Through the silence, Laurie Shapiro still hears the message.

Shapiro, who lives with a genetic condition causing her to progressively go deaf, often listens to her inner world.

“I don’t always hear the outside world,” said Shapiro, a Carnegie Mellon University graduate who lives in Los Angeles. “But I hear an inner world. My inner voices are louder than my outer voices.”

Shapiro has found a way to express herself through artwork. Her most recent creation for Laurie Shapiro Art is “We Are All Connected To Each Other Through Nature.” It’s being displayed at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s 64th annual Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival.

This is the final weekend to view it. The festival closes on Sunday.

Courtesy of Laurie Shapiro Artist Laurie Shapiro, a Carnegie Mellon University graduate, incorpoated lighting into this piece “We Are All Connected To Each Other Through Nature" for the 64th annual Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival.  

The piece is located in The Backyard, an outdoor area at the corner of Eighth and Penn avenues. This space has been expanded and features new patio furniture and landscaping that includes an eco-grass surface and public art displays.

An installation artist, Shapiro used water-based paints to create images on vinyl in a psychedelic pattern which were draped over a metal truss. Handmade light fixtures dangle from inside, illuminating the large structure at night.

She said the images spoke to her as she installed the piece on June 1 with assistance from Flyspace Productions, an event management, event production, and art services company based on the North Side.

“I often lose myself in nature,” Shapiro said. “We all have different ways we see the world. I want to make an impact with my art.”

Shapiro’s work is supported by the Dyer Arts Center and Advancement for Deaf Culture at Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf in New York.

She got connected to the center’s director, Fran Flaherty, of Hampton, a deaf artist, who has the same condition — otosclerosis — as Shapiro. Flaherty is also a former teacher of Shapiro’s at Carnegie Mellon and founder of CMU’s digital print studio.

Shapiro’s work is demonstrating an “interconnectedness with her deafness,” Flaherty said. Shapiro weaves her Judaism through her pieces because doing so furthers a spiritual connection, she said.

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“We Are All Connected To Each Other Through Nature” is one of several pieces under the festival’s “Anthropology of Motherhood,” an ongoing curation of artwork and design that engages in the complex visual, material, emotional, corporate and lived experiences of motherhood, care-giving, parenting, nurturing and maternal labor.

Flaherty co-curated “Anthropology of Motherhood,” with Amy Bowman-McElhone, of Mt. Lebanon. The exhibit is located at 819 Penn Ave. The art that is part of this exhibition offers perspectives in which disability shapes the experience of caregiving, parenting, and motherhood.

There is so much energy in all of this work said Bowman-McElhone, program director, assistant professor of art at Carlow University in Oakland.

“Art is symbolic and a way people make sense of a shared experience to be valued,” she said. “At times in our lives we are a caregiver or we are being cared for.”

Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Artist Laurie Shapiro poses for a photo while working on installing her creation called “We Are All Connected To Each Other Through Nature" on June 1. The work is being displayed at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s 64th annual Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival in Downtown’s Cultural District through June 11.  

People have connected with Shapiro’s piece, Flaherty said. Some people “hear in color,” she said.

“It’s about understanding the perspective,” Flaherty said. “It’s about compassion and thinking about being in that person’s situation. People love to sit under Laurie’s work and just absorb it. Most people will experience some form of deafness in their lives and we all use some form of sign language, so we hope this installation blasts through the stereotypes.”

Laurie Shapiro was born in Long Island, N.Y. in 1990 and received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2012. Shapiro also studied abroad at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey in 2011.

Her immersive installations have been commissioned by various institutions, such as the San Diego Museum of Art, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, Otherworld, Walter Studios, and Coffee World.

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