An Artists Market, performance stages and food booths spread throughout Gateway Center and Point State Park, Downtown, signal the beginning of the annual Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival, which opens Friday and continues through June 10.
Performance highlights include the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Sunday; a new multimedia work by Squonk Opera, June 8-10; and a premiere Bluegrass Day June 9 that will spread beyond festival dates.
The festival remains committed to sustainable environmental practices with water stations where visitors may refill their own containers and free bicycle valet service. This year the recycling stations have been turned into oversized artworks by local artists. They're the main festival public art this year, but not the only art in town. Visitors have already begun posing for pictures with 15 life-sized bronze statues by New Jersey artist Seward Johnson that were brought to the city earlier this month by the Laurel Foundation.
Festival organizers are hoping those visitors will also wander into the Cultural District to see the Juried Visual Art Exhibition, featuring 79 works by 47 regional artists in the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Arts Education Center, 805-807 Liberty Ave. The works displayed include painting, sculpture, photography and installation.
Friday evening there will also be performance art by exhibitors Patty Gallagher and Jenna Boyles.
Ms. Gallagher's fanciful "Hazardous Clothing Is Currently Being Modeled" comprises a costume with dozens of attached candle wicks protruding like porcupine quills. It will be worn by a model who will move through the exhibition on opening night, and be displayed on a mannequin after that. Jenna Boyles, who has exhibited in all three of the trust's juried exhibitions, will perform against the backdrop of a suspended group of her "Mandrake" sculptures, ritualistic objects made of panty hose stuffed with organic materials like leaves and sticks.
Jurors were prominent Pittsburgh art community members Linda Benedict-Jones, curator of photography, Carnegie Museum of Art; Murray Horne, curator, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust; and Michael Olijnyk, co-director, Mattress Factory museum.
Grant Bobitski, curator with art consultants moxie DaDa, is Juried Exhibition curator and responsible for the show's design and presentation. Moxie DaDa has been working with the trust to evolve the exhibition in a more professional direction. "There's less work this year," he said, "and the show is tighter, stronger, the message is clearer."
The ultimate goal is to attract more artists.
"More than anything, we're interested in creating relationships with the artists, following [and] helping to foster their careers. There's a continuing effort to rejuvenate this show. To strike the interest of local artists who aren't applying. I'd like to see the application pool be huge, and the show to be a decent benchmark for the Pittsburgh art community."
Local artists have drifted away from the festival, he said, and his intent is to "make this a welcoming environment again." His vision this year included allotting more space for each artwork and establishing "more of a journey from piece to piece. We want to focus on the integrity of the show and on our integrity as producers of the show."
Mr. Bobitski also wants to serve the public.
"Another goal is educating the public on the whole gallery experience. Come down. See it. I'm not asking you to like the work. Just look at where the artist is coming from. What the medium is. Art is a process. People think they don't understand. The artist is trying to have a dialogue with you. It's really not any more sophisticated than that. To have a dialogue you need two people. You, as viewer, have to participate in that."
The exhibition has work that is approachable in a traditional manner, such as Ann Geiger's atmospheric photographs of decaying urban interiors; Seth Clark's collaged painting "Collapse XIII," which flows elegantly between architectural forms and abstraction; and the beautifully executed oils "Lazarus," an idealized youth lain on a copper bier, by Zach Brown, and David Stanger's rose "Robe" hanging on a white door.
Wade Kramm's smart illusory works pull viewers gently toward conceptual notions, a "String Chair" that is essentially a three-dimensional drawing, and "Self Portrait: Janis Head," a nondescript plaster form inspired by flip books that becomes animated when rotated.
But Mr. Bobitski allows that some works are not as accessible and that an audience with varying degrees of exposure to contemporary art will visit the show, so he's written extensive text labels to guide visitors who want to know more.
An example would be "Wallflowers" I and II, by Rachel Porter, digital photographs of formal decorative wallpapers that she's splattered with a banana cream and chocolate pie respectively. More than food, the stains resemble vomit and feces (or other bodily fluids).
"They begin looking like magazine images that suggest domestic life, like a picture of an afghan on a couch," Mr. Bobitski said. "She bakes the pies, another reference to domesticity, and then disrupts it all by throwing them at the walls. Life is not like the magazine depictions, she's saying. They're almost capturing a performance piece. It's not aesthetic. It's not a beautiful picture. But it's meant to look beyond that. This is a porthole into an idea."
The two interactive works in particular require explanation because most visitors know not to touch artworks. IUP student Patrick Camut invites visitors to crank "Human Powered Vibrator," putting into motion a shaggy black vibrating chair and footstool. Open the door to Kyle Milne's "Outhouse" and pull a cord to roll a drum filled with porcelain slip. As the drum rotates, slip pours into a black plastic-lined basin and takes on varying shapes as it dries and then is refreshed by another pull. The visitor becomes the artist creating works that Mr. Milne will photograph throughout the exhibition.
Mr. Bobitski has faith in the visitor.
"I think you can challenge your audience. You don't have to dumb your work down. I want savvy viewers to dissect the art. When the viewers are savvy, it requires the artists to up their games a little bit."
Information: www.3riversartsfest.org or 412-471-3191.
First Published: May 31, 2012, 8:00 a.m.
Updated: June 5, 2012, 7:56 p.m.
