Introducing The Treasures: A great day in the Hill District
Gathering of Pittsburgh’s 16 Cultural Treasures puts spotlight on their history-making Africana contributions
By Ervin Dyer
I’m not sure when I first came to know of “A Great Day in Harlem,” the inspired 1958 black-and-white photograph of 57 jazz musicians gathered in the New York neighborhood once known as the capital of Black America. I’ve long considered Harlem my spiritual home, so I’m sure the reference came to me during my teenage years as I began to read about this storied Black community.
That would have been five decades ago, and after all these years, I’ve never forgotten it. The image of those jazz musicians — in their suits and ties, and fancy dresses, and those grand but frayed brownstones in the background — made for a memorable photograph.
The freelance photographer Art Kane, working for Esquire magazine, gathered the musicians on the morning of Aug. 12. The musicians — and the neighborhood children who spontaneously joined in — stood at 17 East 126th Street between Fifth and Madison avenues. The sepia beauty of the image was impressive, but my immersion into Harlem is what first awakened me to the power of Black ideas, culture, arts, music, and performance to shape identity and pride. So, I was more equally impressed by the thought of having all of those contributors to Black arts and culture gathered at one place. It was an enchanting, powerful moment.
So, in the spring of 2022, when I was given the opportunity to help coordinate a project that would document the work of 16 Black-led cultural organizations in Pittsburgh that champion Africana arts and heritage, I immediately thought that it would be special to gather the artists, directors, and innovators — and the writers who tell their stories — and re-create, as much as possible, the spirit and technique of Kane’s historic image.
The arts groups and their leaders became known as Pittsburgh’s 16 Cultural Treasures. In the fall of 2020, The Heinz Endowments began its participation in America’s Cultural Treasures, an initiative from the Ford Foundation to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and the global call for racial justice sparked in the wake of multiple police killings of unarmed Black citizens.
The national initiative was designed to focus more arts philanthropy on arts organizations within communities of color and provide them long-term operating support.
In Pittsburgh, that meant a $10 million fund — half from the Ford Foundation and half from the Endowments — to support organizations that would be named “cultural treasures” as part of the regional Pittsburgh’s Cultural Treasures program launched in summer 2021.
A steering committee produced a list of 165 Black-led organizations in Pittsburgh and made recommendations to the Endowments. The Endowments then named 16 of the recommended organizations as “cultural treasures,” awarding them grants.
These are the dancers, actors, directors, singers, visual artists, and nonprofit leaders whom I assigned a collective of Black scholars, writers, journalists, and photographers to help document. I asked the writers to profile the creatives, helping us to understand and highlight the work they currently do, and to show how their work is connected to a long legacy of Black thought and engagement of African arts, culture and ideas that foster community empowerment and self-development.
I was excited to bring these artists together.
We gathered on a Saturday afternoon, at 2:30 p.m., to “best capture the autumn sun,” said our photographer, Brian Cook, of Golden Sky Media.
We gathered in the historic Hill District, the Pittsburgh equivalent of Black Harlem, and a neighborhood once described as the Crossroads of the World, for the wave of musicians and artists who would wash through on the way from Chicago to New York.
We gathered in the center of the Hill, on the steps of the former Irene Kauffman Settlement House, an institution that in the 1900s offered services to immigrants and Black migrants from the South to help them begin a new life in urban Pittsburgh.
We gathered under the sunny skies, and the 16 treasures and writers climbed the stairs and stood in front of the building’s bold columns and smiled.
The photographer clicked his camera.
The rest, as they say, is history. Our stories and images launch soon on Medium and will run over the course of the next few weeks.
This project has been transformative, allowing me to revisit a magical photograph from my childhood that touched me forever. In the same way, we’re hoping that this project, these images and the stories you read will transform and inspire you.
For people of African descent, connecting to our African heritage continues to be a way to be made whole. For others, it is a way to begin to understand the vast humanity and innovation that flows, like a river, out of the continent and across Africa’s global diaspora. Even onto the steps of an old settlement house in Pittsburgh’s Hill District.
It’s important to know that Pittsburgh’s 16 Cultural Treasures only represent Phase I. There is a Phase II that will focus on helping Black-led arts groups with organizational development, networking and mentorship. For more information, please go to https://bit.ly/3zds8av, where you can find the form to nominate a nonprofit, a collective (artists who’ve joined to create a project), or an individual creative to be considered for funding.
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