Everyone enjoys the Artists Market booths at the Three Rivers Arts Festival, but there's art to see beyond Gateway Center and Point State Park.

A dozen art exhibits are sprinkled along Penn and Liberty avenues, easily located by the festival's perky windmill markers on the sidewalk. Because the shows are all indoors, they're especially good places to visit if it rains. Following is a selection of exhibit highlights.

Unless otherwise noted, hours are 4-8 p.m. today, noon-8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, noon-6 p.m. Sunday.

Many festival regulars have lamented the loss of the yellow pavilions that for years held an eclectic mix of paintings or other two-dimensional artworks, and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust has responded by bringing back the show, if not the weather-beaten pavilions.

The enclosed gallery, in the fabulous new Trust Arts Education Center, 805-807 Liberty Ave., allows for sculpture, installation and video works. Now regional rather than national, it features 110 works by 76 artists chosen by a jury from 600 entries. The mix still contains some eccentricities but is more heavily weighted than the pavilions toward established artists and conceptual work.

Morgantown artist Jason Lee, for example, exhibits six photographs installed in light boxes that flow across the galley for "Euthenic Set: Crik," part of a series that calls attention to the way humans think of, and treat, the environment.

Adrienne Heinrich and Patricia Sheahan pun with old wooden ironing boards in their "Pressing Problems." James Nestor stirs things up with kinetic sound sculptures, "Heavy Feet" and "Enquiry," that audibly reach out and demand visitor attention.

There are exceptional two-dimensional works, including Seth Clark's sensitively and exquisitely rendered "Roof" and "Abandoned VII," in pastel, ink, charcoal and pencil. Also handsome and tactile are Doug Kinsey's rust, black and beige abstract "Semaphore" series, of pigment, charcoal and chalk. Tiberiu Chelsea's enigmatic "Thermal Test 1" is quietly powerful, while Paul Rouphail more overtly warns of doom, actual or symbolic, through a mushroom cloud spreading over the beautifully detailed hilly desert basin of "Playa."

If Jenna Boyles' digital prints, "Skin" and "Skin Sequence" aren't from a performance piece, they should be. Her use of nylons calls to mind the work of Senga Nengudi in the 2004-05 Carnegie International.

Also noteworthy are "Hill House," by regional visual spokesperson Ron Donoughe; Anthony Purcell's dignified canine veteran, "kila"; Michelle Lee's fluid "Always Plenty of Fish in the Sea"; Western Hospital series photographs by John FlazT; and Aasta Deth's "Household Pests (Tick)," that by size and upholstery fabric addresses recent concerns about unhealthy home environments.

One floor below the juried art exhibition, this is a workout gym for interactive, technocentric art buffs, where one could while away hours.

Watch a video, for example, of David Bernabo and Corey Layman's Nintendo WiiWare game "Rock of the Dead," complete with zombies and cemetery. Or explore Nicholas Romeo's audio-visual installation "The Stimulation Hypothesis," based on "a belief that we, humans, are existing inside a computer simulation, which is being run by a post-apocalyptic society."

Get, literally, into the work by being photographed for Solomon Bisker's "Recursive Photo Booth" or Burton Morris' "Poparazzi," or add your Twitter Portrait to Lori Hepner's "Status Symbols."

At first appearing traditional are Sandy K. Kaminski's commendable drawings on velum and prints that are circuit board-inspired abstracts and landscapes.

A show of 16 vintage prints by the late Post-Gazette photojournalist Morris Berman offers a good opportunity to explore the refined offerings of this new Downtown gallery. Shaw Galleries, 805 Liberty Ave. (11 a.m.-8 p.m. today through Saturday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday.)

Standouts are Pittsburgh Society of Sculptors members Dennis Childers ("Two-Thousand Intense (2010): Dependence and Doom"), Jane Haskell ("Corner Piece"), Ducan MacDiarmid (October 8, 2008") and Laura McLaughlin ("Beaver") at 937 Liberty Ave., where a live maple tree honors the memory of John Fitzgerald Metzler.

This critic's festival choice is an installation by William Earl Kofmehl III, "Basic Reading Primer," at 925 Penn Ave. The site-specific work makes excellent use of its space, a fully contained entity without a hair out of place. Entering is like stumbling into something that has always existed, like a memory in the recesses of one's mind. The aesthetic is gripping.

On the walls are tablets crafted of wood and modeled upon actual teaching aids and lesson plans from texts his father developed decades ago. On the floor, thick black tar coats a chair, parts of a bed, pots -- the objects of domestic life. Three small white canvases are variously swathed with bands of tar that drip in slow motion across their surfaces.

Mr. Kofmehl is interested, basically, in the way humans interpret and structure knowledge, and how we come to terms with profound questions of existence. He has filtered his approach through his educational experience at Carnegie Mellon University and Yale. But artists, throughout the festival and through time, continually grapple with similar questions. And we visitors respond.

Member works celebrating the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh centennial year, selected by president Kathleen Zimbicki, are in a finished, climate-conditioned space at 907 Penn Ave. that is much improved over AAP's 2009 site. A great variety of media and participants make for a festival-festive exhibition.

Highlights are Tadao Arimoto's wood sculpture "Squibnocket Red Stand," Judi Charlson's glass "Solace," Richard Claraval's Polystyrene "Mars," Frances Gialamas' untitled photo assemblage, Dale Huffman's wood-fired "Bottle," Lorraine Levy's gouache "Winer's Wedge," Judith Musser's acrylic "Wrath," Jay Ressler's photograph "Jade," Wesley Smith's digital composition "Herding Tiny Cows," Lucienne Wald's digital photo "My Neighbor's Wife" and Ms. Zimbicki's watercolor "The Monster That Ate Penn Hills."

Artist Robert Raczka's photographs at 707 Penn Ave. find twinkling magic in the mundane after dark. (11 a.m.-8 p.m. today through Saturday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday.)

And, finally, don't go home without seeing the festival public artwork, an oversized snorkeling Andrew Carnegie by Stephen Antonson. It's in the Allegheny River and viewable from Fort Duquesne Boulevard near the Clemente Bridge.

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