This week may have been all about football in Southwestern Pennsylvania, but the first round of the NHL Playoffs have also been ruling the thoughts of hockey fans who love their hometown team. And the Pittsburgh Penguins love their city back, which is why the team holds a number of community games every season to celebrate the diverse fanbase.
Even better, many of the community games come with special merchandise. For a handful of the special games over the 2025-26 NHL season, the organization commissioned designs from artists for shirts that then became available for purchase by fans — or, in some cases, the subject of giveaways to some attendees. These unique designs reflect the pride that the artists feel for their community and the team.
“Being from Pittsburgh … I think one of the underappreciated things in the city is the arts community here,” said Miles Ritenour, vice president of marketing for the Pittsburgh Penguins.
He also hopes to bring a wide and diverse audience to hockey that may not have given it a chance before.
“By working with the community, it allows us to spotlight a lot of groups that exist here in Pittsburgh and give them a reason to maybe come out and see a Penguins game for the first time, and hopefully they have such a great experience here that they would want to come back.”
The Trib got to talk to some of those designers and discovered how impactful these community games were for them — and for the groups they represent.
Mary Seamans
Both Polish and Penguins history is woven into the fabric of Mary Seamans’ marriage. On their first date, her husband took her to her first Penguins game.
“I had never been to a hockey game before, and I was hooked from the first fight,” Seamans said.
Seamans, who lives in Rostraver, designed the shirt for the Penguins’ Polish Heritage Night, and her own Polish heritage goes back to her grandparents, who were the lone members of their family to emigrate to the United States. She has returned to their hometown in Poland and seen their names on signs inside the church they sponsored there.
For about three decades, she had been doing graphic design for the Polish Cultural Council’s newsletter. It was through the organization that the Penguins found her to create the shirt.
Her design includes the Polish white eagle with the red-and-white Polish flag in the background. On the sleeves is the word “Polska” — the country’s name in Polish — along with representations of Wycinanki, which Seamens said is a Polish paper cutting graphic art that’s very popular there.
“It means a lot, it has a lot of meaning in there,” she added.
Larry Klukaszewski
Longtime sports artist and Upper Burrell native Larry Klukaszewski is no stranger to helping the Penguins with charity efforts, but his Hockey Fights Cancer shirt design was extra special.
Klukaszewski is living with a cancer-adjacent condition called paraneoplastic syndrome that has persisted after he had two skin cancers.
Fortunately, he said, he is now free from chemo.
“This was quite an honor,” he said of designing the Hockey Fights Cancer shirt. “I’m sort of over the cancer hurdle,” he said.
A former Kiski Area School District teacher, Klukaszewski has worked with the Penguins and Steelers on previous projects. His shirt was inspired by the strength and humanity of those doing battle with the disease. From experience, he said that being in cancer centers “runs the whole realm of emotion” and he wanted to portray that.
He also has two close family members who are battling cancer. “I made the Penguins logo really muscular and … totally buff to represent my brother’s cancer fight because he’s just a hero to me and such a warrior. And the ribbon on the collar of the jersey is dedicated to my dear mother-in-law.”
There are also handprints on the front of the sweater that come from a Pittsburgh child currently fighting leukemia.
“He was thrilled for this opportunity for me to put his hand front and center,” Klukaszewski said.
Jess Schweitzer
The mind behind the Pittsburgh-themed art of Happy Lil Canvasses designed the shirt for the Pride Game. After picking up painting in college, Jess Schweitzer of Brookline started working in Pittsburgh-specific art.
“Ironically, it was around the time I came out,” she said.
The Pride Game, which celebrates the LGBTQ community within hockey fandom, has become a tradition at PPG Paints Arena. A accompanying auction was held, which raised more than $36,000 to benefit local LGBTQ organizations, according to the Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation.
Schweitzer answered an open call for artists to design a Pride logo for the Penguins and was selected.
“I added the skyline to it with the Progress Pride Flag,” she said.
The shirt’s design also has Pittsburgh’s bridges on its sleeves.
“That really turned into, I think, my favorite part of it,” Schweitzer said. “I thought it was cool in the way of bridging hockey with the community, and I thought the Pens did a really amazing job this season of highlighting different community groups, local artists … and bridging between the two.”
Rabbi Dani Meisels
Situated during Hannukah in December, the Penguins’ Jewish Heritage Game got a glow-up from Rabbi Dani Meisels, who has education in both art and Talmudic law. He moved from Toronto to Squirrel Hill six years ago and teaches at Hillel Academy Pittsburgh.
“For a number of years now, I’ve been helping our fourth grade students prepare to sing the National Anthem for Jewish Heritage Night,” Meisels said.
This year’s preparation was when the team tapped him to design the shirt.
He worked the Star of David into the typically triangular logo design on the shirt’s front, as well as adding eight candles above the logo to represent the candles in a menorah over the eight nights of Hannukah.
“The most important element of the design was that I kind of kept those things in the background and kept everything else … as it is with the Penguins team logo. And the idea behind that was that the Jewish community here in Pittsburgh sees itself as part of the community and part of the team,” Meisels said.
He has become a Penguins fan since moving here, though his affinity for certain team veterans goes way further back.
“I always loved Mario Lemieux, he was my favorite player growing up,” he said. “So I always had a spot in my heart for the Penguins.”
Dominic Lazzini
Italian Heritage Night’s shirts could have gone in many different directions, but Dominic Lazzini chose to focus on national symbols and colors.
