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Saturday, March 15, 2003

By Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Posters popping up in windows all around town are part of a grassroots effort to make a statement dubbed "PEACEburgh. " The "peace bird" poster, a composite work by artists Steve Hankin of Point Breeze and Cindy Snodgrass of Sewickley, is the colorful ammunition in what's being called the "House-to-House Campaign Against the War" with Iraq.

	Fort Pitt Elementary School fifth-grader Tyriq McClelland paints one side of a peace bird for artist-in-residence Cindy Snodgrass. One of the birds painted by students in the project is featured in a poster distributed by Pittsburghers for Peace. (Martha Rial, Post-Gazette photos) If you want to help distribute the poster or want more information, e-mail contact@peaceburgh.org.

Hankin painted the backdrop, which includes two peace signs and the words "Pittsburghers for Peace" and "No War!" The bird came out of Snodgrass' Dovetail/Dovetale project, which she started in Portsmouth, Ohio, and has taken to other places, including Freedom Area Middle School in Beaver County and Fort Pitt Elementary in Garfield.

The project, in which students create birds for larger installations, is meant to teach and represent environmental balance. But when her friend Terri Taylor asked for a bird for a peace poster, Snodgrass was all for it. "If we don't wage peace, you get war."

Students don't sign their birds, but Snodgrass knows the bird on the poster was made by a student from Freedom. His or her artwork is getting wide exposure.

A first printing of 1,000 posters were gone two days after they were finished on March 4, and a second printing of 3,000 are going fast, said Forest Hills' Elizabeth Donohoe, who is helping to distribute them to businesses, churches and groups. "We're struggling to keep up with the demand for them."

Taylor, a freelance documentary producer and reporter, says the whole thing started three weeks ago when she ran into her neighbor Hankin while they walked their dogs in Frick Park. Usually they wouldn't speak, -- their dogs don't get along -- but on this day they were brought together by mutual frustration over the buildup toward a war they don't want.

A PEACEburgh poster hangs on a fence along Reynolds Street in Point Breeze. Organizers are calling their efforts the "House-to-House Campaign Against the War."

"He said, 'Well, I think I'm going to go home and paint a big sign and hang it off the front of my house.' ... I said, 'Well, paint me one, too.' "

The poster idea was born and quickly became what Donohoe calls a "sort of jumping-off place" for the bigger campaign to stand for peace. The "PEACEburgh" name was coined by Taylor's partner, Bill Schiff, who's printing the poster on donated recycled paper at his Etna printing company. The effort's Web site is www.peaceburgh.org.

They're asking for $5 donations for each 15-by-20-inch poster or $10 for each laminated one, but Taylor says "no one is denied a poster." All the money goes to make more posters, and anything leftover will be given to the nonprofit Thomas Merton Center.

Posters can be found at several locations, including the Merton Center at 5125 Penn Ave. in Garfield, the Rosenberg Institute for Peace & Justice at 801 Union Place Suite 420 on the North Side, and the East End Food Co-op at 7516 Meade St. in Point Breeze.

The loose-knit group now has buttons, too, and may come out with bumper stickers and other items. They may even organize "paint-ins" where citizens against the war can create their own "peace birds" like the one on the poster. "This is something people needed," Taylor says, explaining how stress levels figure into the "spontaneous combustion" behind this movement.

She says people who buy a poster are told, "You may NOT put it on your refrigerator. ... This is for proud public display."