Pittsburgh Humanities Festival brings speakers to online audience
Share this post:
A reboot of the Pittsburgh Humanities Festival will offer online “smart talk about stuff that matters.”
Interviews available for free explore health care and policy, incarceration, technology and creating opportunities for artists of color in Pittsburgh.
The Pittsburgh Humanities Festival @ Home kicks off Friday with the first of four presentations by guests originally slated for in-person “Core Conversations.” That event was canceled in March at the onset of the covid-19 pandemic.
The festival is typically a two-tiered program with large-scale featured events at the Byham Theater and more intimate conversations staged in smaller venues, according to co-director Randal Miller.
Winnowing down to four speakers addressed the challenge of livestreaming logistics, staffing and budget, along with determining which presentations “are most relevant to where we are now,” Miller said. Three of the presenters are Pittsburgh-based, while the fourth is from Philadelphia.
The final speaker, Boaz Frankel — a filmmaker, writer, talk show host and new Pittsburgh resident — was chosen through an open call for the general public to join the festival’s dialogue. Frankel was selected by a jury panel to appear in the “Core Conversations” lineup.
Each talk will be streamed on the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s Facebook page and YouTube channel.
Programs include:
• “Life Sentences: The Amazing Journey of Walking Out of an American Prison,” with Robert “Faruq” Wideman, 7 p.m. Friday.
The Homewood native will discuss leaving prison after 44 years and re-adapting to life on the outside. Wideman was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for his role in a 1975 murder. He was released July 2, 2019, when his sentence was commuted. Wideman’s collection of essays and other writings, “Life Sentences: The Amazing Journey of Walking Out of an American Prison,” will provide the basis for the program. His brother, the novelist John Edgar Wideman, wrote a memoir about their relationship, “Brothers and Keepers.”
“Faruq Wideman’s talk was the one that staff was most looking forward to,” Miller said. “He has a lived experience that almost no one has, and it’s so pertinent to the social justice conversation we’re having now.”
• “Dance Maker: Blackness in White Spaces,” with Staycee Pearl, 7 p.m. Oct. 9.
Pearl will discuss creating meaningful opportunities in movement and art residencies, classes and workshops for artists of color through her work as a dancer, choreographer and artist director.
Pearl is the co-artistic director of PearlArts Studios in Pittsburgh and Staycee Pearl dance project, focusing on dance-centered multimedia works in collaboration with her husband, Herman Pearl. Her work includes project-generating programs like the Charrette Series, the In The Studio Series and the PearlDiving Movement Residency.
She received her initial dance training at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center in New York City.
• “Everyone Wants to Get to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die,” with Jonathan D. Moreno, 7 p.m. Oct. 16.
Moreno, a bioethicist and University of Pennsylvania professor, “will be talking through the lens of what’s happening now” with the pandemic. His wider work explores what he sees as an unprecedented revolution in health care, with Americans wanting everything that medical science has to offer without debating its merits and its limits. The result he sees is that Americans pay far more for health care, while having among the lowest life expectancies and highest infant mortality of any affluent nation.
• “Don’t Google This — Offline Curiosity in an Online World,” with Boaz Frankel, 7 p.m. Oct. 23.
“We’re all born curious. Curiosity is what makes our world a bigger and more interesting place,” Frankel says. “But in an age where every answer is a Google search away, the ways we find answers and the paths we take have completely changed.
“Together, we’ll explore the difference between online and offline curiosity. We’ll look into the science behind it, the extreme places that curiosity can take us, and the surprising things that happen when we try to answer a question without a computer,” he says.
Frankel is on a quest to make a documentary in each of Pittsburgh’s 90 neighborhoods, with about 10 completed so far. He and his wife, Brooke Barke, are co-authors of “Let’s Be Weird Together: A Book About Love.” For six years, he hosted “The Pedal Powered Talk Show,” working around the country from a bicycle. He also volunteers at Phipps Conservatory and Heinz History Center.
Miller said festival organizers, including co-director David Shumway, are “excited about the potential to broaden our reach” with a virtual event.
“Before, you had to commit to being in Pittsburgh for a certain date, so this gives us increased access,” he said. “You could watch this from Russia.”
Providing virtual programming also is part of a larger conversation on supporting the arts community through the pandemic shutdown and the uncertain future of live arts events, he said.
The festival is a production of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and the Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University and is presented by Citizens Bank.
Details: trustarts.org