There was a gallery crawl in downtown Pittsburgh Friday night. Basically these art galleries open up and let the gallery crawler wander from one gallery to another in the several block neighborhood. The thing reminded me a bit of First Night in Boston that I attended in the very early nineties.The exhibits ranged from the somewhat slap-dash improvised look to the large and I-don’t-know-what-to-think-of-it Amorphic Robot Works.
My pet peeve on this crawl was the gamut of loud (but not in a good way) bands sprinkled variously along the crawl. Didn’t need them; didn’t like them either.
On the other hand, paintings at Watercolors Gallery followed in the traditional sense of an art gallery, as was the collection of political cartoons by Kirk Anderson, Clay Bennet (Pulitzer Prize Winner), Dennis Draughon, Gary Huck, Mike Konopacki, Andy Singer, Bill Yund and P.S Mueller (of the New Yorker) at Artists Upstairs. That proved to be popular stop, reading the commentary on American political life.
Future Tenant offered an installation piece that abstracts the layout and orientation of downtown Pittsburgh into a large angular sculpture.
Pennsylvania Culinary Institute provided a welcome stop for hot food and drinks.
Favorite stop was the Chatham Baroque in the Prime Stage Theater Space. They were playing music written hundreds of years ago. We heard Spanish dance music written in 1700s. The composer isn’t alive now, and pretty much nobody knows the person who set that music to paper, yet the expression of his creativity lives on centuries later. Of all the arts, music is one where the art is not to be statically appreciated in a passive manner. With paintings, writing, and sculpture we experience it by viewing. With music, musicians are interactively performing it, and in doing so are actively expressing the art of the creator. So, here we are listening to music performed live that was conjured up ages ago in the head of a now long-gone composer. But his music lives on.