Pittsburgh’s identity is deeply rooted in its history as the Steel City and “The City That Built America,” at one time producing more than half of the nation’s steel and 80% of its glass. Though these heavy industries have faded, their remnants are visible all over, in old buildings and architecture that could have easily been lost to time.
Instead, local artists and makers have repurposed the region’s industrial infrastructure into galleries, studios and creative hubs. Adapting spaces, including a former soda bottling company, an ice house and a 2-acre brewery site, Pittsburgh’s arts organizations are honoring the region’s heritage while shaping its modern legacy.
Brew House Arts
711 S. 21st St., South Side
Among the oldest art studio conversions in the city, Brew House Arts was once the landmark Duquesne Brewery. When the brewery shut down in 1972, local artists began living in its vacant brick buildings. In 1991, a nearly decade-long battle for ownership ensued, until the artists established the nonprofit Brew House Association and purchased a building on the site.
Today, under the banner Brew House Arts, the space is a neighborhood arts center in its fifth decade hosting public performances and exhibitions. The building houses 76 mixed-income apartments across seven floors and a rentable gallery and artist studios (where there are still vats from the old brewery in the ceiling). A year-long Distillery Residency, now recruiting its 17th cohort, showcases seven artists’ work and fosters community.
The 2026 Distillery exhibition “I Remember It Better” (on view through June 20) engages with themes central to Brew House itself — featuring art exploring memory, history and found materials.
Artist Liv Cocozza, who’s recently in remission from lymphoma, used medical supplies including tape, glue, latex and even a device once implanted in their body, to create sculptures and a video installation.
Cocozza said The Brew House allowed them to do the “really heavy work” of “emotionally processing what it’s like to be in remission and to still have disabilities, and marry it with my art-making practice.
“This feels like a reintroduction to what feels good about being alive,” Cocozza said.
Pittsburgh-born artist Isabella Schubert-Jones created “Swan Lake,” a moving menagerie of animals pieced together from “treasures” scavenged mostly on the South Side.
“(This) idea of adaptive reuse is such an inherent methodology within artists’ work,” said Brew House Arts executive director Natalie Sweet. “The creativity to take a space that some might see as wasting away, not good for anything — and to be able to breathe new life in it, to be able to provide affordable space that artists need to grow. I think that is Brew House’s foundation, and that’s the same thing we try to provide today.”
Ice House Studios
100 43rd St., Lawrenceville
Ice House Studios in Lawrenceville is named for a bygone industry. The 44,000-square-foot site was originally Consolidated Ice Company’s Factory No. 2, the city’s largest ice manufacturing plant before the advent of electric refrigeration.
After it closed in 1951, the ice house fell into disrepair and became an eyesore before Pittsburgh’s Artists and Cities foundation purchased it in 1999.
Now managed by Lawrenceville Together (the newly formed coalition of Lawrenceville Corporation and Lawrenceville United), Ice House Studios has been repurposed into 32 reduced-rate studios. Tenants run the gamut from makers like Chez Lapin, offering candles and skincare products with a “house rabbit” in store, to FashionAFRICANA, showcasing African heritage and Black history, to tattoos and ephemera at the Curiosity Shop.
Associated Artists of Pittsburgh — the country’s oldest, continuously exhibiting visual arts organization — runs a gallery where artists hang their work on brick walls and from large steel rafters.
For a dose of old and new world, Lindsay Schmittle of Gingerly Press, who does letterpress printing using antique proof presses, has set up shop near Rain Stick Dreams, a manufacturer of rain stick instruments used in sound baths.
“Lawrenceville has changed dramatically, and artists are a lot of what got (the neighborhood) to come back,” said Kara Kimicata, Lawrenceville Together’s community outreach manager. “That’s part of our mission, to keep artists here. It’s been a way to remind people that Lawrenceville isn’t just about (one thing). We love our restaurants, but we have all these different galleries, boutiques and amazing artists here, too.”
412 Art Studios (STORExpress)
Multiple locations, including Etna, Bridgeville, McKees Rocks and Pittsburgh’s South Side
412 Art Studios is a tale of multiple conversions. Self-storage company STORExpress first repurposed old industrial buildings into storage units. Then, at the behest of artists, it converted those units into affordable art studios.
“Everything started because we do self-storage, and we love the ‘hustlepreneur’ of it all,” said marketing manager Jessi West. “We had customers asking, ‘Can I do art here?’ We had the space, so we just started growing it with the features artists said they needed.”
