Festival for the People

October 13–28
2018

Location: Artist studios

Cherry Street Pier is celebrating its opening with Festival for the People, a three-week-long event produced by Philadelphia Contemporary.

The festival will feature a dynamic set of participatory programs, events, sculptures, installations, videos, and banners, which will activate all of the different spaces within Cherry Street Pier, as well as neighboring Race Street Pier. In keeping with the mission of Philadelphia Contemporary, Festival for the People aims to expand the public conception of what contemporary art is and can be across a range of mediums and subjects.

Each of the three weekends will be programmed according to specific themes: The People’s Analog Culture Weekend, The People’s Embodied Culture Weekend, and The People’s Digital Culture Weekend. In addition to exciting programming on the weekends, Cherry Street Pier and Race Street Pier will be filled with installations including:

  • Two interactive sculpture installations in collaboration with the Montreal-based group Creos: Impulse, an installation of seesaws designed by CS Design and Lateral Office, and Prismatica, a group of colorful spinning prisms by Raw Design.
  • Typewriter Poetry: Interactive poetry installation inside Cherry Street Pier with Philly Typewriter featuring live activations by Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela, Autumn Konopka, Warren Longmire, Trapeta B. Mayson, Frank Sherlock, and Jacob Winterstein.
  • Erlin Geffrard: ‘Banners for the People’
  • Video Installations by Michel Auder, Andrea Bowers, Hiwa K., Yoshua Okón, Jennifer Levonian, Maider Lopez, and Tintin Wulia.
  • Selections from Creative Time’s ‘Pledges of Allegiance’ (Tania Bruguera, Alex Da Corte, Jeremy Deller, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Marilyn Minter, Jayson Musson, Yoko Ono, Trevor Paglen, and Rirkrit Tiravanija).

Funding for Festival for the People was generously provided by the William Penn Foundation. It is completely free and open to the public. Full details about the Festival can be found here.