Art Stroll Festival: A Monthly Celebration

Lyrics

The sun dips behind the Hottle Building.
Friday. The second one.
The film set generators go quiet, but a new current starts to hum.

This isn't the old machinery's song.
It's a different kind of power.
Down Bell Street, the roll-up doors are open wide tonight.
Where cotton bales were once stacked to the beams,
canvases now bleed their color on the old brick.
The air, once thick with diesel and dust from the yard,
now tastes of turpentine and cheap wine.
A different kind of factory floor.

This is the new shift. The night shift.
Forging something else on these old anvils.
The Art Stroll Festival, a monthly industry.
We punch the clock when the gallery lights switch on.
The product is feeling, the commerce is connection,
built right on the bones of the warehouse spine.

The film crews packed up on Thursday.
Left a fake Gotham City sign leaning by a dumpster.
Tonight, the real people are the spectacle.
The artists with paint speckles on their boots, explaining their labor.
The crowds spill out from Elliott Street Pub, clutching their plastic cups.
They're buying a piece of this new assembly line.
A photograph of a ghost.
A sculpture from bent steel.

I remember the nineties. The first sparks in the dark.
Just hammers and hope, gutting the old Box Factory.
You can still hear the echo if you listen close.
That freight train whistle, cutting right through the DJ's beat.
It’s the same track, just carrying a different cargo.

This is the new shift. The night shift.
Forging something else on these old anvils.
The Art Stroll Festival, a monthly industry.
We punch the clock when the gallery lights switch on.
The product is feeling, the commerce is connection,
built right on the bones of the warehouse spine.

Midnight comes.
The doors roll down.
The streets quiet again, slick with a little spilled beer.
But the work is done.
It hangs on the walls.
Waiting for the next whistle.
Waiting for the next shift.