CMU Artists Take Flight

How eight School of Art faculty, staff and alumni helped shape the new Pittsburgh International Airport through a shared vision of public art’s role in the world.

School of Art

written by
Phillip Crook

Something rare greeted travelers when the reimagined Pittsburgh International Airport opened its doors in November 2025. Across the concourses, in the restrooms, along the floors, ceilings and walls, art wasn’t an addition — it was infrastructure.

“What we’re trying to do with all of the projects is to create moments,” said Keny Marshall, the airport’s Arts & Culture Manager. “Sometimes those are big, expansive gestures, and sometimes those are little quiet moments as you move through space, using art as a wayfinding tool, but also giving you a sense of place in the region.”

Of the 15 artists commissioned for permanent public artworks, 80% are from within 150 miles of Pittsburgh, and nearly half are faculty, staff and alumni of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Art. Each artist grounded their commission in a shared theme, responding to the prompt of “nature, technology and community.”

Here is how they did it.

Community

Assistant Professor of Art Alisha B. Wormsley began her commission in 2021 by walking the airport in long, quiet intervals. “I would just get my steps in, get a vibe and feel it out,” she said. Wormsley studied daily patterns and sifted through research. “I saw a report on the demographics of people who come through the airport, all the immigrant populations and why they come here. It was fascinating to me.

"Orrery & Butterfly Nebula" artwork by Alisha B. Wormsley in Pittsburgh International Airport.

Her installation, "Orrery & Butterfly Nebula," anchors the international arrivals corridor. Across a monumental glass wall, Wormsley arranged hundreds of Lost and Found objects — sunglasses, toys, water bottles, even a Squishmallow — into the shape of the Butterfly Nebula. Backlit and kinetic, it pulses on a loop. 

“I was thinking about us traveling through space and what we leave behind,” said Wormsley, whose interdisciplinary practice draws in part on cosmology, the study of the nature of the universe. “We’re all stardust, right?”

The concept took shape after she toured the airport’s vast Lost and Found warehouse, a hangar lined with items ranging from designer shoes to taxidermized animals. Over three years, she salvaged roughly 300 objects, building a time capsule of 2020s travel.

Suspended above the corridor is a 70-foot orrery — a chandelier-like model of multiple solar systems — engraved with constellations. Wormsley collaborated with the Pittsburgh Glass Center, Technique in Wilkinsburg, and other local fabricators to create the planet groupings. 

“Each solar system represents the places where immigrants come through in order to come here,” she said. “They’re all lined up like chakra colors, like one full body.”

Concourse B restroom project at Pittsburgh International Airport by Carolina Loyola-Garcia.

Chilean artist and alumna Carolina Loyola-Garcia (MFA 2000) first arrived in Pittsburgh as a CMU exchange student in 1995. For her Concourse B restroom project, she began — like Wormsley — by observing travelers. “I wanted to get a sense of who uses the airport,” she said. “What kind of stories are there? How do they interact?”

Now Professor of Media Arts at Robert Morris University, Loyola-Garcia invited actors, dancers and movement artists into her studio for a weeklong improvisation workshop. She asked them to embody the “characters” she saw during her research: parents juggling children, business travelers with carry-ons, people moving with service animals, ground crew members parking planes. Her photographs of the sessions became silhouettes for glass panels spanning 2,000 square feet of restroom walls. Inside each figure, Loyola-Garcia layered digitally manipulated fractals and mandalas sourced from her photographs of local flora at Highland Park, Phipps Conservatory, and throughout her neighborhood.

“Art makes your life in any public space better. It brings a sense that somebody cares, more than just functionally,” Loyola-Garcia said. “The airport’s approach to art is another way of caring for the local community, showcasing not just the work of creative people, but who we are as a region.”

Luke Doyle's handmade tiles (left) and Chris Craychee's 360-degree photo panels (right) in the Pittsburgh International Airport.

Community involvement was just as crucial for another bathroom installation on the new departures level, where alumnus Chris Craychee’s (BFA 1996) 360-degree photo panels are accompanied by 28,000 custom tiles.

Working for Pittsburgh-based Limelight Tile and Ceramics at the time, School of Art staff member Luke Doyle was heavily involved with producing the tiles, which are glazed in a luminous finish that subtly shifts between blues, greens and browns. Select tiles were CNC-milled with a “half-hexagon” pattern that makes the surface appear like a constellation of smaller pieces once grouted.

“When you’re making the same thing over and over again, you find joy in that everyday grind and the little victories — like solving a glaze flaw that happens when you mass-produce something," Doyle said. "I use a lot of that mindset in my practice today, which is invaluable.”