412 Art Studios’ first location in Etna was formerly offices for steel rolling mill manufacturer Tippins Inc. Maintaining original elements, including exposed steel beams and ductwork, STORExpress refurbished the site and reopened it for month-to-month artist workspace rentals in 2014. Another 412 Art Studio location in Bridgeville occupies the former offices of Schneider Electric.
Studios, including band rehearsal spaces, offer enhanced ventilation, natural light, paint sinks and other “human” amenities, said West, like clean restrooms and community areas. Renters include painters, woodworkers, photographers and other creatives who have donated their artwork to decorate the building’s halls.
Artist Tom Mosser — whose “Really Big Faces” portraits line the walls — was among the Etna studio’s first tenants, setting up shop in 2014.
“I pulled up, went inside, and it was this Shangri-La, converted studios and brightly colored walls and skylights,” Mosser said, as his golden retriever, Franco, followed him around his studio. “It was life-changing.”
“There’s a really creative vibe,” he added. “You hear musicians practicing at night … guitar riffs, rappers. So this old, dilapidated building is now just beautiful.”
Industrial Arts Workshop
5434 Herbert Way, Hazelwood
Industrial Arts Workshop, an arts organization that teaches youth welding and creative arts, is technically in its sixth year. Groups of local students, primarily aged 14 to 18, gather in a 5,200-square-foot Hazelwood warehouse — formerly a soda bottling company, then a car restoration business — to practice welding and make art in 11 booths.
But if you ask IAW founder and artist Tim Kaulen, the project began more than 30 years ago.
Kaulen was part of the early Brew House artist collective and “as a young artist, was visiting vacant industrial sites,” he said. “The curiosity was what happened in those spaces. The question of why can’t they be repurposed in new ways led me to try to activate them in a do-it-yourself kind of way … so it took years to get here in a very circuitous way.”
Kaulen left Brew House in 2000 and ultimately shifted his efforts toward teaching. From 2014 to 2019, he and other artists led the Mobile Sculpture Workshop, a youth-focused program, at the Carrie Blast Furnaces. The program evolved into IAW and found a permanent space through the Hazelwood Initiative in 2019.
“I’m always looking at new ways to reach the kids,” Kaulen said. “How do you get to the youth? Because that’s where things turn.”
On a Saturday at the warehouse, students showcased their art at the close of one of IAW’s spring programs. Pieces ranged from experimental and freeform — IAW blends creativity with industry skill-building — from a rebar silhouette of a deer, to a flower and a “monster coupon,” an extra-heavy pipe and welding skill test.
Adam Einloch, 18, came to IAW as a Pittsburgh CAPA sophomore and is now a welding instructor with multiple certifications.
“I’ve always been an inherently creative person. I just didn’t know what that outlet was,” he said. “And the second I came down here, I fell in love with every aspect of it. My dad says all it took was metal and fire.”
Radiant Hall Studios
Multiple locations, including Lawrenceville, Homewood, McKees Rocks, Downtown
Radiant Hall has been a fixture since 2012. The artist-led organization began when Pittsburgh artist Ryan Lammie — who’d recently moved back to his hometown from Brooklyn, N.Y. — leased a studio in a former 1930s Polish social club, named Radiant Hall, in Lawrenceville.
Located less than a quarter-mile from Ice House Studios, “something seems to have alchemized in Lawrenceville,” the site of several art studio conversions, Radiant Hall’s executive director Marina Balko said.
Radiant Hall has since expanded with subsidized studio locations in Homewood in 2016, converting a former 150,000-square-foot Westinghouse Electric factory, and McKees Rocks in 2019, moving into the former Linder’s Fine Furnishings and Rugs complex. In concert with other arts organizations, it emphasizes community and collaboration, hosting group critique sessions, artist mixers and pop-up markets.
This spring, Radiant Hall will debut a Downtown location, occupying the first and second floors of the former Hefren-Tillotson Building at 308 Seventh Ave. The building will house 21 new studio spaces, a storefront for artists’ work, and a project space curated by artists, encouraging them to “experiment and try something out that they might not be able to do in a traditional gallery,” Balko said.
With the expansion, Radiant Hall hopes to capitalize on “this wave of resurgence of investment and energy going into the Downtown area,” Balko said, and increase access to its studios through public transportation.
Radiant Hall is preparing for a public launch and exhibition on May 29 as part of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s monthly Gallery Crawl.
“This idea that artists being in community has its benefits beyond just the financial implications of sharing space together is what (Radiant Hall) has really grown out of,” Balko said.