SALEM – Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) features free outdoor music performances in downtown Salem from noon to 6 p.m. Sunday. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and admissions to both are free all day.
“Take in the sounds of an eclectic mix of street musicians performing at eight stages set up in downtown Salem,” reads the museum website.
The street musicians will be performing at eight stages set up outside the museum entrance at 161 Essex St. Food trucks, street vendors, a pop-up beer garden, as well as live art experiences and art making for all ages. Free parking is available at 27 Congress St. in Shetland Park with pick up in front of the Colonial House at 29 Congress St. Shuttle service is provided for those parking there.
Before the festival begins, from 10 a.m. to noon, the visitors will be able to enjoy the performance of musicians Takumi Kakimoto and Andres Guerra at a jazz brunch in the main atrium café at PEM, which will offer savory and sweet bites.
Kakimoto is a Japanese pianist and composer who was awarded a full-tuition scholarship to the Berklee College of Music, and Andres Guerra is a Venezuelan composer, arranger, and guitarist who aims to break down the stigmas of classical music. Guerra performed with a wide variety of artists, including several who were Grammy-winning.
Some of the other performers will include Lily Antonini, a contemporary and jazz musician currently attending Berklee College of Music; a bucket drummer David Bowdre; a self-described “migratory, songbird, rap seamstress, art poet” Myles Bullen; Ben Cosgrove, a traveling composer-performer whose music explores themes of landscape, place, and environment; and many others.
From noon to 6 p.m., at the museum entrance, artist Anna Dugan will be creating a mural painting, and from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., the participants will be able to create their own spinning hand drums and decorate them at the Family Art Making at Axelrod Walkway, in honor of PEM Prize recipient, Cuban composer Carlos Garaicoa.
The festival is generally held in celebration of Garaicoa, artist and the inaugural PEM Prize recipient of 2021. Each year PEM awards an artist or a group whose work extends the museum’s mission and explores the catalytic relationship between creative expression and civic engagement.
Garaicoa’s immersive exhibition Partitura at PEM featured a new kind of orchestra made up of 40 individual recordings of street musicians from Madrid and Bilbao, Spain, that radically vary in their cultural background, skill level, and musical tradition.
The event was held one week in March 2020, before the world shut down due to the pandemic, and it then reopened Aug. 1, 2021, and was on view through Feb. 6, 2022. The artist, who grew up in Havana, said that the city was one of his inspirations and he generally enjoyed lively and busy environments.
“I think cities are so rich… so full of contradictions and so full of material. Everything happens in the city,” he said.
Garaicoa will attend Sunday’s event, performing a new score created for the PEM Prize celebration. PEM Prize Street Music Festival is an outdoor community celebration hosted in collaboration with Creative Collective. The Creative Collective is a group of economic development strategists, small business supporters, and believers in the importance of the creative workforce. For more information, please visit https://www.pem.org/events/pem-prize-festival.
Oksana Kotkina can be reached at [email protected].
