Sculptural art
Site-specific and integrated art
Live performance, including puppetry, theater, dance, music, and spoken word poetry, etc.
Pittsburgh Creative Corps Artist Directory
Petra Floyd
Petra Floyd LLC
Primary Discipline
Artistic Practice
Audio / sound recording
Assemblage, including found objects, multimedia
Site-specificity determines materials used
Electric Boogie Too, 2017-ongoing. A two-hour workshop in which participants think through their relationships with social hierarchies and systems of power while learning how to do the Electric Slide.
Kalimbrrd: A Sonic Tour, 2024-ongoing. Participatory sound sculpture where visitors are invited to play amplified toys and makeshift instruments.
Soundscape for “Artists Garden at Vetheuil” at Phipp’s Botanical Conservatory, 2022. Sound, transducers, speakers.
Seeds and Sounds, 2023-ongoing. Artist-grown hardshell gourds crafted into instruments. First crop harvested with Garfield Community Farm and Black Unicorn Library.
Women’s Mobile Museum, 2018. Design for a modular, stripped-down exhibition infrastructure that re-ordered the opaqueness and social hierarchies of museums.
About the Artist
My name is Petra Floyd. I am a Black, queer, first-generation Liberian-American post-disciplinary artist and designer raised by working-class immigrants in Philadelphia. I live and work in Pittsburgh, and wherever I’m invited to make something fantastic happen.
Post-disciplinary means I do whatever I want, however I want, ideally cracking myself up during my process. I value improvised, devised, and collaborative modes of making and thinking. My practice is social and playful; I link up with other instigator-activators to craft moments and performances using close-at-hand materials. I dream up group movement and gameplay spaces for self-reflection and expansion. I make sounds, videos, drawings, sculptures, installations, and performances happen, with feeling.
Photo by Audrey Medrano
Web
Accreditations, Certifications, and/or Awards
- Greater Pittsburgh Art Council’s Black Arts Action Committee, 2023-2025;
- Protohaven’s BLK Art Residency, 2022-2023;
- The Heinz Endowments’ Creative Development Award, 2022;
- The Pittsburgh Foundation’s Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh Award, 2022;
- MFA in Art, Carnegie Mellon University School of Art, 2022;
- Kelly Strayhorn Theater’s Freshworks Residency, 2021;
- Building Hero Training Program, 2019
- Second State Press Fob Holder Program, 2016;
- Fabric Workshop and Museum Apprentice Training Program, 2014
Provides Fabrication Services to Other Artists
Yes
Teaching Artist
Yes, all ages
Joined the Directory
April 2024
Related
PROJECT
Pittsburgh Creative Corps
Designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pittsburgh Creative Corps initiative engages artists and creative workers to activate the public realm while providing economic opportunity.
“As an artist in the public realm, I use an imaginative approach that integrates material study, historical accounts, contemporary relationships, and unexpected connections to other space/times.”
Petra Floyd
Contact the Artist
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Related
PROJECT
Pittsburgh Creative Corps
Designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pittsburgh Creative Corps initiative engages artists and creative workers to activate the public realm while providing economic opportunity.
