On a muggy July afternoon in Market Square, Marritta Gillcrease, a Perry High School junior clad in an orange t-shirt and jeans, watches a woman squeegee dollops of blue and silver paint across a silkscreen print. It doesn’t look all that radical, but what this duo is up to is all about speaking up, and out, through art.

Gillcrease is a member of The Warhol’s Radical Urban Silkscreen Team (RUST), and she’s demonstrating to this enthusiastic passerby the art of silk-screening, a technique made hugely popular by Andy Warhol. Together, they’re silk-screening an image onto a poster that Gillcrease helped design for this very occasion: a peace rally organized, in part, by Teens Against Senseless Violence (TASK).

“Violence is not only a problem in our communities but also in schools, high school especially,” says Gillcrease. “Violence in Pittsburgh is claiming the lives of young people at alarming rates and some serious actions need to be taken.”

For this crowd, poetry, dance, and visual art are part of those serious actions. RUST is a summer program launched last year by The Warhol in partnership with Justseeds Artist Cooperative and the local artist-run fine art printmaking shop, Artists Image Resource. The goal: to recruit a diverse mix of area teenagers, tapping into groups such as the North Side’s Young Men and Women’s African Heritage Association, to teach them the low-cost skill of printmaking and how to use the medium as a positive agent of change in their communities.