Trenton Art All Night returns year after a mass shooting: ‘It has been an emotional rollercoaster’
By Sulaiman Abdur-Rahman sulaiman@Trentonian.com
TRENTON — Talk about resolve.
A mass shooting ruined the 2018 Art All Night festival, but the free community event is making a triumphant return this year thanks to grit and popular demand.
“We are excited that it is actually happening. No Doubt,” said AAN organizer Lauren Otis, executive director of Artworks. “We don’t want the bad guys to win.”
The 13th annual Art All Night kicks off Saturday, June 15 and concludes on Sunday, June 16. Held at the familiar Roebling Wire Works building in Trenton’s North Ward, the big change at this year’s event is the introduction of enhanced security to promote safety and order.
For starters, “The whole perimeter of the event will be fenced off, and we will have two main access points,” Otis said, adding attendees will be subjected to metal-detector wanding and bag searches.
The security will be “multi-layered and multifaceted” inside and outside of the perimeter, Otis said. “The city is going to close off streets outside the event, Dye Street and South Clinton Avenue for a couple of blocks being the main ones. There is security on the outside, security on the inside.”
“I don’t want to go into a lot of detail,” Otis added, “because, to be honest, we’ve developed a security plan with the city. We’re all really good with it. It is safe to say there is going to be a lot of law enforcement there. There’s going to be private security, and I think the plan will ensure that it will be secure and safe, but it will not impinge on people. I think they will see law-enforcement presence, multijurisdictional, and they’ll see people in uniform, they’ll see people patrolling, but for the most part the event will be what it will be.”
Indeed, this year’s AAN will feature the same flavor and entertainment that historically attracts more than 20,000 attendees, including the trusty film festival.
“From the inside looking out, the event will essentially look the same,” said Art All Night event director Joseph Kuzemka. “We’ll have a lot of interactive events. We’ve got a community mural that is going to be painted. We’ll have the Murals All Night project, which is where we usually gather four to six muralists that paint these six-foot-by-12-foot murals over the course of the 24 hours. We’re also going to be working with Freedom Skate Park. They are working on a skateboard-art component with Wills Kinsley, who is a local artist.”
Compared with prior years, less bands will perform at Art All Night this year “because we did remove a stage, and then we only had so many time slots,” Kuzemka said. “We decided to simplify things a little bit and just focus our attention on the two stages and just go that route for at least this year.”
Prior years featured three stages for live music performances. “I think it’s important for us to be able to check ourselves,” Kuzemka said, “understanding that we have so many new aspects to the event this year that we can only handle so much.”
The enhanced security measures will prevent people from waltzing into the venue willy-nilly. Attendees this year will have to line up and cooperate with the screening process.
“It is going to be a whole new world because people actually will be lining up outside the event,” Otis said. “We just ask people to be patient, to be calm and patient. It’s new to everybody. You can’t just walk in and go hear your music. We just ask people to plan a little more, to plan their visit a little more, because definitely there’s a whole lot more to getting in this year.”
