The inaugural installation is organized into three interconnected bodies of programming. Sail the Road of Heaven, inspired by Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean, transforms the Center into a luminous vessel journeying through the waters of memory toward Aunt Ester’s City of Bones. Coming and Going, inspired by Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, explores spiritual passage, ancestral encounter, and Herald Loomis’s journey toward self-possession and his climactic declaration, “I’m standing!” Each unfolds as an approximately 10-minute ceremonial sequence in which the architecture itself becomes an active participant in Wilson’s metaphysical world.

A third body of shorter civic and commemorative light sequences allows the installation to respond to the cultural life of the Center and the city. Programs created for occasions including the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival, Juneteenth, Pride, Independence Day, Pittsburgh sporting events, and other celebrations expand the work beyond the interpretation of Wilson’s plays into an adaptable platform for public gathering and collective expression.

Together, these programs establish Give Light to the Whole Circumference as a living repertoire of architectural light. As new sequences are created over time—including future interpretations of plays from August Wilson’s Century Cycle—the installation can continue to grow with the Center. In this way, light becomes a medium through which architecture remembers, performs, celebrates, and speaks to the city around it.

Lighting artwork conceived and directed by Rainbow Serpent (Marques Redd and Mikael Owunna), with technical and systems support by SPRK.

ARTIST BIO

Mikael Owunna and Marques Redd are the Co-Founders and Co-Executive Directors of Rainbow Serpent, a transdisciplinary production studio creating ambitious works across public art, film, sculpture, photography, performance, light installation, music, publishing, immersive media, emerging technologies, and ritual. Grounded in Black queer perspectives and African diasporic cosmologies, the studio brings artists, designers, technologists, fabricators, performers, and cultural institutions together to realize projects that move fluidly between artistic disciplines and scales.

Together, Owunna and Redd have developed a growing body of large-scale and experimental work, including Myth-Science of the Gatekeepers (2024), a series of 16 glass sculptures reimagining ancient Egyptian divinities; Blackstar Sanctuary (2024), an immersive VR and installation film set within a digital temple; Opening the Mouth (2024), a site-specific ritual performance activating the sculptures; and This Is the Body of the Sun (2026), an eight-foot public sculpture of the solar deity Ra.

Their collaborative productions also include Obi Mbu (The Primordial House), an experimental dance film adapting an Igbo creation narrative; The Four World Ages, a multimedia performance interpreting human history through Igbo myth; Playing the Cosmic Strings, a monumental mural commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; The Three Sisters, a large-scale programmable light installation spanning Pittsburgh’s Sister Bridges; Miracles, a documentary about the Redd Family Collection of Black Art; and Between Us, The Gaze, a documentary on pioneering British photographer Ajamu X.

Owunna is an award-winning photographer and filmmaker whose work from the series Limitless Africans was recently acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, and he has served as President of Pittsburgh’s Public Art and Civic Design Commission. Redd is a writer, composer, artist, and ritual practitioner whose work spans literature, music, visual culture, and African diasporic spiritual traditions, and whose scholarship includes writing on figures such as Sun Ra and Ishmael Reed.

Working across disciplines and in collaboration with cultural institutions, artists, designers, engineers, and fabricators, Owunna and Redd approach Rainbow Serpent as both a creative studio and a platform for cultural worldbuilding. They develop projects that transform buildings, landscapes, screens, galleries, and public spaces into sites for collective imagination, memory, encounter, and transformation.