Our Many Faces, One Collective series continues, this month highlighting Charlie Connell, written by Marlene Paul
The “Many Faces” that make up ART 180 represent different eras across our lifespan. But there are a few faces who’ve been around all 26 years—including Charlie Connell, whose staying power is second only to mine.
Charlie has checked nearly every box as a volunteer, from leading our first mural project, to leading the board, to leading a fundraising campaign. Not many people have that scope of skills, much less the willingness to donate them over the course of a couple decades. But not many people are like Charlie.
He sat at the fabled dining room table where we first gathered in 1998 with an idea to connect artists and young people to stoke creativity. That idea appealed to Charlie, who remembers how it felt as a child for his artwork to be noticed and benefitted from a teacher’s special attention, before building a successful career as a creative. He recalls a portrait assignment in third grade when he painted Paul Stanley of Kiss. The teacher pulled him and another boy aside to acknowledge their talent and invite them back for further instruction.
Art followed Charlie from military bases where his Marine father was stationed to Mechanicsville where his dad retired when Charlie was in middle school. Like a lot of young people in ART 180, Charlie was more interested in art class than other subjects, and his grades reflected it. Graduation approached and he hadn’t applied to any colleges. When a friend enrolled at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and needed a roommate, he convinced Charlie to follow.
Classes at the Institute covered not only on art techniques but on getting a job. Since this was the ‘80s, computers were new, Macs weren’t out yet, and everything was done on a PC. “If you wanted to make a square on your layout, you had to plug in the XY coordinates of each of the corners and say connect it with codes,” Charlie describes. “It’s truly, truly crazy to look back on.”
Charlie’s professional path unfolded along with advances in technology, as new software allowed for more flexibility that sparked his interest.
“We moved from being at paste up tables to sitting in front of machines. Now you could actually take type images, illustrations, shapes, whatever, and put it all into the layout yourself. And that’s when I was like, boom! This is what I want to do.”
He got hired as a catalog photographer by Carter Printing and freelanced on the side, cofounding a business with his father to learn basics like bookkeeping. He started his design agency Briarpatch with a friend he met on the soccer field in middle school, Brad Adams (who has since passed).
Charlie left Carter Printing, and Briarpatch later merged with another agency, rebranding as Punch in 2005. His business has grown alongside our organization. He remembers the first brainstorming session that led to ART 180. “You said, ‘Why don’t you come and hang out us because I can see your life is going nowhere and needs some purpose,’” he jokes.
At the time he was a volunteer with SportsBackers and saw an opportunity for collaboration. “They had a program called Sports Corps and would refurbish athletic equipment and facilities,” he explains. They selected The Salvation Army Boys & Girls Club and asked Charlie to paint a mural on an interior wall. He proposed it as a chance to enlist volunteers to work with club members to create the mural, putting our vision into practice. That Saturday event on July 25, 1998, marked our debut as ART 180 (and SABGC remained our partner for 20+ years).
Charlie sketched out a rough design centered around healthy lifestyles, and youth at the club filled in the blanks to make it their own. He’d only painted one other mural and never worked with a group, much less one whose membership changed throughout the day.
“I was a little nervous because it was a big wall and it wasn’t going anywhere, so whatever went up was staying. I remember the kids would come in and it was great to work with them and kind of guide them.”
“I’ll never forget there was one young man who was probably 8 or 9. He came in dragging his parents and said, ‘Look what I did’ and that’s when it clicked for me. This whole idea of expressing yourself and being heard through what you’re creating, I was like, ‘Okay, I get it.’ This thing that we were sitting around the table talking about and saying ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if’… It was a real thing.”
Once we had a name, we needed a logo. Artist Anne Chamblin had carved potatoes and printed a batch of ART 180 T-shirts, and one of those stamps emerged as the logo.
“I took the potato print and digitized it and we made a whole identity package,” Charlie remembers. Originally we thought the logo should be computer generated, but the hand-carved print suited us. “Just the fact that it’s very organic, kind of the way ART 180 started, very organically, it matched the vision of what you and Kathleen wanted to do.”
Charlie continued donating his design services, including our first website—which was also his first website. Over the years he stayed connected as a designer and donor, participating in events and joining the communications committee. For 15 years his company Punch produced an ART 180 desk calendar that we sold and sent to donors.
In 2010 he joined the board, becoming president in 2014. A lot of big shifts occurred during his board tenure, including buying our building in Jackson Ward and establishing Performing Statistics as a pilot program to reform juvenile justice.
Humble about his contributions, Charlie explains, “I love thinking about community building and having a positive impact. Our whole company is committed to that.”
Having been at the table from the beginning, Charlie’s proud to see how ART 180 has grown. “Once you had your own space, to me that that made it real. And it gave the kids a place where they could just come and hang out. A place where they could be safe and just create stuff there. And that was awesome.”
Much has happened in the 26 years since ART 180 formed. For Charlie that includes meeting and marrying his wife Renée (also a designer), raising two children who are now in college, and buying a commercial building on Broad Street.
From early days working out of a Church Hill basement, to running a full-service agency with his wife and nine employees, to building out a beautiful office space in the heart of the city, Charlie’s still the same generous, self-deprecating, Golden Retriever loving, vintage Land Rover driving soccer fan ready to lend a hand. Whether it’s leading our first art project in 1998 or raising funds from fellow past presidents for our 25th anniversary in 2023, he’s always been there. And always ready to say yes.
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