Six months before graduating from high school, Ezra Jones had no idea what he was going to do next. He wanted to go into a creative field, but he didn’t want to spend money on college without a clear path in mind.
“It was terrifying,” he says.
Fortunately, the North Side resident found another way—leveraging a digital content creation program at The Andy Warhol Museum to break into the burgeoning field of video production.
“When you try to break into creative industries, it’s very difficult, very competitive,” says Jones, 20, who is now an assistant editor and junior producer for The Warhol’s boutique production studio, The Warhol Creative. “This really helped me make connections, and it led to a great job.”
The Warhol Creative is one pillar of The Pop District, The Warhol’s multi-pronged, 10-year strategic expansion announced in 2022 to transform the six-block section of the museum’s North Shore neighborhood into a cultural and economic hub.
Launched with support from the Richard King Mellon Foundation and the Henry L. Hillman Foundation, The Pop District features public art installations, workforce development programs, and eventually a creative arts center in what is now a parking lot across the street at the intersection of Sandusky and East General Robinson streets.
After two years, The Pop District has already met and in many ways exceeded its original goals, especially for the workforce development component, says Dan Law, associate director of The Warhol.
“We hoped it would be successful, but it’s really gone through the roof,” Law says.
He notes that the museum envisions the $60 million Pop District as a way to provide new revenue streams while advancing Carnegie Museums’ overarching vision to turn its museums “inside out” by engaging with the community outside their walls.
“There’s a tremendous opportunity to take the museum outside the four walls,” Law says. “There is a growth mechanism and a growth mindset that unlocks revenue potential and sustainability potential for the museum.”
The initiative has garnered accolades for The Warhol. The tech entrepreneur news site Technical.ly named The Pop District its Culture Builder of the Year in 2023. The New York-based news site Observer has cited it as a possible “blueprint for museum recovery” as cultural institutions continue to bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic. And Artnet pondered whether it could be a new model for museums’ civic engagement.
“We’re able to lead the way nationally, demonstrating that museums can evolve and innovate post-pandemic,” Law says.
All the while, the entrepreneurial initiative remains aligned with its namesake’s legacy. Andy Warhol was famously entrepreneurial while making art, once saying, “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”
The Warhol Academy
Last year, Clarise Fearn was operating her part-time crafting business as a pop-up store, and it was proving so popular that she wanted to turn it into a permanent operation. Fearn conceived a kind of restaurant for art where patrons could make reservations to come to a cafe-like setting and order from her menu of craft projects.
But she lacked the tech savvy to promote it online. Then she heard about a new digital marketing course offered through The Warhol. Fearn, 30, says the 24-week course she took last year gave her the confidence and digital skills to open up the Mindful Craft Cafe in the Mexican War Streets on the North Side in August.
“The course really did change my life,” Fearn says. “It gave me the confidence to know that I could open a brick-and-mortar business and market it.” She says the course helped her elevate her website from “OK to amazing.”
A critical part of the vision for The Pop District’s creative workforce development efforts was to provide people with the skills to participate in the 21st-century economy. The Warhol Academy became the hub for this programming.
Operating out of The Pop District headquarters next door to the museum on Isabella Street, The Warhol Academy offers paid fellowships in filmmaking and post-production, as well as digital content creation. It is also the home of Carnegie Museums’ digital marketing diploma program, which currently is free to participants. Specifically aimed at providing pathways to employment for marginalized communities, The Warhol Academy does not require its diploma and fellowship applicants to have a high school diploma. The only requirements are that they be at least 18 years old and eligible to work in the United States.
The Warhol aimed to remove as many barriers to entry as possible—including cost and prerequisites—so that its programming was attractive and accessible to a diverse array of students, says Ryan Haggerty, school director for state-licensed programming and adult workforce development at The Warhol Academy.
“We consider accessibility in everything we do,” Haggerty explains. “It’s part of the mission of empowering people to be competitive.”
“If you did a fellowship with The Warhol Academy or you were able to jump in on a shoot for Dell or The Warhol Museum, that’s massive. Having that line on your resume or project in your portfolio can get your foot in the door.”
–Ryan Haggerty, school director for state-licensed programming and adult workforce development at The Warhol Academy
By the end of 2024, nearly 600 people—ranging from teenagers to mid-career professionals—will have participated in The Academy’s programming since the pilot program launched in 2021. This year, The Academy was named “Innovator of the Year” by Goodwill of Southwestern PA.
