Pittsburgh artists rally in support of Marc Fogel, others detained in Russia

Marc Fogel has made his mark in the art world, as an educator and with his friends and family. On Saturday, Fogel’s fellow artists decided to “Make a Marc” of their own by staging a group art show in support of their colleague.

Fogel, a 61-year-old Butler native who taught history in Moscow at the Anglo-American School, was taken into custody by Russian authorities in August 2021 and sentenced to 14 years in prison for possession of medical marijuana.

Pittsburgh artist Tom Mosser, who has never met Fogel, organized the event in collaboration with one of the Fogel family’s attorneys, Sasha Phillips, in the Brightspace Room of the Energy Innovation Center on Pittsburgh’s Bedford Avenue. Mosser said the turnout exceeded his expectations with about 100 artists and many others showing up.

“We decided to have a pop-up show (but) this has become an explosion show,” Mosser said. “A month ago we went public with a call for creatives to create whatever (art) form — written word, sculpture, digital photography, make a statement — just join us.”

There were no fees and the event was free. Artists could keep their work.

“All the work has been made in the past month but it represents thousands of hours of creativity if you combine all the artists,” said Mosser.

One of the artists who showed up was Randy Backes, a friend of Fogel’s for 41 years since their days together at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. When he found out about the event, Backes created a couple of pieces centered around photographs of his longtime friend, and caught a red-eye flight from Los Angeles.

“He’s a humanitarian, he’s a family guy, he’s got a loving wife, two beautiful children. The guy would give you the shirt off his back. We’re just great friends. I just love the guy. He’s a teacher, he got caught with pot. He’s in jail for 14 years for something that … in California you can go to the store and buy like a bag of Doritos. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime,” Backes said. “This isn’t a political thing. This is about awareness of who he is. Some of these artists have captured his imagination.”

Among the artists who accomplished that was Phillips, Fogel’s attorney and a Moscow native who first came to the U.S. to attend art school while she learned to speak English.

“In any major city there are a lot of artists and Pittsburgh is no different,” Phillips said. “But to have such a turnout and such passion and to have their art be an advocacy tool, this is incredibly unique. I’m just so happy that so many people came out for one of their own (and) rallied behind a Butler native and said ‘we support Marc. Please bring him home.’”

Phillips’ artistic contrbution was a painting that captured Fogel in full teaching mode standing and clutching a messy armfull of papers with Putin looming over his right shoulder.

“I had my doubts about (the exhibition) because I didn’t know anything about the artists community in Pittsburgh,” Fogel’s 94-year-old mother, Malphine, said. “It’s just mind blowing that there are so many entries and so many originals. None of these pieces is similar at all. Even with the anticipation of bad weather, there still was a great turnout. I’m sure that Marc would be very gratified to know that he has so many loyal friends.”

Marc’s sister, Lisa Hyland of O’Hara, said this event was step one in the process of getting him freed from that Moscow prison.

“On July 8, we’re going to take this to the White House,” Hyland said. “We’re going to take this art work with us and hopefully get people down there a little more excited about this case.”