After 20 years in Lawrenceville, Art All Night moves to South Side
By Scott Mervis Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Art All Night began 21 years ago at the vacant G.C. Murphy’s building on Butler Street and since then has gone round-the-clock in 13 different locations, all in Lawrenceville.
This year, for the first time, Art All Night, a grass-roots project of the Lawrenceville Corporation, does the unthinkable and leaves the neighborhood, even crossing a river to the South Side, to hole up at The Highline (formerly known as the Terminal Building) at 333 E. Carson St.
“We start planning in February,” says Kate Bechak, the Art All Night 21 Poobah, “and our first goal is to find a location. We’ve been so lucky for the last 20 years that we’ve been able to come up with something. Our bottom line is maybe 40,000 square feet, and there’s not a lot of spaces like that. We worked really hard to find a place in Lawrenceville, but, unfortunately, there wasn’t anything that quite fit our needs.”
Last year’s space, the warehouse on 35th Street, is in use, and the previous two locations, the Arsenal Terminal and Willow Street, have transitioned to residential in the increasingly upscale neighborhood.
The Highline Building offers 80,000 square feet for Art All Night to do its thing, which is a free, non-juried, uncensored, rough-and-tumble 22-hour art show with music ricocheting around the building.
It began, in 1998, with about 200 people checking out 101 pieces of art, and last year, it was more like 20,000 visitors and 1,050 pieces — which still range in quality from finely crafted, beautiful artwork to a hot mess.
Artists, of any level, can register on the