The Bridgeville native connected with the Penguins after seeing an open call on the Calabria Club’s Instagram page.
“I used the color blue as the main color, which might be surprising to some people, but that actually goes back a long time in Italian history,” Lazzini said.
“If you’re familiar with Italian soccer, any of their national sports teams, they all wear blue.”
He also added a marble pattern on the sleeves and Penguins logo, invoking the Renaissance and making the connection of how important marble is to Italy and how important steel is to Pittsburgh.
“It’s also a nod to where my family is from, a town called Massa e Carrara, which is the marble capital of the world,” he said.
Lazzini is an avid hockey jersey collector, so having others collect his own design is a watershed accomplishment for him.
“It’s one of those things I think you just dream about as a little kid, it’s super special,” he said.
Cue Perry
Artist Cue Perry integrates a lot of symbolism into his Black History Night shirt, combining a proud cultural heritage with his pride in the City of Pittsburgh. Growing up in Manchester, Perry currently lives in Homestead.
“First and foremost, I wanted to make something that you’d want to wear all year round,” Perry said.
He modeled many of the elements off of African dashiki, because he said that hockey jerseys already seem similar.
“They’re very loose-fitting, and a lot of African warriors remind me of hockey players,” he said. “They fight, they battle.”
The pattern on the shirt is an evocation of a Kente sash, often worn by African royalty.
“I want to be Pittsburgh proud. If you’re black and gold, I want you to feel like royalty because I love Pittsburgh,” he said.
He also said that his father wore a lot of traditional “mud cloth” when he was younger. “The patterns in mud cloth, they mean different things, like good luck, good fortune, goodwill and such like that.”
Perry said that seeing fans, especially Black fans, wearing his shirt at the Black History Night game was a wonderful experience.
“There were a lot of Black pioneers in hockey, and no one knew about it. So even a lot of people who had never been to a hockey game … they went to their first hockey game that night, and that meant a lot.”
Andy Miller
The Irish Heritage Night design by Andy Miller of McKees Rocks was heavily inspired by the immigrant experience.
“I have Irish heritage,” Miller said, “but I’m kind of a Pittsburgh mutt.”
His involvement with the Pittsburgh Gaelic Athletic Association brought him to the Penguins. He wanted to take care and represent Irish culture past just the shamrock.
“I did a lot of research and I reached out to some people for help and ideas,” he said.
The shirt includes a trinity knot integrated into the Penguins logo on its front; The Pittsburgh Penguins’ name translated into Gaeilge by Marie Young, Irish/Gaeilge Program Coordinator at the University of Pittsburgh; and a harp on the shoulders, a national symbol of Ireland.
Miller said that around the time he was chosen to design the jersey, unrest related to immigration enforcement was at the forefront of the news, and the stories coming from areas such as Minneapolis affected his outlook.
“Pittsburghers are all kind of a blend. ‘Heinz 57,’ right? And we all have these really unique cultural heritages. I thought this was a really unique opportunity to … draw attention to the fact that we are all immigrants in some form or another,” he said.
Miller also has a heritage of Penguins fandom; his father’s love of the team goes back decades.
“I think he was a season ticket holder even before Lemieux got here,” he said.
And he got to write a new chapter in that Pittsburgh heritage; — he took his dad on a Zamboni ride during the Irish Heritage Night game.
Alana Lipham
Alana Lipham may not be from Pittsburgh, but she’s had loyalty to the Pens since she started following hockey in her teen yeas in Athens, Ga. The reason?
“I loved alliteration, and penguins are my favorite animal,” Lipham said.
The current Austin, Texas, resident comes to Pittsburgh around 10 times a year to catch her favorite team’s home games. After picking up an old drawing hobby during the pandemic, she started making stickers for the Penguins, and they caught on.
She has worked with the Penguins Foundation for previous charity events, and she was chosen to design the shirt for the Her Hockey game, which spotlighted women’s contribution to the game. Her design included sunflowers, a frequent historical symbol of women’s rights and suffrage; integrating a laurel wreath into the logo, as they are an ancient Greek symbol of triumph in both sports and the arts; a nod to the Pittsburgh Pennies, the first women’s hockey team in the city; and a very special message stitched into the collar.
“I was the one who came up with ‘Every Woman, Every Shift.’ Just basically trying to communicate to everyone that no matter what a woman is doing in hockey — whether she’s playing or coaching or a fan or she is working in it somehow — she is a part of every single time someone is on the ice,” Lipham said.
Emma Schlichtkrull
The final community game of the year was Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Night, and Emma Schlichtkrull created a design full of luck and significance. The Zelienople resident and her twin sister were adopted from China, and she brought a lot of Chinese culture to her design.
“This year is the Year of the Horse, which was also the year I was born,” Schlichtkrull said.
The young designer grew up in the Pittsburgh area and has been a Penguins fan for several years.
“I love going and watching the games. … Everyone in the organization is so friendly and nice, and I just being around everybody,” she said.
In her design, she used colors to symbolize traits that she hoped her shirt could embody for the team. Red for luck and happiness, black for stability, power and wisdom, and gold for wealth and good fortune.
“And black and gold are also the Pittsburgh Penguins colors, so I thought that would be really nice to incorporate,” she said.
Fortunately, the Penguins won the April 5 game against the Florida Panthers.
“I have a lot of things on there that symbolize luck, so I like to think that helped,” Schlichtkrull said.