The City of Pittsburgh's Department of City Planning (DCP) is seeking a qualified professional with a background in research and project management to aid in an audit of the City of Pittsburgh’s collection of public art, monuments, and memorials. The audit will assess the objects in the collection with a focus on identifying inequity within the objects, histories, and practices of the City’s public art narrative.

The City of Pittsburgh’s public art collection contains over 160 permanent and limited-term artworks, monuments, memorials, and historic objects. These include commissioned public artworks, war memorials and honor rolls, and monuments to historic figures and eras.

The collection was formed over the past two centuries, alongside a national history of structural bias and racism that has often elevated a single cultural narrative at the expense and exclusion of others, both explicitly and implicitly.

These biased systems have resulted in many public spaces and objects that are not representative of the broad range of lived experiences and perspectives that exist within the population, and are at times representative of values and narratives that are harmful to a public realm that is welcoming and inclusive of all people.

The City of Pittsburgh wishes to examine the works in its collection to identify objects that perpetuate inequitable or misrepresentative histories, as well as to determine gaps in representation to inform future public art programs.

Phase 1 of this audit has been completed, with several works identified as needing an immanent priority review. Phase 2 will engage a researcher, who will conduct this priority review, followed by a deeper analysis of all works in the collection. The criteria for this analysis will be determined as part of the researcher’s initial process planning.