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Crowds savor ethnic delights at Summer Festival of the Arts
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Andrew Check, 18, of Youngstown plays the cimbalom, a Hungarian instrument, during YSU’s Summer Festival of the Arts. Check played the song “Priest Pipe” on Sunday as others sang along during the final day of the event.
By Robert Guttersohn
YOUNGSTOWN
The 90-degree weather couldn’t keep the crowd away Sunday at the final day of the Summer Festival of the Arts at Youngstown State University.
Instead, they turned to the shaded Kilcawley Amphitheater fountain, where kids and adults jumped or dipped their feet into the cool water. But plenty still walked the campus, shopping for art, relishing ethnic food and spotting solar flares.
Bill Pearce from the Mahoning Valley Astronomical Society and Pat Durelo, head of the YSU Planetarium, set a telescope next to the Richard Pirko Memorial Sundial aimed toward the sun.
“Do not do this any other time,” Durelo said to children of a family waiting in line to look at a filtered view of the sun.
Around its edges were tiny bumps. In reality they were solar flares millions of miles long.
“Makes you feel pretty significant,” Pearce said sarcastically.
The planetarium was open all weekend for the fest, playing shows about stars, black holes and more.
The Festival of Nations section of the event was a collage of culture as Jeff Green and his band played extended jazz covers of Eric Clapton’s “Change the World” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” in the amphitheater.
Simultaneously only a hundred feet away, 18-year-old Andrew Check sat under a cricked tent tapping the strings of his cimbalon while Margie Dubosk, 82, sang “Priest Pipe,” a Hungarian tune.
“It’s kind of like the great grandfather to the piano,” Check said of the cimbalon, the national instrument of Hungary.
It’s a long and wide instrument with sever cords that when struck let off different tones. Check, who is Hungarian and has played the cimbalon for eight years, can play 96 songs but claims there’s still much more to learn.
“With something as complex as this, it’s almost impossible to master,” Check said.
The art ranged from cuts of metal to cuts of paper. Tim Martin, of Sidney, Ohio, sculpts eccentric copper fixtures using metallurgy techniques usually reserved for engineers. In one piece, he manipulates the copper into a crane standing upright among tall blades of grass.
In another, the copper becomes bamboo stalks with water dripping down from leaf to leaf until falling into the basin at the bottom.
Kelly Burt’s black-and-white stenciled images added a dimension to an often two-dimensional art world.
She takes a piece of black cardstock paper, sketches the images on the back and cuts out parts with an X-Acto knife. Separating the etched imaged from a layer of muslin with a piece of glass allows the images to stand out in a foreground.
At 5 p.m., food vendors and artists began to tear down their tents. But Green and his band kept playing, and a crowd stayed to listen.