The Warhol Academy also offers paid fellowships to about 32 people a year—one in digital content creation for brand videos and other short-form work, and a film and post-production fellowship for longer-form videos and films. These fellowships offer a $3,000 stipend and are highly competitive.
Since last year, Pop District mentors have been available to work one-on-one with fellows and digital marketing participants, helping them make connections and offering career advice or resume-writing guidance even after the participants leave the program. The fellows also are given projects intended to stretch the boundaries of their creativity.
For Erika Kondo, who was part of the film and post-production fellowship, that meant creating a music video of Pittsburgh pop musician Kahone Concept. “They gave me access to equipment that I don’t have. I produced everything myself within the span of two months.”
Haggerty notes that the fellowship opens doors for job seekers and small business owners. “If you did a fellowship with The Warhol Academy or you were able to jump in on a shoot for Dell or The Warhol Museum, that’s massive. Having that line on your resume or project in your portfolio can get your foot in the door.”
Expanding on these successes, in May 2023, Pennsylvania’s Department of Education licensed Carnegie Institute, the state-registered entity for Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, to launch its first-ever diploma program in digital marketing at The Warhol. That program, which is unique as the only museum-based school licensed to operate in Pennsylvania, is also currently offered for free and has averaged more than 40 annual graduates.
Students who graduated with a digital marketing diploma are landing jobs, Haggerty says. Eighty percent were employed within a year, with an annual salary between $35,000 and $75,000, Haggerty notes.
It adds up to a lot of wealth created for the region. Those salaries, as well as the wages, contracts, stipends, and honoraria paid by The Warhol Creative and The Warhol Academy, totaled $1.5 million this year alone, Law says.
“That’s money going back on the street, money in people’s pockets.”
Emily Armstrong was hired as project coordinator of Pittsburgh Robotics Network after receiving her digital marketing diploma in 2023. Armstrong, who studied studio art at Carlow University, had been working at The Warhol as a museum youth program coordinator when she heard about the program.
She notes that instructor Maddi Love demystified the process of digital marketing. “New technology is really scary and off-putting. She was really supportive,” Armstrong says of Love’s guidance. “She said, ‘You can do this. It’s not that hard.’ She definitely helped mentor me.”
The Warhol Creative
In 2023, when Kondo graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in cinematography and film and video production, she faced a bleak and depressing job market in the highly competitive film industry.
“I applied to over 150 jobs,” she says.
Every job listing was flooded with applicants, Kondo says, and one New York-based editing position she saw posted to LinkedIn had 3,000 applicants in 48 hours. “It is an absolutely awful market right now,” she says.
Thanks to the work she did during her fellowship, Kondo was offered a position as a junior producer and assistant editor at another pillar of The Pop District—its production studio, The Warhol Creative.
“Everyone wants to go to New York and LA, and they want to go big,” Kondo says. “I have huge ambitions, too, and I think I can really bring forth some of my ambition here.”
This was, after all, part of the intention behind The Pop District: to nurture young creatives in Pittsburgh so that, according to Law, “the next Andy Warhol doesn’t have to leave the city to become Andy Warhol. It’s kind of our North Star, the guiding principle of our vision—don’t let our creative community go elsewhere. Keep them in Pittsburgh and help them grow here.”
The Warhol Creative does this by offering paid opportunities to people—mostly those who, like Kondo, have come through The Warhol Academy training programs—to produce social media content and films for local and national clients. These include Dell Technologies, NBCUniversal’s Creative Impact Lab, and Miami City Ballet.
The Warhol Creative has produced more than 1,000 videos for 33 clients and generated $1 million in revenue through contracts and sponsorships.
Age and experience are less important criteria in hiring decisions than finding people who are highly motivated to learn, says Christian Lockerman, executive producer of The Warhol Creative. Lockerman is a filmmaker with two decades of experience who has developed original content for corporate clients like Spirit Airlines, and held research and teaching positions at Point Park University and the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. He manages a team of seasoned professionals who work with their charges to produce award-winning work.
“The important idea is to help young people who don’t get an opportunity,” Lockerman says. “We provide a professional environment where you can be mentored. You can gather experience on sets, on shoots, on projects that most people—even in film school—don’t get.”
