Artist Janel Young’s This Way Up Mural
This Way Up, by artist Janel Young of JY.Originals, is a large-scale, colorful mural that welcomes visitors and staff to the Laurel Highlands Workforce & Opportunity Center. The mural brightens the outside façade of the tower near the building’s administrative offices entrance and extends to an adjacent wall. During the engagement and planning stages for this project, Young spoke with the community and the groups that use the Center to hear their stories. These stories served as inspiration for Young when conceptualizing the mural.
Please click here for a video from the unveiling where Janel Young goes into detail about the public work and her process.
Make sure you swing by and check out this awesome mural located at the Laurel Highlands Workforce & Opportunity Center, Inc., 310 Donohoe Road, Greensburg, PA 15601.
About the Artist
Rising artist Janel Young of JY Originals was a previous participant in the Artist-in-Residency program at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art.
Known for a number of public installations and murals painted throughout Pittsburgh, her past projects include New Space Spheres, Pathway to Joy, and Heroes on the Horizon. In collaboration with four additional artists, she curated New Space Spheres, a series of pandemic-inspired social distance artworks appearing throughout the city in 2020. Her Pathway to Joy, a large brightly-colored geometric asphalt mural, was created for the Allegheny Overlook pop-up park experience that kicked off the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival in the summer of 2021, and Larimer’s Bakery Square features her Heroes on the Horizon, a permanent three-dimensional mural, which she created after working with students from local schools Lincoln K-5 and Urban Academy of Greater Pittsburgh.
Young has also achieved national and international recognition for commissions, including her canvas titled “Be Open To…” which was displayed at the 2020 U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York City, and for major companies, including Yahoo!, where she was the first artist ever commissioned to design their Black History Month logo in 2021.
Click here to read a Q&A with Janel Young during her residency.
