The idea
Pittsburgh makes beautiful things out of hard ground. This box takes the most Pittsburgh object there is, a ketchup bottle, and pours out flowers instead of what you expect.
No faces, no figures. Nobody has to decide who it's for before they look. It's just the city, in color, on a corner.
The box
Why I want to paint this box
I'm from the east side of Pittsburgh. I'm self-taught, no training, just seeing something and giving it ten thousand hours. Pittsburgh has always been family to me. We come from different places, different stories, different backgrounds, and sometimes at the intersection of life we get beautiful moments.
This box is a ketchup bottle pouring out flowers. Not ketchup. Flowers. Because this city gave the world August Wilson, Wiz Khalifa, Mac Miller, Josh Gibson, Chuck Cooper, Andy Warhol, Fred Rogers, Leon Ford, Ed Gainey, and a whole lot of people whose names never got called. I want to give them their flowers while they can still smell them.
My grandmother raised me on Steelers Sundays. She pushed me to be great before I had anything to show for it. She never got to see my art.
Art should be accessible to everybody. That's why a news box is the right canvas. It's free, it's on the corner, and it belongs to whoever walks past it. I want somebody running late on their worst morning to look at this and feel like the city sees them. Even if Pittsburgh isn't their home, I want it to feel like home for a minute.
Flowers you can take home
If this box gets painted, I want to give away prints of it, handed out through the box itself. The box becomes its own little gallery, and anybody who walks by can take a piece of it with them.
I'd also like to work with City Paper to bundle a small print of the piece into the first 100 copies of the issue that covers it, so people can hold a piece of it before they've even seen the box.
Built to last
Whichever box I'm assigned will live outside through Pittsburgh winters, so it gets built like it.
- The powder-coated metal is scuff-sanded and sealed with a metal primer before any paint goes on.
- Exterior acrylic enamel for the color, exterior paint markers for the lettering and scribble work.
- Gold leaf laid on exterior-grade size and sealed.
- Two coats of UV-resistant clear coat over everything, so the color holds and the surface can be cleaned.
About the artist
Malcolm Xavier Davis is a Pittsburgh multidisciplinary artist with over twenty years in mixed media, working in acrylic, gold leaf, and resin. During his run on the live commerce platform NTWRK he was a Featured Creator two years running, with over seven hundred live shows and work shipped to all fifty states. He is the founder of StashHouse Gallery and Love Yours Club, a community nonprofit focused on self-love advocacy.
