Gallery Crawls

Gallery Crawls returns to Downtown Pittsburgh's Cultural District on Friday, October 30, from 5:30 to 9 PM. It's a free, quarterly open house produced by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, and it's one of those nights that draws thousands of people into the heart of the district. The whole thing is built around a simple premise: a bunch of galleries and eclectic spaces across the neighborhood open their doors at once, and you can drift from one to the next.

What sets it apart from a typical gallery opening is how it mixes the visual arts with live music, dance and spoken word. You'll find the art on the walls, but you'll also run into performances happening throughout the evening, so it's as much about what you hear and see in motion as it is about the work hanging in the rooms. The crawl is part of the Office of Public Art's wider network of self-guided walking tours of public art across Downtown, the North Shore, the Northside and Oakland, which they put together with the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council and the City of Pittsburgh's Department of City Planning. If you're already out for the crawl, those tours are an easy way to keep the art going beyond the galleries.

It also often runs alongside the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership's Night Market, which brings out local artists and food vendors to the street. Between the galleries, the performances and the market, there's plenty to do without ever leaving the district. It's free to attend, and it runs from 5:30 to 9 PM on Friday, October 30, across a variety of galleries and eclectic spaces in the Cultural District.