetheless. And in our present era, when didactic text panels next to the art are often thought to be as important as the art itself, the absence of such hand-holding in this show feels liberating. You’re simply given a plethora of stuff to look at and thumb through—sort of a mixed bag of high relevance and weird tangents. 

By deciding what to pursue, out of this mixed bag, you become a participant. You get a choose-your-adventure experience, like interactive fiction, except that this is an interactive excursion into real history and real art. Very cool. Try it. 

Closing Credits and Visitor Info

Eyes on the Point has been co-curated by Pat McArdle and Erin B. O’Neill. The show is free of charge, but open to the public at limited hours: Thursdays and Fridays 4 – 7 p.m. and Saturdays 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. It’s up through August 30 at the Benedum-Trees Gallery, 223 Fourth Ave., Downtown.

Key contributors to the show were Rob Pfaffman, an architect with experience in history and education, and Mark Houser, who composed the wall text. Support from the Benter Foundation made the exhibition possible. 

Mike Vargo, an independent writer based in Pittsburgh, covers the visual arts and theater for Entertainment Central. 

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