Posted on 01/31/2014 5:51:52 AM PST by raccoonradio
The bank has sued to foreclose. The city’s philanthropic groups, with names like Mellon and Heinz, have withdrawn support. The $42 million August Wilson Center for African American Culture, a bow-front building inspired by a Swahili sailing ship, is high and dry.
Named for the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who found a street-savvy poetry in the lives of poor Pittsburgh blacks, the culture center’s plight has been especially painful for those who had hoped it would enshrine the music, art and literature of the urban world he knew.
Instead, it appears to be a victim of mismanagement by its senior staff and board of directors, who borrowed to build a grand palace of culture, but failed to find a wide enough audience and donor base in the hometown of Wilson, whose plays are mostly set in the Hill District just blocks away.
... a state judge handed control of the cultural center to a conservator, usurping its board in a final effort to avoid liquidation. The bank that holds the mortgage, which has gone unpaid for months, is advancing $25,000 to pay the conservator. The culture center is flat broke.
Mark Clayton Southers, a former director of its theater program, said the Wilson center struggled to find an audience among the people Wilson portrayed: working-class blacks, many of whom feel unwelcome downtown with its skyscrapers and largely white-owned businesses, he added.
“You can’t build it and they will come,” Mr. Southers said. “Not when you’re trying to work with a community that is not traditional theatergoers or cultural consumers.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The August Wilson Center actually has a better location than the Heinz Museum. Plus there is plenty of foundation money here in the Burgh to support it if the people running it could show they could do something with that money other than make it disappear. They can't and that's why it has dried up.
That's a rare triple oxymoron.
August Wilson was actually a fairy talented and respectable playwright.
He's not the problem. The grifters making the money disappear is the problem, just as you pointed out.
Where ever and whenever government money freely flows, there is no shortage of grifters to consume it.
Shocking that the building looks just like the soviet hammer, not.
Melanin uber alles has always failed. The only people who visit these centers are school children who are forced to visit.
Some years ago I was doing research on an ancestor who lived in that county in the early 1860s and discovered that his farm was located about a mile from George Washington Carver's birthplace. Have never been to visit either the farm or the monument.
Don’t Sheesh me miss! Read my second post.
Wife beat you to the correction. The play was bad, I should not have even read the post. I didn’t have gaydar equipment then.
Good point.
Wilson died years before they built this turkey. Not fair to hang this debacle on him just cause they’re parking on his name.
I’m betting he was just checking to make sure you weren’t giving the credit to August Wilson. ;)
Yes, it’s in O’Neill’s old home, which is fine. But I meant a museum deliberately built for any of our major playwrights. I don’t think that’s ever been done. I would like to visit a building dedicated to Georgia O’Keefe in Santa Fe some day. And there’s nothing wrong with a building dedicated to whomever. The only thing is I hate the implication that average citizens should have to patronize these things or they’re racists.
The O’Neill Center is not just his home. It is a large complex in New London.
Thanks for the info. I’m glad some great American playwrights are honored like that.
The NYTimes is full of it...the problem is total mismanagement of the funding and marketing. The August Wilson Center SHOULD BE field trip central for the arts, and grow their following that way...instead it’s been “presented” as an artsy fartsy theatre experience...which it never came to be.
Going back to my school field trip idea, Wilson’s “Fences” could be presented for a school year. Kids could understand it (conflict between father/son, father when he loses his best friend due to a promotion). The place could see potential, and Wilson’s work (as it is so specific to the poor in the Rust Belt) could be seen in the area it was based in.
And FWIW, the building is really odd looking. It DOES look like a hammer :-/
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