ARTS FESTIVAL GOES VIRTUAL
Playing the first Pittsburgh show of her career, on opening night of the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival last year, neosoul star India.Arie was struck by the stunning view from the stage.
“I didn’t know Pittsburgh was so beautiful!” she said.
It’s a common reaction from artists performing on the Point State Park stage, gazing out at the hills, the trees, the rivers, the bridges and, more immediately, taking in the sights and smells of the crowds and food booths.
They are all things Pittsburghers may have taken for granted over the 60-year history of an annual festival that helps mark summer in the city.
To experience the 61st edition, which begins Friday and runs through June 14, the landscape will be your office, bedroom, deck or wherever you set up your screen for the festival’s first digital event. It will consist of three exhibitions, the Artist Market and streaming concerts, plus food trucks, one of a few things that can’t be streamed.
“It’s not gonna be the same,” notes festival director Sarah Aziz. “The Arts Festival, a big part of its charm is complaining about the rain and eating funnel cakes on the lawn while listening to some band you’ve never heard of but turns out to be really good. That is the experience that people have loved for 60 years.
“And so, we’ve done our best, but I’m not gonna lie and be like, ‘Oh, it’s translated 100 percent! It’s going to be the same experience — totally, totally the same.’ ”
Virtually live
Planning for the festival began almost a year ago and just about everything was in place when the coronavirus pandemic began shutting things down, starting with the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in the second week of March.
That’s also when the offices of the presenting Pittsburgh Cultural Trust closed and the staff began working at home.
“And for about the first two weeks,” Aziz says, “we were still honestly hoping, I think, like with the rest of the city, that the summer might bring some sort of normalcy and maybe TRAF could be the big return.”
Then, in April, she got a call from Cody Walters, co-founder of the Deutschtown Music Festival, informing her he was canceling that North Side event set for late July.
“When that happened,” she says, “we just saw the writing on the wall and we said, ‘Geez, our event is significantly larger and six weeks sooner.’ Just for public health, even if we are in green phase, the likelihood of thousands of people being allowed to gather was low, and we didn’t have the infrastructure to gate, and nor did we want to.”
They began to inform the artists and musicians TRAF would go virtual, which meant effectively scrapping the lineup of national acts they booked.
So what are we missing?
TRAF won’t say, because at least four of the 10 acts promoter Gary Hinston booked have asked if they can have the same dates for the 2021 festival.
The “live” portion of this one begins Friday in what should be charming fashion with Josh Verbanets, frontman of powerpop band Meeting of Important People, paired with important person and WQED star Rick Sebak. The two did a run of holiday shows together during the Christmas season and had a blast.
“We will be hosting together and throwing to some surprise guests, and also he and I will be ‘spinning the wheel of famous Pittsburgh songs,’ like a Jimmy Fallon bit,” Verbanets says. “Wherever the needle lands, Rick gives a quick history snippet and I am forced to play a minute of the song ‘unrehearsed.’ ”
The performances will continue at 7:30 each night with Buffalo Rose & Inez; Social Justice Disco featuring Liz Berlin & Phat Man Dee; Byron Nash & Brittney Chantele; Dance Battle 5 with DJ Inception; and the PHILLTER Music Showcase: Live-Loopers, One-Human Bands and more.
They are scheduled to run for 30 minutes, but there will be no curfews if artists want to run over.
Transversing the art
To manage the visual art side, the IT people and designers became even more essential than usual. The festival’s exhibitions have been uploaded to the website, with each artwork displayed on its own custombuilt web page.
The centerpiece is “Transverse: Juried Visual Art Exhibition,” a show of 51 works by 40 artists selected by a panel of four jurors. In October, the festival set the theme of “Transverse” by asking for submissions “exploring ideas about altered realities, utopias, and challenging the status quo,” fully unaware of just how altered our reality would be.
“There’s a lot of what people would call traditional art -- 2-D painting and photography — but there’s some really interesting video pieces as well,” Aziz says. “The thing I love most about the Juried Visual Arts Exhibition is they’re all regional artists, so all of them are made by an artist within 150 miles, within the last two years, and most of them are emerging or mid-career artists, so you can get a really great piece. There’s a lot of amazing work in the Artist Market but most people don’t know that the stuff in the Juried Visual Arts Exhibition is also for sale.”
Viewers can vote for The People’s Choice Award, earning a $500 cash prize for the winner.
For the interactive exhibit “Compass Roses: Maps by Artists,” artists were asked “to consider and interpret Pittsburgh in any way they wished,” inviting a journey of discovery.
“Kudos to Renee Piechocki and Nadine Wasserman on this one,” Aziz says. “We had a meeting where they were like, ‘We want this to be all analog. We want this to be a big public art installation and people are gonna come and draw their own maps and pick up paper maps and this is like ‘the anti-Google map project.’
“And then we were like, ‘Girl, it’s an alldigital festival,’ and they were like ‘Cool, digital maps, we’re on it!’ ”
They ended up with a diverse body of 20 visual, literary and performing artists creating maps that can be viewed and also printed out as pdfs.
There will also be maps to the public art Downtown — such as the 168 Lightbulbs, Magnolias for Pittsburgh, Cell Phone Disco and FLOW — for self-guided tours, either
virtual or in-person, should you want to physically venture into the Cultural District.
The festival will also feature the fifth year of “Anthropology of Motherhood: Culture of Care,” works about motherhood, parenting and nurturing, and the popular Artist Market with works by more than 300 artists.
Aziz is confident that even when the festival comes back live next year, the virtual Artist Market will be among the ongoing improvements.
“There are some things that are going to come out of the digital festival that we hope to continue going forward. The revamp of the Artist Market is so much better, and we’re implementing things that we’ve talked about in the past but we’re never really priorities.”
The tastes
As for the fried vegetables, burritos, pizza, funnel cakes and many chocolate-covered foods, none of which can be printed or downloaded, TRAF will provide with scattered food trucks.
“As you know, our restaurant and food truck partners have been hit really hard,” Aziz says, “so we wanted to make sure to include that, as well. So, we’re still in the process of collecting everybody’s capabilities and whereabouts, but our goal is to have a handful of food trucks participating in the festival around different neighborhoods and having some sort of TRAF menu item.”
To close out the festival on June 14, Verbanets will circle back “from a secret location” with a stripped-down Meeting of Important People. They will be joined for a song or two by comedian Gab Bonesso, Verbanets’ partner in the children’s musical comedy group Josh & Gab.
The reunion is by popular demand from schools and other clients looking for virtual programming that includes content about “focusing on health, staying positive and creativity during the pandemic,” Verbanets says.
Like Aziz says, it won’t be the same, but, barring a power outage, the performances will go on, rain or shine.
The festival can be found beginning Friday at TrustArts.org/TRAF.