Nature

Travelers may already know "The Sky Beneath Our Feet," the sweeping terrazzo mural by Clayton Merrell, Dorothy L. Stubnitz Professor of Art. What’s new is how it has evolved. Installed in 2015, its 69,000 square feet depict a swirling blue sky embedded with iconic Pittsburgh neighborhood silhouettes and a subtle “Easter eggs” of flying motifs. For the new terminal, Merrell expanded the work by 13,000 square feet, adding a horizon line that marks the threshold between the old and new buildings. The total installation now spans roughly two acres.

Details from Clayton Merrell's expanded "The Sky Beneath Our Feet" terrazzo mural, now spanning roughly two acres.

In the departures terminal, Merrell introduces a second work: life-size inlaid aluminum leaves representing 12 Western Pennsylvania tree species — red maple, white oak, sassafras, dogwood and others — placed beneath each of the 12 tree-like column clusters. He collaborated with architects and fabricators throughout the design process: 

“The roof line is based on the hills of the region,” he said, describing architect Luis Vidal’s concept, adapted by Gensler into an undulating ceiling of aluminum panels. “Unlike most airports, when you’re inside it feels like you’re outside.”

Professor of Art Kim Beck also looked to the surrounding landscape — specifically, the Montour Trail near the airport. She collected stones during her hikes to create cyanotypes, the 19th century photographic printing process that form the basis of her Concourse C restroom installations. Beck enlarged the cyanotypes and printed them on glass panels in layered compositions of silhouettes and shadows. For Beck, stones are a link to time and “the kind of unfathomable age that they represent,” she said. “I think that there’s something about time that I’m trying to capture in these pieces.”

Concourse C restroom installations by Kim Beck.

To produce the cyanotypes, Beck brushed iron salts onto absorbent paper and placed the stones on top, letting the sun expose them over long and short durations. “I was very open to chance and accidents,” she said. “The silhouettes the stones would leave, and the different kinds of shadows they would make.” She sometimes rubbed black or blue crayon onto the prints to enhance their texture, resulting in quiet, atmospheric works that counter the hurried pace of air travel.

Technology

In the baggage claim hall, Adjunct Professor John Peña revives the split-flap display, a once-ubiquitous airport technology. His installation, "What Does Luggage Think About?," features four sculptural suitcases topped with oversized “thought bubbles,” each made from custom split-flap modules controlled by Raspberry Pi systems.

"What Does Luggage Think About?" installation by John Peña at Pittsburgh International Airport.

“The job of an artist is to make people go, ‘that thing is awesome,’ so that the first thing they think about isn’t how it’s made,” Peña said. “People think, ‘This is so cool. It looks so effortless.’ And I’m like, yeah, five years of effort.”

Each bubble cycles through its own internal monologue, as if the suitcase itself is thinking out loud. One “sleeps,” producing mostly Zzzzs. Another offers deep philosophical reflections on the nature of existence. Peña gathered more than 1,200 public submissions through prompt cards around the airport while developing the project in 2021. The most common themes mused on overpacking, exhaustion and long journeys, and “about a third were unusable due to profanity,” he said.

Technology surfaced in unexpected ways for Sharmistha Ray, Estella Loomis McCandless Assistant Professor of Art, who created the Concourse A restroom installations. 

“I work with abstraction, so I came up with three interconnected ideas: the terrestrial, the solar and the cosmic realms — three areas where I would say humanity derives forms of energy from,” Ray said.

Concourse A installations by Sharmistha Ray.

The compositions began as digital collages drawn from their abstract paintings and developed into three distinct color palettes: green for terrestrial, yellow for solar, blue for cosmic. Ray paired two realms at a time across the restrooms, ensuring the colors vary in ways that move beyond gender associations. 

Yet even after the project completed, Ray’s digital exploration continued, expanding the collaged paintings into an immersive three-channel animation, paired with a new sound piece by Grammy-winning musician Arooj Aftab. That work is currently on view in “Emergent Realities,” an exhibition presented by Pittsburgh Cultural Trust at Wood Street Galleries in downtown Pittsburgh through July 5, 2026.

Collaboration

“The theme of ‘nature, technology and community’ is a nice schematic,” Marshall, the arts and culture manager, said, “but it is also so open-ended that it really does not constrict anyone in their creative practice.”

Marshall and longtime public art consultant Renee Piechocki worked closely with architects, engineers, fabricators and construction teams from the earliest planning stages. That collaborative structure allowed School of Art faculty, staff and alumni to bring their practices into spaces that were still evolving, in some cases while construction continued around them.

Across the terminal, each artwork offers a moment of reflection, recognition or curiosity, underscoring how public spaces are shaped by the people who move through them and by the creative communities who help build them.

“Art can introduce those moments of reprieve or departure, pun intended, from the everyday realities of traveling,” Ray said. “I think it completely transforms a traveler’s experience.”

◂ CFA Magazine | Spring 2026