Arts & Culture in the Community Spring Iron Pour and Forge Festival
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ou feel an unusual warmth sitting outside on an otherwise cool, spring day. You hear the repeated clank, clank, clank of a hammer hitting an anvil. You catch the scent of fire roasted local food that’s been pit-roasting for hours and your mouth starts to water. You’re in the parking lot of an old goggle factory, standing in the shadow of its imposing brick chimney, but surrounded by the buzz of modern city life. Then, you notice the sound of rushing wind as it passes through a furnace and is super-heated to over 2,000 degrees. Even from a distance you can feel the intense temperature. The excitement is building, the sun is setting, and soon it will be time to pour heavy metal, liquid and hot like lava, into fantastical forms. These are the sensations at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts (GoggleWorks) during their Spring Iron Pour and Forge Fest: a celebration of fire and all it can create. Returning on April 30th after a two-year hiatus, GoggleWorks welcomes the community to its annual celebration of all things molten metal. The art center, which specializes in creating unique experiences out of the artistic process, spares nothing for this particular event. It’s like the artists’ vision of a fireworks celebration–spectacular yet sustainable, highly technical but packed with fun hands-on activities, and enjoyed by people from all across the community.
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Avenues Spring 2022
The event is free and open to the public, with the signature event–the iron pour itself–scheduled at dusk. Held annually for residents, artists, and visitors, up to 1,000 typically witness the sparks, pouring, tapping, and shaping of superheated metal. The celebration is complete with live music, food, and plenty to see and do for the whole family. This year the event expands to include blacksmithing, through a partnership with the PA Artist Blacksmiths’ Association. The iron pour process is pretty simple, although for GoggleWorks it tells a story of their mission. First, the metal. The nonprofit art center receives donations of radiators and any manner of hard iron detritus from churches, residential developers, nonprofits, and residents. This reclaimed iron gets broken down with a sledgehammer into smaller pieces by staff and students. Next, iron workers need a furnace that can get very hot. That’s where Albright College and artist-professor Brian Glaze come into play. Glaze lends his furnace and crucible to heat the old, hard metal. Glaze serves as sort of master of the ceremony, leading it as a massive, real-time learning experience. A pour team comprised of artists and makers along with students from GoggleWorks and Albright raise the iron to approximately 2,500 degrees, hot enough to turn the metal into liquid. They unplug the furnace and molten hot iron shoots sparks, spilling