Three Rivers Arts Festival announces details of 60th anniversary
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Flip flops, a moving stage, multiple musical performances and lots of art will be part of the 60th anniversary of the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival.
The city staple presented by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust takes place June 7-16 at Point State Park, Gateway Plaza, and the cultural district in Downtown Pittsburgh.
“60 years. Wow,” Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said Tuesday. “Pittsburgh is a community of arts and culture and nothing demonstrates that more than the Three Rivers Arts Festival.”
Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto recalled being part of the event when he was in high school. He and a friend drew faces on balloons because they wanted to be artists.
“The Three Rivers Arts Festival has become a part of the fabric of this city,” Peduto said. “It is the beginning of summer around here and welcomes everyone into the living room of our city.”
Through programming on the Dollar Bank Main Stage, Acoustic Stage at Gateway Center and Stanwix Stage, there will be more than 85 acts. The featured music lineup is headlined by four-time Grammy Award winner, India.Arie. She has sold 3.3 million records.
Point State Park’s main lawn will be filled with “Los Trompos” or spinning tops, a piece of public art by award-winning Mexican artists Héctor Esrawe and Ignacio Cadena. The brightly-colored, interactive sculptures function as both artwork and rotating seating spaces, according to a news release.
The Gateway Center area will feature vibrant colors through Ocean Sole Africa’s art sculptures made entirely out of flip flops reclaimed from the Indian Ocean. Ocean Sole Africa, of Kenya, collects, cleans, compresses, and carves the old flip flops into masterpieces.
Fusing public art and contemporary dance, Compagnie Furinkaï’s “Origami” will close out the event the weekend on June 14-16. A special co-presentation with the Pittsburgh Dance Council, “Origami” introduces an unlikely pairing – a monumental, 40-foot shape-shifting shipping container and a gravity-defying dancer, according to the release.
There are only five opportunities to see the spectacle, inspired by Japanese paper folding. Performances will be held at June 14 at 9 p.m., June 15 at 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., and June 16 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Art spaces throughout the Cultural District will be free and open to the public for the duration of the festival, including 707 Penn, 937 Liberty, August Wilson African American Cultural Center Galleries, Harris Theater, Juried Visual Art Exhibition in the Trust Arts Education Center, SPACE, and Wood Street Galleries.
The festival, a production of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, is a 10-day celebration of the arts in downtown Pittsburgh. It’s free and attracts nearly 500,000 visitors annually, according to the trust. It features more than 300 artists from around the country.
An artists’ market features emerging artists who are invited for the first time. Two of those, Yusuph Ulomi and Obie Coleman, both of the North Side, attended Tuesday’s news conference.
“Pittsburgh is a very inviting city,” said Ulomi, originally from Tanzania, who paints with acrylics and also uses pencils, and owns liberationsart.com. “When I paint, I am inspired by music I am listening to and books I am reading. Art is not isolated and it’s about boundary dissolution.”
Coleman said one of his first inspirations was from the late Andy Warhol, who makes people think about what art really is and who incorporated everyday objects in his work.
This year, to celebrate six decades of the arts festival, there is an interactive timeline.
“This is going to be the best festival yet,” said J. Kevin McMahon, president and CEO of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.