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Chasing Pat McArdle around his house as he shows off his art collection, it’s easy to forget he recently turned 75. Tall and lanky, McArdle careens from sculpture to painting, from parlor to dining room, with the alacrity of a teenager.
His brightly day-lit Swissvale home contains thousands of pieces he’s purchased over the years. He’s zipping around — first floor, second floor — because he’s readying an unusual series of exhibitions at a venue off the beaten trail.
“Live Worship Shop: Eight Iconic Exhibits from the P.J. McArdle Collection” will occupy Bellevue’s John A. Hermann Memorial Art Museum, with openings on eight consecutive Saturdays, Jan. 6 through Feb. 24.
The exhibits will highlight 70 or so artists living and dead. Many have local connections. But all they have in common is their place in McArdle’s collection. (The show’s title, of course, references Bellevue’s landmark sign on Route 65.)
McArdle, who grew up in Ford City, is a former structural ironworker and truck driver. In the 1980s, he became an independent concert promoter here, booking everyone from James Brown and George Jones to R.E.M. and The Smiths at venues like the old Syria Mosque.
Intrigued by self-taught Georgia-based artist Howard Finster, he located him with help from another fan, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe. (Stipe and Finster created the cover of R.E.M.’s album “Reckoning”; Finster also painted the cover of Talking Heads’ “Little Creatures.) That visit launched McArdle’s collecting career, and self-taught, or “outsider,” artists remain a specialty.
The Hermann Museum is itself somewhat DIY. The onetime home of its namesake painter (who died in 1942), the unassuming house on Lincoln Avenue reopened in 1976 as a museum showing Hermann’s work exclusively. In 2015, under longtime executive director Paul Cusick, it began hosting other kinds of shows in its first-floor galleries, including juried student work.
Admission is free. Despite minimal hours — it’s open 1-4 p.m. Sundays and for special events — Cusick said it now draws up to 1,000 visitors a year.
This Saturday, McArdle will launch his octet of shows with “Pershing, Picasso and Pittsburgh.” It’s primarily a tribute to Louise Pershing, a modernist painter and sculptor who studied at Carnegie Tech and in the 1940s had a solo show at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Her best-known work might be “The Flow,” an abstract steel sculpture located at Sixth Street and Bigelow Square, outside the U.S. Steel Tower.
That one, of course, is not McArdle’s, but he’ll show some 35 paintings, sculptures and other items from her collection, which he first encountered while working on her estate, in the ’80s. The “Picasso,” meanwhile, is a single small painting from that collection, which appears to be a version of Picasso’s famous “Two Women Running on the Beach.” McArdle believes it to be a real Picasso, though he said it’s not been formally authenticated.
Week two of “Live Worship Shop” brings “The Warhola Family of Artists & Howard Finster Family of Artists,” featuring 20 pieces created by members of Andy Warhol’s extended family, and 30 or more from Finster’s clan. On the Warhola side, artists include Andy’s nephew James, a children’s-book illustrator and Mad magazine contributor.
On Jan. 20, the Hermann opens “Pittsburgh Modernists,” featuring artists from what McArdle considers “the golden era of the Pittsburgh art scene,” a mid-century community that included Henry Bursztynowicz, Glen Davis, Aaronel deRoy Gruber, Frank Komperda and Esther Phillips.
On Jan. 27 comes “International Artists of Instagram” — paintings and works on paper by nine artists from Canada, Serbia, Australia, South Africa and more whom McArdle met through the app.
On Feb. 3, McArdle opens a show dedicated to African and African-American artists, including Thad Mosley, Amir Rashidd, Mr. Imagination, Lonnie Holley, Bo Hill and even Teenie Harris, the legendary photographer whose first-ever solo gallery exhibit McArdle staged in the 1990s, with Harris in attendance.
The Feb. 10 show spotlights self-taught artists, including such Pittsburgh and formerly Pittsburgh names as Vanessa German, Carl Dingbat Smith, Karl Mullen and Chuck Barr. Feb. 17 brings a showcase of art from VaultArt Studios, which nurtures artists with special needs. And Feb. 24 is “P.J.’s Favorites,” highlighting artists like Georgia’s John Cleveland and Pittsburgh icon Bob Qualters.
While some of the works in these shows will be for sale, McArdle said his main goal is to encourage others to collect art. He knows that sounds like an intimidating endeavor, he said, but “I just want to show people — there’s nothing in here that was not affordable at the time” he bought it.
For McArdle, collecting “has been and continues to be a quest to meet artists,” he said. “They just see different than I do. They have brought me so much. Basically it’s a spiritual thing.”