Painting an inclusive enclosure: Post-racial public art as compensatory cultural strategy in Pittsburgh

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the erasure and eventual replacement of a public mural in the U.S. city of Pittsburgh as an act of gentrification-induced cultural displacement precipitated by tech-led urban development. Due to its role in the mural’s removal, the tech company Duolingo was entangled with public controversy over the erasure in relation to contemporaneous impacts of gentrification in the neighborhood. In response to the controversy, Duolingo embarked on a range of compensatory cultural initiatives, including the commissioning of a replacement artwork. I argue that in replacing the mural, Duolingo employed a representational strategy of “inclusive enclosure” in an effort to compensate for the company’s association with broader effects of gentrification in the neighborhood while simultaneously negotiating tensions around its institutional identity as a “multicultural” language-learning service and “progressive” tech firm. I conceptualize inclusive enclosure as a convergence of aesthetic and discursive appropriations of diversity that seeks to mitigate anxieties over the uneven effects of urban development by eliding their roots in racial, economic, and other forms of inequality. In particular, I assess this case of public art transformation as a visual-representational corollary to post-racial discourses that obfuscate racial inequalities through a superficial celebration of difference.