ROMANCE
Fourth River
Cay Bahnmiller, Jono Coles, Sophia DiRenna, Finn Dugan, Justin Emmanuel Dumas, Armanis Fuentes, Sophie Friedman-Pappas, Alice Gong Xiaowen, Max Guy, Katherine Hubbard, Kahlil Robert Irving, Robert Lepper, Erin Jane Nelson, Ido Radon, Jerome Sicard, Harrison Kinnane Smith
May 31–Aug 17, 2025
A body of water is buried beneath Pittsburgh; local lore refers to it as the “Fourth River.” A river below the city and its sharp downtown skyline is a surreal image, suggesting the possibility of an underworld free from urban development and capital. Prior to the formation of city’s three defining rivers, this region known as Pittsburgh marked the edge of a shallow ocean running across the Midwest and today constitutes the easternmost edge of a large swath of the US known as the Mississippi River Basin. As a result of these easy trade routes, the city fell prey to the industrialists, starchitects, and urban planners (Olmsted then Moses then Wright) of the early 20th century.
This exhibition brings together works that consider how cultural myth shapes cities and, in turn, the emotional experience of not just the individuals who live there, but the psychological energy contained within a place itself. The show uses the Fourth River and its connection to other mythological waterways—namely, the Ohio to the Mississippi River—as metaphor for the emotional impact of American ideology and cultural myth on the built world. The specific works discussed here share visual affinities: a resemblance to memorials or memento mori; abstracted expanses of material that highlight a surface’s physicality: where ideology meets emotion meets materiality in an accumulation or conglomeration of matter and narrative; and, finally, borrowing from historical Conceptualism, through surreptitious documentation of polluted modernism.
Not unlike American exceptionalism informing the modern city for which Pittsburgh was a microcosm, the surreal image of ever-plentifal free flowing Fourth River is a mirage. It is, in fact, an aquifer formed by the Wisconsin Glacial Flow, through which a conglomeration of underground cracked stone and sediment have given form to a subterranean landform increasingly blocked by concrete and drained for drinking water and air conditioning and, as it’s told, the towering Point Park Fountain at the headwaters of the Ohio. The fountain, often linked to Wright’s unbuilt 1947 Civic Center proposal, was completed decades later as part of mid-century redevelopment efforts. “Yosemite meets Vegas,” as artist Ido Radon describes it, with its one-acre infinity pool and LED lights installed in 2013 to mark a new-age modernity.
The landmark in many respects feels like a gravestone for the Fourth River—a repository of grief and psychological toxicity that modernism’s model of the city holds. Aimed at expanding the city beyond the machine age, Pittsburgh’s two Renaissances sought to manifest Enlightenment ideals favoring the disembodied mind and an intentional forgetting. For Robert Smithson, the modern city “forgets that the earth exists.” So “Most Livable City” for who and for what kind of life? The collective imaginary often thinks of Pittsburgh as the farthest thing from romantic. But it is, in the sense that it is a city built on the faulty ground of idealization and limerence. Love, in contrast, is rooted in facing grief and conflict, facing material realties that impact our emotional wellbeing, which the city at large often hesitates to acknowledge. Perhaps, this exhibition considers, a new affective understanding of place can find new cracks and creeks underground. As David Harvey writes in The Right to the City:
The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of daily life we desire, what kinds of technologies we deem appropriate,what aesthetic values we hold. The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire. […]
Pittsburgh’s urban environment served in the mid-20th century as a blueprint for cities moving toward the west into the region of the United States connected by the Mississippi River. “[T]he ambitious program of revitalization that transformed Pittsburgh quickly became a model for other US cities,” Ed Simon crucially explains in An Alternative History of Pittsburgh. He also noted that “even in those early days, people seemed to have a vision of what America might become and realized the strategic position Pittsburgh occupied in regard to the development in the West.” Further, “the ugliest depths of the American character would become manifest in Pittsburgh as well.” Pittsburgh’s urban environment served in the mid-20th century as a blueprint for cities moving toward the west into the region of the United States connected by the Mississippi River. “[T]he ambitious program of revitalization that transformed Pittsburgh quickly became a model for other US cities,” Ed Simon crucially explains in An Alternative History of Pittsburgh. He also noted that “even in those early days, people seemed to have a vision of what America might become and realized the strategic position Pittsburgh occupied in regard to the development in the West.” Further, “the ugliest depths of the American character would become manifest in Pittsburgh as well.”
The simultaneity of the city’s corroded past alongside its grabs for futurity expose the failure of not just the post-industrial period for which it is known, but of “The Most Livable City” as conceived today with the hegemonic smoothing over in overlays of vacant condo developments and rapid tech expansion. With the courtship of Uber, the dominance of Google and Duolingo and AI robotics, the monopoly of the UPMC health conglomerate, there is a palpable kind of mourning here: not of the steel industry’s failure, but of a deadening present that only by surfacing its unseen truths can it truly move forward. Not as a problem to solve with a “solution” but a being present in its stored psychological energy and resulting material realities.