Green Leap 2.0 Expands the Economic Possibilities of Local Artisan-Made Goods
By Courtney Balestier, Contributing Writer
June 27, 2025
Green Leap, a cohort-based business education program provided by Bridgeway Capital’s Monmade initiative, supports artists to develop eco-friendly and market-ready interior design products. As much as Green Leap is interested in environmental sustainability, it also helps working artists maintain creative sustainability: guiding working artists to remain artisanal as they scale up to reach larger audiences and forge more economically viable businesses.
Both missions were on full display at this month’s Green Leap 2.0 Product Launch. At Bridgeway’s Hay Street Gallery inside the historic Wilkinsburg Train Station, Green Leap’s second cohort displayed a range of handcrafted works, from solid wood credenzas and gourd pendant lights to large-scale ceramic planters and wallpaper inspired by native Pennsylvania flora. The evening was the culmination of an eight-month curriculum, which guided 13 artist entrepreneurs through research, collaboration, and hands-on development to create repeatable product designs for use in commercial and private spaces.
Green Leap — like its parent program, Monmade — represents Bridgeway Capital’s long-standing commitment to strengthening local economies through creative community. Recognizing that artists are a vital part of our region’s cultural and economic fabric, Bridgeway has created creative economies programs that offer everything from one-on-one coaching to cohort-based curriculums like Green Leap, all with the goal of igniting creativity-driven economic investment.
“A few years ago, we saw the need to make standard artisanal products,” Bridgeway Capital Program Director Katie Schaible said of Green Leap. “Not mass-produced, but repeatable and predictable. Not custom, but customizable. These are artisanal products that keep money in the community. It’s something that no one else is doing: helping artist entrepreneurs who are in that space between fine art and scaled production to develop marketable, yet still artisanal, production.”
For Curtis Reaves, a fine art photographer and founder of Curtis Reaves Design Studio, it was a chance to consider his practice in a different light. Reaves’ abstract, organic photography has been shown widely across the country. While he had experimented with trying to get his work into commercial and hospitality spaces, he said it was something he never thought he fit into. Green Leap gave him the freedom to see his practice in a new way.
“As artists, we’re on our own islands a lot,” Reaves said. “A program like Green Leap boosts you. It gets you on another level.”
Reaves’ Green Leap collection, called Abstract Solitude Architectural Series, features bold, abstract photographs of discarded organic matter. It turns detritus into modern, naturalistic artwork that can be scaled to suit a variety of applications in commercial, hospitality, and residential spaces. The works can be custom arranged to create feature walls, large-scale installations, and privacy screens.
Inspiration from the natural world was evident all around the gallery. Petra Floyd, of Petra Eff Studio, created sculptural pendant lights from Pennsylvania-grown gourds. Able to be installed individually or as a chandelier-like cluster of varying heights and sizes, they are a warm, biophilic alternative to traditional lighting. Janet Watkins, of Janet Watkins Ceramics, used discarded clay to create her Arc Wall Planters. The large pocket planters, glazed in vibrant blues and oranges and adorned with playful engravings, come alive with color and texture.
For Watkins, who became a ceramics artist after a career in banking, Green Leap is a new phase of a creative practice that began with small figurative pieces like her “Pot Heads,” bust-style planters that were also on display in the gallery. Forming scrap clay into slabs allows her to create an easily repeatable design, even as each remains handmade. “I would like to make more,” Watkins said.
The crisp, modernist Linea Credenza by Steve Orkis, of Orkis Woodwork, is handmade from domestic wood responsibly sourced within two hours of Pittsburgh. For Orkis, a custom woodworker, Green Leap was a chance to make good on his intention to develop a product.
“I like that it forced me to develop and held me accountable,” he said. He honed his idea through the program’s site visits and many conversations with his cohort members about methods and efficiency. Each Linea Credenza is handmade, but Orkis has refined his process into a streamlined, easily repeatable work flow. “Hopefully it will spark interest,” he said.
Indeed, Green Leap products caught the attention of designers and industry professionals in attendance. Ashley Morgan, principal designer at Knez Morgan, an interior design studio, was inspired by the diversity of the collection. Knez Morgan is committed to supporting artists and artisans rooted in the region, and she appreciated Green Leap’s support of a more intentional approach to design.
“This in-between space [between custom and mass-produced] is often where we find the most compelling and versatile solutions,” she said. “Having customizable options that begin with a prototype allows us to review quality, scale, and materiality while still tailoring pieces to our clients’ needs. Many clients appreciate starting from an existing concept — it gives them the confidence to move forward and helps us communicate ideas more clearly. It’s the perfect balance of flexibility and refinement.”
Mark Karason, now a poet and volunteer docent at the Carnegie Museum of Art after a long career in the hospitality industry, also saw possibilities in Green Leap’s mission of scalable artisanal works and environmental sustainability.
“The concept is really terrific,” he said. “When I travel to hotels in city downtowns, I see all this terrible reproductive art. You know there are artists who have works available that could be hanging in all those rooms and lobbies. Here is an opportunity for developers to see a new way.”
Learn More
For more information about Green Leap 2.0 and to view the full line of products, visit Monmade.org. To learn more about the ways that Bridgeway supports creative economies and artist entrepreneurs, visit our Creative Business Accelerator.
About Green Leap
Green Leap, a program by Monmade, merges sustainability, product innovation, and community impact in the form of responsible products ready for the built environment. This design exhibition showcases new products that are stunning and functional, along with inspiring narratives that raise the sustainability bar for product development and procurement.
Grean Leap 2.0 was made possible with support from PNC Charitable Trust and the S. Kent Rockwell Foundation.
About Courtney Balestier
Courtney Balestier is a writer whose work focuses on the intersection of place and identity, particularly in her native Appalachia. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Joyland, The New Yorker online, Lucky Peach, the New York Times, Saveur, Oxford American, New York, Wired, and others. Her writing has been anthologized in The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell (Ohio University Press, 2019) Cornbread Nation 7: The Best of Southern Food Writing (UGA Press, 2014) and nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award and a Pushcart Prize. She is also the creator and host of WMFA, a podcast about why and how we write.