The Hill Projects

The Hill District, a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Pittsburgh, has become the locale for a number of community-based Center projects. The mission of the Hill Projects is to define and to design collaborative projects that combine the resources of Carnegie Mellon with the creative endeavors of Hill District residents.

Take Back the Hill is a youth newspaper written, produced, and distributed by students in the Hill District. Through the newspaper project, Hill District teens are trained in investigative analysis, writing, design, and layout, providing themselves with the tools to engage in community issues and interact with local activists, artists, civic leaders, and the rich cultural history and current developments within their community.

Take Back the Hill is a collaborative initiative between Carnegie Mellon's Center for the Arts in Society and the Hill House Association. By partnering with organizations, activists, and educators, the project offers participants various ways of engaging with and responding to the pressing issues in their communities.

Click here for the current issue of the newspaper (PDF format).

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The Arts Greenhouse is an interdisciplinary project to recruit, record, and market young musical and performing artists from Pittsburgh and the surrounding region. It was created in cooperation with Carnegie Mellon's School of Music, Business School, and several community groups.

The Arts Greenhouse is open to all teenagers around Pittsburgh, but is aimed at students who would not otherwise have an opportunity to take music lessons or record a CD. Through a semester-long series of workshops with instructors knowledgeable in the spoken-word, contemporary music and studio production, participants learn about the music business, how to make hip-hop beats, write lyrics or raps, be a producer, and record music for a CD.

With the expertise of students from Carnegie Mellon's Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, the youth also learn about marketing and promoting their work, which is necessary to succeed in today's music industry. At the end of a series of workshops, a compliation CD of the students' work is produced, marketed, and distributed around Pittsburgh.

For more information about the Arts Greenhouse project, please visit:

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The Virtual Hill is an educational program for third and fourth graders that fosters research into and representatin of the Hill District's historical and cultural heritage. The project, a collaboration among the center, the Hill House Community Center, and Weil Elementary School, utilizes web-based digital media. The Virtual Hill recreates the place through the memories of residents, photographs, and material artifacts, all organized by the children using multimedia techniques.

The Virtual Hill contributes to an existing social studies curriculum but also becomes the basis for a newly-designed curricular package that can be distributed throughout the Pittsburgh region, and eventually, the country. The Virtual Hill provides a tool for attaching children to their neighborhoods while giving them skills in research, expression, and design.

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Site Index

About Us

Events

The Hill Projects:

Take Back the Hill
Arts Greenhouse
The Virtual Hill

Ethnography & Arts Policy

College of Fine Arts

College of Humanities and Social Sciences