It’s been another great year of art in Pittsburgh. To ring in 2025, I’ve picked my favorite art shows I saw this year—the ones I felt stand out or delivered the most interesting new ideas to the city’s art scene. Here’s to more next year!
Sean P. Morrissey & Loring Taoka – Supernatural (Union Hall)
Morrissey and Taoka’s work together created a show cohesive in its uncanniness. (Pictured above is the sticker pack some lucky guests got). The snack and wine selection at Union Hall is always unmatched, but this show was also a visual feast. I especially love Taoka’s ability to use clashing shades of neon in a way that still feels beautiful and elegant. Morrissey’s more figurative, surreal-inspired depictions of suburbia with Taoka’s abstract paintings combined to make something that paired together as well as a Bar Marco arancini and a glass of Montepulciano.
Emilia Wang – Heaven Potato (ROMANCE)
ROMANCE has really come into its own this year, and its most recent (currently open!) exhibition is my favorite I’ve seen at Margaret Kross’s apartment gallery. Wang’s work has a strong voice and vision, using ancient scroll-painting techniques to create dreamlike images of the past, present and future that overtake the space. Kross also has a small group exhibition inspired by maximalism and clutter in a side gallery. I can’t wait to see what ROMANCE does next.
Paul Peng – Intentions (April April)
April April is the new kid on the block, and Intentions was a fitting start because it felt wide-eyed and anticipatory with pencil drawings mixing abstraction and strange figuration. Peng’s greyscale drawings set an interesting precedent for what the formerly New York gallery will do next, with a taste that doesn’t shy away from the absurd, erotic, and playful. A new show at April April opens on January 4th.
John Gall – Folded and Gathered (Bottom Feeder Books)
Getting to see famed cover designer John Gall’s collage work was one of the greatest visual treats of this year. A show of a literary cover designer’s work blended well with the venue of Bottom Feeder Books, showing how unique of a space it is for both local and out-of-town artists. The combination of technical mastery and whimsy in this show really shone through.
Giovanna Ferrari – Cracks of Continuity (Ketchup City Creative)
This was one of the most packed houses I walked into in 2024—fifteen minutes before the show was supposed to close, there were easily 50 people in the small Sharpsburg storefront that makes up Ketchup City Creative. It’s no surprise, given the quality of Ferrari’s work. Cracks of Continuity showed her commitment to evolving as an artist, and the conversations I had with her demonstrated someone with passion and drive to create new works.
Corey Ochai, Glendon Hyde, Jodie Shields – The Ego Subversion Project (Studio 4)
Though this was a three-artist effort, it gelled together well and showed the best of each artist’s work, Hyde’s quirky ephemera, Shields’ mixture of inventive collage and strong principles of design, and Ochai’s wide range of talents and mastery of color theory. I was lucky enough to get a personal tour from Corey Ochai (work pictured above) and saw his huge imagination come through in the works he presented.
Ron Donoughe, Victor Capone, Ed Charney, Scott Hunter, Rick Landesberg, Duncan MacDiarmid, Mike McSorley, John Ritter, Patrick Ruane, and Stuart Smith – Drawn Together (Ron Donoughe Studios)
Speaking of packed houses…this was another massively attended show, put on by a long standing friend group. I said about it in Petrichor that “So often art (and our world at large) is forced to be current and quickly produced, focused on what’s coolest and hottest and most recent to stay afloat. But then, those hot, fast, current things burn out and disappear, and many artists’ careers have flickered out that same way. Drawn Together celebrates longevity, that a long career with many turns and decades of work (sometimes as an artist, sometimes, in Donoughe’s case, as a gravedigger or a chicken catcher) is, too, worth displaying.”
Rosabel Rosalind – Sexiest Man Alive (Pullproof Studio)
Rosabel Rosalind is a one-of-a-kind artistic voice, capable of equal parts humor and sublimity. Sexiest Man Alive, in which she covered the walls of Pullproof Studio with sketched portraits of Matthew McConaughey is a prime example of that. Rosalind also invited people in the art scene to put ads for “crushes” on the wall, a further callback to the salacious innocence of adolescent crushes.
Azza El Siddique – Echoes to Omega (The Mattress Factory)
This show gets a special shoutout because it was my first byline in Artforum, which would go on my personal “best of” list for the year. But even if that weren’t the case, it’s a complex and immersive work. My list last year included Shohei Katayama’s As Below, So Above in the same space, which was a hard installation to top, but El Siddique did it. Anyone who loves fragrance should see this installation, because it uses smell in an impressive and creative way.
John Burt Sanders – Dark Mode (ZYNKA Gallery)
This was a truly special show that I felt melded different social groups within the art scene and produced some awe-inspiring work. I wrote that: “The show is a sensory delight, but at the same time, there is a sadness to it. We can see, with our own eyes, galaxies we could never reach, but now we know that there are worlds beyond what we can actually experience. That knowing is a lack. When you have access to the right answer to any question through a device in your hand, no wonder so many people feel always wrong. Dark Mode can be meta, it’s a show of beautiful achievements that also works as a meditation on existential emptiness.”
I want to give a thank you you to everyone who helped with Petrichor this year. every contributor who shared their words and their voice with me this year but especially newcomers like Riley Kirk and Pria Dahiya and OG columnists who’ve stuck with me like David Bernabo and Bob Freyer, as well as my intern from Chatham University Danny Mckaveney for all of his assistance and contributions, Grant Catton for, well, everything, but for always being a sounding board for Petrichor-related ideas, Zach Hunley who generously offered to help me keep the calendar going, everyone who bought the anthology and came to the magazine’s birthday party. If you missed it, you can buy it online. Happy new year!
PETRICHOR 
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