Everyday there is a new story to tell… Everyday the story is wiped away to become just another memory. All over the grounds of the University of Pittsburgh Oakland Campus, there are chalk drawings, sometimes just arrows, other times just words. But either way the chalk drawings create a story for the life at the University.
In the dead of night and the early morning dawn, the artists leave the warmth of their beds. They work in teams with group assignments or they work alone, fulfilling their own need to tell the natives of the Oakland Campus just what is going on. In its simplest form, the chalk drawings around campus could be conceived as just a message system. They tell people where to go, how to get places, and when they should go. But the system is not as simple as a messenger. The messages are changed daily, sometimes wiped completely from the ground and the memories of the people they tried to reach or sometimes leaving faint traces of themselves for days on end. Yet despite how the messages are so easily changed and forgotten their appearance on the campus is a record of the events that happened there. The chalk drawings are like an invisible scrap book upon the walls and floors of the campus. They are a record of events to come, events gone past, and the events taking place at the present time.
Like any piece of art, the chalk drawings around campus reflect the context of the area time they find themselves in. Some of the messages pertain to not only the immediate area, meaning the Oakland campus, but to the world at large.
The chalk art is similar to an exhibition style or performance style of art. The art is on display for only a short while and is changed by the things around it. The art is forever lost and can never be repeated unless the chalk art is recoreded. Also, the chalk art is open to interpretation in many instances. Arrows could be pointing to places that lead to something good or bad. The arrows path can be taken differently from person to person. Some of the messages that the chalk art displays can be interpreted by the average person in several different ways. The messages are not always clearly written out in standard English language. They sometimes make use of a jargon that only a select people would be able to understand or left in an open ended style of writing that leaves the meaning of the words open to several meanings.
Meaning or not, the chalk drawings around the campus are art not only due to their nature of living in the realm of context but because they are interpretable pieces that combined form a whole piece that reflects the life of the world around it. Art is not always what is visible but what is beneath the surface or left behind.
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