Gallery Crawl to liven up Downtown tonight

Gallery Crawl in the Cultural District SPACE, Wood Street Galleries and More Tonight, 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Downtown Free www.pgharts.com

It’s usually a special occasion when Pittsburgh’s Downtown is still pulsating with human activity after dark. When there’s an overabundance of tight jeans and heavy, dark-rimmed glasses among the crowds for the occasion, it’s more than likely “Gallery Crawl.”

The free event is held once a season on Friday nights by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust to showcase a variety of the galleries and cultural spaces around the Penn and Liberty avenues area in Downtown.

While some of Cultural Trust’s main galleries are premiering new exhibits tonight, places like Pennsylvania Culinary Institute (808 Liberty Ave.) will be selling edible artworks of their own and Arthur Murray Dance Studio (136 Sixth St.) will be giving free lessons from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Many of the venues will have complimentary food and drinks and some live music, but, of course, there will actually be some worthwhile exhibits to check out.

Wood Street Galleries, located above a Port-Authority T station at 601 Wood St., is premiering a collection of technologically chic artworks by several artists in “Urban Living.”

“‘Urban Living’ is about the issues people confront when looking into the immediate future,” according the Murray Horne, the galleries’ curator.

As Horne described them, the artworks deal with everything from artificial intelligence to genetic cloning to the way we interact and communicate with each other and the machines in our world.

“They are sort of cute,” Horne said, describing Pascal Glissmann and Matina Hofflin’s “Electronic Life Forms [Elfs].” The “Elfs” are solar powered analog circuits that interact with the viewers.

For as adorable as they may be, Horne also sees them as posing an interesting question:

“Can we interact with something that’s essentially a machine [on an emotional level]?” Horne wonders.

At 812 Liberty Ave., Ed Parrish Jr. put together “Hot Metal,” SPACE’s latest exhibition.

“It’s essentially a wide variety of approaches to metal as a medium for the creation of art,” said Parrish, who is the gallery’s guest curator for the show.

A metal-based artist himself, Parrish put together an eclectic showcase of seemingly disparate artists and craftsman who really would never fall into the same category artistically if it weren’t for their shared use of the same medium.

“There is everything from a traditional blacksmith from Ukraine to a guy who makes fantastical comic book-like character engravings from tinfoil,” said Parrish.

Locally-based Cellofourte, a cello-driven heavy metal cover group, will also perform at SPACE tonight.

“Totally Maybe: Works By Ladyboy” also opens at 707 Penn Gallery. It’s a solo exhibition of silk-screen paintings, wall murals and fluorescent paint by a local artist who prefers to work under the moniker Ladyboy.

Next door, at 709 Penn Gallery, “Celebrations of Life and Death is West Africa,” a photography showcase by Colter Harper, will also be on display.

“[‘Gallery Crawl’] features artwork you simply would not see in other cities,” said Horne. And he’s right.

Artist group Informationlab’s “Cell Phone Disco,” which interacts with cell phone airwaves, may make Wood Street Galleries the first gallery ever to encourage cell phone usage while viewing the art.

Only at “Gallery Crawl” can one be so hip as to dig art and talk on a cell phone at the same time.

There are more than a dozen other venues and spaces in the area taking part in the crawl.

For a complete list of events, visit www.pgharts.org.