Public art, public performances, public joy

Please Play Me Pianos connects creators, musicians, and those who hear and see their work, in an inspiring collaboration

“Ephemeral art is really kind of a special thing on its own – just knowing that something is meant to be experienced in a certain place in time, and it becomes a moment. It’s not going to be around forever.” – Marc Evan

By Chris Worthy

A piano is built to be played. Sometimes a virtuoso takes the keyboard soaring. Other times a child bangs out scales over and over again. Both are forms of beauty and both give meaning to the piece of working art made from wood and steel. Eventually – maybe – that well-loved instrument is no longer needed, but it just might find new life, new art, and a second chapter of joy.

Please Play Me Pianos is rippling the arts across the Upstate of South Carolina as one of a growing number of organizations that offer moments of serendipity in the form of public pianos. Play, listen, enjoy, share, delight.

Anne McLaughlin’s vision for the South Carolina nonprofit grew out of her love of music and some lockdown time to cultivate it.

“I could always play piano, just classical reading of notes. I was sort of a robot, and I don’t really have a good ear. I don’t even care if a piano is out of tune, but I could never sit down and just play unless I had music,” she said.

A reset during a dark time

Learning – and then teaching – came through YouTube videos during the pandemic.

“I said I’m going to finally learn Boogie Woogie, because it just makes me really happy,” McLaughlin said. “It just made me so happy that I jumped in very prematurely, and I contacted the senior center.”

At the time, McLaughlin lived in Virginia and she reached out with an offer to share her newfound piano joy by teaching virtual classes to senior adults who were also feeling the pandemic isolation.

“I really had no right doing that, but at least I knew a little more than they did,” she said. “I literally did it every day, and it took me a long time to learn to play just straight from my head to the keyboard. Sometime after that we stumbled upon a public piano in, I think it was Staunton, Virginia, and it was the first time I was able to sit down and play one.”

The piano wasn’t painted and it needed repairs, but that didn’t dampen McLaughlin’s joy at being able to play it. It also planted a seed that was fully realized when she moved to South Carolina. She decided even before she knew where she would live that if her new home did not have public pianos, she would start the program. There would be a couple, available to play by anyone who walked by. That would be it – just a couple. Soon, McLaughlin learned that public piano programs are worldwide.

“There are different models, but I imitated one in Atlanta that’s very big, and it’s run by just a woman and her husband. They were like, ‘Go ahead, start a nonprofit, it’s easy.’ Their goal is 88 pianos, and I think they’re up to probably 36. They’ve been helpful, and she gave me permission to model my website after hers, which I did, because – again – I just jumped in,” she said.

Artists came on board and offered to paint, and McLaughlin said she figured it out as she went. The result? Music and art intertwined.

A family affair

Marc Evan is one of those artists. He moved to South Carolina during the pandemic, but he is from New York and still spends part of the year there.

“I’m a multidisciplinary artist, so my background is in illustration and fine arts, and I have been working as a muralist and an illustrator for decades. I had created a lot of painted pianos in New York, and I had done a lot of work with an organization called Sing for Hope, which I think is the largest painted piano organization. They just celebrated their 25th anniversary,” he said.

Evan said Sing for Hope Pianos flood the streets of New York City with painted pianos that are available for public playing for a limited time and are then donated to organizations like schools and hospitals. When he saw a painted piano at Swamp Rabbit Café and Grocery in Greenville, he reached out to McLaughlin.

“Working with Anne and her husband, Dan, was incredible, because they are so passionate about this project and so committed to bringing art and music into public places in Greenville,” Evan said. “Once we really clicked and decided this was going to happen, they show up at my house with a piano and they roll it off the back of a truck, and it was such a fun experience.”

Evan painted a piano that now resides at BridgeWay Station in Mauldin, known locally as “the castle” because of its Italian-inspired architecture.

“I knew a little bit about the venue, and that they wanted something that kind of was fitting with their vibe there, which is very Italian themed,” Evan said. “I didn’t want to just paint something that was overtly Italian. I used a painting process that’s rooted in Renaissance painting techniques that go back to Italian masters and Dutch masters. It was a lot of layering and glazing. My Instagram has a lot of videos of the process, but I would go through the different surfaces of the piano, painting details and painting all the light, building up form by painting with just white on a colored background, and then glazing the entire thing with a full color. Then starting over with another round of painting all the light back in, and then glazing the whole thing with another full color. You do this repetitively, and it’s almost like a printing process where the colors overlay and start to intermix and create these transparent, spectacled, glowing forms.”

The process is Italian, but the theme is all local, including the flora, fauna, and fungi of the region.

“It was celebrating the biodiversity of our area – what you might find if you went for a walk on the Swamp Rabbit Trail – different local pollinators, weeds, flowers, fruits, snakes, any kind of animal kingdom that you could think of is represented on there, and it was really fun,” Evan said. “There’s, I believe, over 50 different species represented, and because I was working on it from home out of my garage, I got my kids heavily involved in the process.”

During the design phase, Evan sketched with charcoal on the primed piano. He encouraged his children to join in.

“I thought it would end there with the charcoal stage, the stage that’s easily erasable, that can be easily covered up, but they did so well, and then they started taking ownership of it, and really wanted to do the next step, and the next step, so I just kept teaching them, and keeping them more involved,” he said. “It really became a family project. Even the little one, who was 2 at the time – there’s video of him drawing on the piano… It just kept evolving, and we kept finding more places where we could sneak in more plants, and more creatures, and more mushrooms, and it was really such a great experience.”

A note in the air

The pianos are given new life. The art that covers them is accessible and open and, as a result, relatively fleeting compared to its climate-controlled, gallery-housed counterparts. The music that comes from keys to hammers to strings drifts off into the ether. It is all an exercise in trust and the power of moments.

“Public art is a big part of what I love to do,” Evan said. “I have my studio practice, where I create work for clients, for myself, and that work is more permanent. Public art has an ephemeral quality to it at times, because you never know how long something will survive in the public, for various reasons. It’s rare that public art really gets defaced – it’s a graffiti deterrent when you do public art. The communities normally embrace the public art, but it’s still ephemeral. It takes weather damage. It takes a beating… It’s meant to be experienced and often site-specific, and the viewer helps to complete the story, but it’s normally somewhat temporary, and that’s a hard thing for some people to wrap their heads around. Ephemeral art is really kind of a special thing on its own – just knowing that something is meant to be experienced in a certain place in time, and it becomes a moment. It’s not going to be around forever.”

But the memories of it just might endure.

“The pianos are truly beautiful sites of connection,” McLaughlin said. “I have met more people at the pianos, total strangers… a lot of times when I’m talking to the person, or if they’re playing for me so I can get a little video, other people will come up and they’re clapping, and it starts this very cool little community moment.”

Find, volunteer, and support Please Play Me Pianos at pleaseplaymepianos.org.

Find one close to you! Visit playmeagainpianos.org/the-list or try the PianoSpot app.