Abstract: Historically, air quality in Pittsburgh has long been a site of conflict, with competing groups framing the city's atmosphere to align with their material interests, whether defending industry or advocating for stricter regulations. Artists have contributed to these debates through photography, film, performance, and more recently multimedia installation, reflecting and critiquing prevailing attitudes toward the region's airshed. This article examines how contemporary artists in southwestern Pennsylvania's Steel Valley corridor engage air pollution in the post-Trump era of the polluter-industrial complex. Drawing on atmospheric humanities, working-class studies, and Stacy Alaimo's ecofeminist concept of transcorporeality, it treats the sociopolitical airscapes of Braddock and Clairton as aging steel towns marked by smokestack nostalgia and targeted by eco-artivism. Then, the article centers the multisensory practices of Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Erin Mallea. Articulating symptoms of breathlessness to exhaustion, Takahashi's performance What causes one to break their silence? (2018) sheds light on the corporeal-affective experience of toxic exposure in Braddock. Mallea's documentary Obscuring Power (2023) tracks smoke-reading schools that monitor industrial emissions in Clairton. I argue that these eco-artivists tune our noses to the atmosphere, exposing respiratory hierarchies and imagining new possibilities for solidarity in a time of weakening regulation.
Benjamin Ogrodnik (Sat,) studied this question.