Three Rivers Arts Festival returns with new configuration
Music of all kinds will be part of the Three Rivers Arts Festival.
Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust
Activities for children will be part of the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival.
Artists will be selling their wares on Fort Duquesne Boulevard during the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival.
Concerts are a nightly highlight of the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival.
Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust
“Utterance,” a sculpture by Pittsburgh artist Jim West, will be displayed at the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival.
Squonk's performance "Hand to Hand" will feature two giant puppet hands during the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival.
The Artist Market will host more than 300 artists during this year's Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival.
So far, the 2020s have been a time of experimentation and improvisation for the Three Rivers Arts Festival.
Festival planning came to a halt in March 2020 because of the pandemic, and it ended up being entirely virtual that year. In 2021, a hybrid festival happened, with a scaled-down, in-person event and an online component. The festival returned to its traditional full, in-person format last year, with concerts, the artist market, gallery shows, and more, but in a dramatically reconfigured form — the festival was moved into the downtown Cultural District and out of Point State Park, where much of the festival’s activity had long been centered.
Reviews of last year’s festival footprint ended up being decidedly mixed, according to Sarah Aziz, the director of festival management for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.
“We took a lot of notes,” she explained. “We looked at survey responses, we did our due diligence, and came to the conclusion that that footprint really didn’t work very well. It wasn’t great for the artist market, it wasn’t great for guests, it wasn’t great for our Cultural District neighbors.”
Armed with that information, the 64th annual festival, which opened Friday and is officially called the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival, has a new layout. The Dollar Bank Main Stage will now be at the intersection of Fort Duquesne Boulevard and Stanwix Street. This will allow concertgoers to have more grass to stand or sit on, more trees and more food and drink options nearby.
Also, the artist market will stretch down both sides of Fort Duquesne Boulevard between Sixth and Ninth streets. That portion of the festival will be connected to the indoor galleries hosting events through smaller stages, the food court and the Giant Eagle Creativity Zone, where kids can make their own art and have fun.
It was the result of rule changes in Harrisburg that now only allow one event to happen for seven consecutive days in state parks that led to the retreat from Point State Park. One of the advantages of having the festival in the Cultural District, Aziz pointed out, is it will put visitors within the vicinity of the galleries they may well have overlooked in previous years. Before 2020, the artist market was typically centered behind the Wyndham Grand hotel in a tight space that didn’t allow much movement for either artists or festivalgoers. On Fort Duquesne Boulevard, there will be a little more room for everyone to move, Aziz said.
Estimates have it that about 250,000 people passed through last year’s festival, which is a little below attendance numbers before the pandemic. Organizers are hoping that a stretch of home games by the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Pittsburgh Pride festival centered on the North Side will help boost attendance this year. Aziz admitted that the festival will also be unfolding in a downtown that has seen a drop in pedestrian traffic as a result of more workers doing their jobs from home and not driving to their offices on a daily basis.
“We’re anticipating lighter crowds during the week and heavier on the weekends,” she said. “Offices are more populated than they were last year, so we’re heading in the right direction.”
This year’s festival highlights include:
n Nightly concerts on the Dollar Bank Stage. This year’s lineup of performers is Galactic, featuring Rising Appalachia, on Sunday; The Pittsburgh Symphony, on Monday; Lizz Wright, on Tuesday; Red Baraat, on Wednesday; Corinne Bailey Rae, on June 8; Mo Lowda and the Humble, June 9; Chali 2Tina and Cut Chemist, June 10; and the Taj Mahal Quartet, June 11. All concerts start at 7:30 p.m.
n “Taking Up Space,” the annual juried visual art exhibit, will be in the SPACE gallery at 812 Liberty Ave., and looks at the ways artists take up space within their practices physically, psychologically and emotionally.
n Three multidisciplinary public art attractions will be in the Backyard at Eighth and Penn, one of them being “Utterance,” a mixed-media sculpture from Pittsburgh artist Jim West.
n The Harris Theater will be hosting free screenings of the recently-released music documentaries “Little Richard: I Am Everything,” “Rewind and Play,” and “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat and Tears?”
n “Traveling While Black,” a cinematic virtual reality experience about how the movement of Black Americans was long restricted, will be at 820 Liberty Gallery.
All events are subject to change. The festival is free and wraps up Sunday, June 11. For additional information, go online to TrustArts.org/TRAF.