Symposium: Looking Glass App by Adrian Jones
Thursday, May 15, 2025 – Sunday, May 18 2025
All Weekend
Kelly Strayhorn Theater | 5941 Penn Ave.
FREE
What if a camera could unearth the history buried within a neighborhood? From that image grew Looking Glass, an app-based archive of Black life in Pittsburgh, equipped with an augmented reality lens created by artist Adrian Jones. Use the app’s map feature to discover markers where people, events, and institutions are remembered. At each location, you can examine artifacts like photos and videos and activate site-specific AR sculptures.
When we connect to the past, we find power, healing, and guidance for the path ahead. Looking Glass facilitates meaningful connections to history and, in turn, helps us imagine and pursue a more just future.
This event is part of Owning Our Future: A Symposium on BIPOC Institutional Ownership.
AND DON’T MISS…
Symposium: Neighborhood Tour
Thursday, May 15, 2025
7:30pm – 10:00pm
Kelly Strayhorn Theater | 5941 Penn Ave.
Pay What Moves You: $15 – $30
Symposium Film Screening: East of Liberty
Thursday, May 15, 2025
7:30pm – 10:00pm
Kelly Strayhorn Theater | 5941 Penn Ave.
Pay What Moves You: $15 – $30
- ABOUT THE ARTIST
- About Owning Our Future Symposium
Adrian Jones is an artist, creative technologist, and archivist whose practice is shaped by a commitment to those living in society’s margins. Utilizing his formal background in electrical engineering and software development, Adrian’s creative work explores the power of speculative imagination and intergenerational storytelling within digital spaces.
In 2021, Adrian began developing Looking Glass, an app-based archive of Black life in Pittsburgh, which uses augmented reality to connect the present to both the past and imagined futures.
KST is leading a groundbreaking national symposium that aims to reshape the future of accessible, equitable cultural spaces owned and anchored by BIPOC communities.
Guided by our vision “Owning Our Future. Thriving Where We Live.,” this three-day gathering in May 2025 serves as a platform to catalyze a critical national dialogue and chart a path forward.
Collaborating with an advisory committee of national and local colleagues, KST curates a cross-industry program that features discussions, performances, and celebrations with leaders in art, activism, urban planning, philanthropy, and government. Together we imagine new financial, operational, and physical structures for BIPOC-owned arts spaces, addressing the structural inequities that the pandemic laid bare.
The symposium spotlights organizations employing new strategies to safeguard culture in their communities. It engages forward-thinking stakeholders invested in emergent models. Look forward to thought-provoking panel sessions, inspiring keynote addresses, and dynamic performances by Pittsburgh and national artists.