Join us this fall for the 4th Annual Public Arts Festival at ODU, taking place on October 11 and 12. Over two consecutive nights, the campus will be transformed as visitors encounter immersive artworks, hands-on activities, food trucks, and more. For this year’s festival, the Barry Art Museum is partnering with Pneuhaus, an art design studio based in Rhode Island. Specializing in the reimagining of public space through interactive environments, Pneuhaus creates immersive, inflatable sculptures inspired by physics, biology, and craft. Each work represents a distinct biosphere, with each piece engaging the natural world through their form and function.
This year’s festival will feature three distinct biomes from Pneuhaus. Inside the museum, visitors can encounter Cloud Lights. Suspended from the museum balcony, these abstract forms channel the forms of moving clouds while their constantly-changing lights turn the museum foyer into a rainbow of light. Outside the museum, visitors can interact with two different biomes. Fabric Prism takes inspiration from caves, and invites visitors to immerse themselves in a light-filled shelter. The second outdoor work, Canopy, represents a grove of tree-like sculptures. By riding bicycle-powered generators, visitors can transform the grove opening and closing its branches and changing its lighting. Through this engagement, visitors can not only take part in Canopy’s kinetic qualities, but can also experience first-hand the power of green electricity production. In addition to Pneuhaus, the Festival also highlights the work of ODU faculty members Brendan Baylor and Kelly Morse through an interactive exhibition that considers the industrial and ecological changes affecting the Chesapeake Bay through image and sound.
