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Tuesday, October 30, 2001

By Gene Collier, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Stuck amid the several dozen generic definitions of art, somewhere between "art is what you make it" and "art is where you find it," is the Duds'N Suds Laundromat at 5430 Centre Ave., which these days is the astoundingly unlikely venue for one of the edgier contemporary art exhibits around.

	Cheryl Capezzuti, right, evaluates how Kristen Ervin of Lawrenceville looks in the lint man costume at Duds'N Suds Laundromat in Shadyside. (V.W.H. Campbell, Jr. Post-Gazette)

From its sidewalk approach in this low-gloss area of Shadyside, the Duds'N Suds struggles predictably at trying to evoke a gallery setting, wedged as it is between the CVS frontage and the liquor store at the rear of the property, but that's OK. Inside, Cheryl Capezzuti tells us why.

"This is not for the gallery crowd," she says.

No, this is more for that somewhat larger demographic, people who do laundry, and more specifically, who clean lint traps. The fact is, Duds'N Suds is one of the few facilities where you can still experience the singular thrill of cleaning your own lint trap. The more common high-tech tumble parlors now make it so that lint is sucked into the abyss without ever touching human hands.

What a waste.

Lint, it happens, is what this exhibit is all about. Lint in the Laundromat is part of Capezzuti's eight-year-old National Lint Project, which we are not making up.

"My audience is regular people," says the noted visual artist, whose public successes have generally been with immense puppets. "The main purpose of this, I think, is to engage the community, to get the community to make art and to participate in the artistic process."

	The next free art class, inspired by Capezzuti's lint sculpture, is scheduled for Sunday from 4 to 6 p.m. at Duds'N Suds. For a complete list of class times, call 412-362-1024 or visit http://www.studiocapezzuti.com/.

People from 20 states have sent Capezzuti their dryer lint over the past eight years. She has mixed it with wallpaper paste, sculpted it into the various figures, and sent it back. On a washer lid at the Duds'N Suds the other night were a figure made from "new blue towel lint" and another made from a "box the cat slept in" lint from California.

On some days, drawing from shopping bags of lint in her third-floor studio in Morningside, Capezzuti will sculpt lint figures from morning till night, providing herself with a kind of relaxation that she considers the essential reward of the artistic process, not to mention a great line for the people who sometimes say, "So Cheryl, what ya been doing?"

"I'm supporting my lint sculpting habit by making giant puppets," she says. And then she laughs richly, because the founder of the National Lint Project should not really be a dour person, right?

Capezzuti grew up in Gibsonia and studied art at Penn State, where graduate level work with nontraditional materials first forced her to consider lint. It's probably the kind of thinking you have to come upon yourself, because if someone walked up to you and said, "Consider lint," you'd have to reply, "Get away from me."

"I was looking for something that was texturally interesting," she says. "Sometimes you have to work with something for a long time before it becomes interesting. Every now and then, with lint, it's really beautiful in a weird sort of way."

Before long, she was making lint sculptures to sell at garage sales and to present as gifts at cocktail parties, and the people who were receiving her sculptures from their solicited lint began mailing her visual evidence of their great affection for her work. Some people were moved to bad poetry.

Lasso your lint
Tumble your tints
Put something wild
Into your dryer

Don't forget to . . .

All right, that's enough of that.

"Look at this," Capezzuti says, opening an album of collected lint correspondence, "somebody took their lint figures to Fallingwater and sent me pictures."

She laughs really hard about that. She has to. There's this little gray lint guy with Frank Lloyd Wright's nonsense in the background. Beautiful.

Capezzuti is supported in her National Lint Project work by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and this year's Pittsburgh Center for the Arts Community Artist Fellowship.

The big opening party for Lint in the Laundromat is Nov. 17 at the Duds'N Suds, but exhibitions and free art classes for patrons began this month and will continue through late April. The opening party will feature sculptures, artwork by Laundromat patrons, giant dancing lint puppets and the performance of "Mismatched Pair," a puppet show for adults inspired by Cheryl's sculptural work.

"The truth is you don't have to make art or even send lint to be included," she says. "If you pause and smile the next time you clean out your lint trap, you are a participant."