Gallery Crawl Pittsburgh Cultural District

Had a new experience / small adventure Friday evening, I met my friend Mark downtown and we participated in a Gallery Crawl. It was an excellent time and, remarkably, free.

There's a bunch of participating galleries and you walk from one to another, they all have signs outside identifying the place as part of the Crawl, you can go inside to see the artwork and often speak with the artists. Lots of different kinds of art - photography, drawings, music performances, installations, and there was an intensive fog-noise-lights room.

It was a very mixed crowd - a mix of black clothing, pierced/tattoo'd people, lots of university types, lots of 30-somethings, and a fair number of fogies.

What really impressed me was the organisation - there's a website with a PDF map of the various spots, with parking marked - it made going downtown and participating very easy. There were a lot of people there, and it was nice to see downtown thriving on a Friday night.

The most Pittsburgh-kitschy piece of the night had to be the Steelers Creche:

which I post here in my on-going campaign to prove that I haven't really been excited about a sports team since the 1969 Mets.

I hadn't seen Mark in a while, after we saw most of the galleries we had dinner at Tambellini's on Seventh and it was an excellent meal, I've never eaten there before. Very nice. The whole evening left me with "I should do this more often".

The next Gallery Crawl is Friday, July 17, 2009 5:30 PM. If you're looking for an evening's diversion and seeing a lot of different things, I recommend it.