In the late summer and early fall, a group of young producers of The Warhol Creative were filming and editing videos for Dell, shooting a docuseries about contemporary artists, working on a video promotion for a City Theatre play, and creating video content for both The Warhol and Carnegie Museum of Art, to name a few. The team also is producing its first feature-length film, a documentary on the LGBTQ+ prom held every year at The Warhol. Lockerman says they plan to submit it to several film festivals.
“One of the things we’re most proud of is providing these opportunities for people from less-represented portions of society to get into this world of film production,” Lockerman says.
He cites Alejandro Jimenez as an example of someone whose career has flourished after completing the fellowship program during the first cohort in 2021.
This fall, the 35-year-old Jimenez, who emigrated from Ecuador and now works for The Warhol Creative as a producer and editor, flew with Lockerman to Miami to do a shoot for the Miami City Ballet. “He’s the lead on some very big projects,” Lockerman says. “The opportunities are there.”
“There’s a tremendous opportunity to take the museum outside the four walls. There is a growth mechanism and a growth mindset that unlocks revenue potential and sustainability potential for the museum.”
–Dan Law, associate director of The Warhol
Jimenez, a former painter, says, “I’m always trying to combine fine arts with filmmaking—even though we make a lot of promotional videos and nonfiction work, there’s always a way to add something extra.”
Jimenez says he was captivated by Warhol while studying art in Argentina—“He changed the way people looked at art.” But having a deep prior knowledge of the legendary Pop artist is not a condition of employment. Students don’t need to have a background in art, period.
Jones, the former fellow who now works for The Warhol Creative as an assistant editor, had never heard of Warhol growing up in the North Side, not far from the museum.
His introduction to Warhol came when he enrolled as a high school junior in The Academy’s digital content creation program. That opportunity led to a sports marketing job and then a dream job with The Warhol Creative. He now brings his own creativity to his video-production work, such as adding a visual effect he might have seen on Instagram.
“I’m really getting a sense of artistry,” he says. “We do videos based around marketing, but art is at the center of it all.”
Public Art and the Factory
A critical piece of being a “district,” however, requires engaging with the public outside on the streets.
Along the museum’s exterior wall on Silver Street is Typoe’s Over the Rainbow, a vibrant mural painted on the exterior wall that was the first public artwork commissioned by the museum in 2021. Accompanied by stringed bistro lights and seating, it transformed an otherwise hidden alleyway into bright space for the public to gather.
“I hope that all who visit The Warhol are welcomed by these fields of color and leave having experienced their own journey in form,” Typoe said at its unveiling.
Meanwhile, across General Robinson Street in Pop Park, The Warhol unveiled in May a newly commissioned sculptural work by the artist KAWS to mark the museum’s 30th anniversary. Titled Together, it’s a massive teak sculpture two stories tall that represents two of the artist’s signature cartoon-like characters embracing. It was preceded by other temporary art installations in Pop Park that include Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree, and Anatomy of the Human by local Nigerian American artist Mikael Owunna.
Law notes there’s still work to do in getting the public to identify it as a “district,” like the Cultural District in Downtown, where visitors would want to make return trips. He acknowledges that most people don’t yet recognize The Pop District as a cultural destination, although the outdoor art installations are slowly changing that.
That’s sure to change when a planned creative arts center—another key plank of The Pop District called “The Factory”—opens at the site of the current Warhol parking lot. Its name harkens back to Warhol’s famed New York City-based Silver Factory, a hub of activity where Warhol managed his art and business empires, all while hobnobbing with celebrities.
“That’s when banners will go up,” Law says.
Law believes the new 800-person standing room Factory—part interdisciplinary arts space, part concert hall—will generate a lot of excitement, hosting musical acts and shows that traditionally bypass Pittsburgh on their concert calendars. Expected to open by 2027, the space will enliven The Pop District—located just across the Andy Warhol Bridge from Pittsburgh’s Cultural District—especially during the evenings.
When that happens, it will become a kind of capstone for The Pop District, and further The Warhol’s larger goal to have a more dynamic relationship with its audience.
“I think there’s a contrast to be drawn between a static, one-directional paradigm where we are the holder of these precious valuables to a more direct relationship to the community,” Law says.
Ezra Jones agrees. The Pop District, he says, will help revitalize the place where he grew up. “It gives people the direct route to make connections in the art world, the
world of filmmaking, and I want to help foster that.”
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