(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) - This year is our fourth annual Public Arts Festival.

And for this one, we are featuring biomes.

We're thinking about the Earth sciences.

We have a lovely piece here.

They are building these beautiful tree canopies that open and close, but they're human-powered, so you need to ride a bike in order to open and close it.

And then over here we have a piece called Fabric Prism.

This biome, we're thinking about caves, underground structures.

And then inside we have something called the Cloud Lights.

Cloud Lights are these beautiful, atmospheric, sort of brand new clouds.

It's actually their newest piece.

They created it just for us today.

We're thinking about the atmosphere.

So the group is a collaborative group called Pneuhaus, PNEU, like pneumatic, like built with air.

They're architects, engineers, and sculptors that all kind of came together to create these beautiful pieces and it's really fitting because this is their 10 year anniversary.

And we have their oldest piece right here.

This is actually gonna be decommissioned after this.

This is it's final inflation, and their newest piece.

So it's sort of like we kind of bookend their whole careers here, and they've sent down some of their people, and they've helped us set everything up.

And it's been wonderful working with them.

Over here we have some ODU Professors, Brendan Baylor and Kelly Morse.

They're partners in life and in art, and they're doing a piece called Sound Mapping.

And they're inviting the public to take sounds from their own waterways.

And all of those get put up into the cloud into this new website, that allows people to think and hear our waterways right here in Hampton Roads.

And they've done all of that inside of a shipping container.

So the Public Arts Festival began really organically during COVID.

People couldn't come inside, so we decided to create an outdoor street festival that would be safe for everybody to still experience art.

People loved it.

And they decided, the new president here at Old Dominion University, President Hemphill said, "Let's do it again."

We started in the moon, we went all the way out to Mars, then we landed back on Earth last year with Fantastic Planet, those big people that landed here.

And now we're delving into the Earth sciences.

There is actually one other thing I do wanna tell you guys about.

We're closing the museum for a massive expansion.

We're doubling the footprint of our museum.

We've raised 90% of the $23 million goal for us to break ground, so we're breaking ground next spring.

This sort of was necessitated through a major gift by the Waitzer family.

They doubled our collection, and now we need to double our gallery space to match that, but don't worry, the festival will be here next year.

It's still happening.

The museum just won't be open.

And we'll go out into the community, and be popping up places, but it's very exciting, and I'm really excited for the next chapter here at the Barry Art Museum.

(indistinct chattering)