Up in Smoke
(1988)
The five ladders in Up in Smoke make a pretense of chimney repair at a time when the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts is caught up in major renovation. They refer, however, in their play on words, to the steel corporations whose success – and ultimate demise in the early-to-mid-80’s – was measured, quite literally, by the amount of smoke hanging over the Greater Pittsburgh region. After a century of obscene financial gains in tandem with rising pollution, the steel industry, supplanted by Japanese and Chinese steel corporations, finally went “up in smoke” altogether and mercifully vanished.