When seeing red is a good thing: ODU brings back hit street event with Mars Fest this weekend

Last year’s Museum of the Moon festival, organized by the Barry Art Museum at Old Dominion University, was supposed to be a one-off.

Featuring a giant inflatable moon sculpture suspended 10 feet above the ground, the free, open-air public arts festival drew around 12,500 people, far more than organizers expected.

“It really was supposed to be this one-time, pop-up experience that put the museum on the map, got people engaged,” said Charlotte Potter Kasic, the museum’s executive director. “As soon as we were done and wiped our brow, it was like, ‘That was awesome. Now let’s get back to being a museum and putting together traditional exhibitions that exist inside white cubes.’ ”

But ODU’s new president, Brian Hemphill, had other ideas.

“President Hemphill pulled me aside,” Kasic said, “and he was like, ‘You just started an annual public art festival.’ I was like, ‘I did?’ ”

He said, ” ‘That’s the kind of energy we want to be bringing.’ “

From Friday through Sunday evenings, the Barry will host Mars Fest, featuring another giant installation by the same artist, Luke Jerram, floating on 43rd Street outside the museum. This one is about 72 feet around (1.5 times as tall as the Hollywood sign) and depicts the valleys, mountains, craters and volcanoes gracing the surface of the red planet.

The festival has doubled in size — from one city block to two — with three days of dance and music performances, the release of a specialty beer (Red Planet Red Lager from Norfolk’s COVA Brewing Co.), talks by guest lecturers, and games and hands-on activities, including some provided by NASA.

The fact that the second year of the festival is anchored by an installation by the same artist as in the first is another piece of serendipity, albeit one that Kasic doesn’t plan to repeat.

Jerram was one of the international artists included in a virtual lecture series Kasic organized during the height of the pandemic. She’d corresponded with him before regarding glassblowing in her previous role at the Chrysler Museum of Art, and collaborated with him when the museum brought his art installation “Play Me, I’m Yours” — publicly placed pianos — to Virginia Beach.

Jerram mentioned The Museum of the Moon several times in his talk, which resonated so deeply that museum founders Carolyn and Richard Barry called Kasic the same day to tell her they wanted to bring the piece to Norfolk.

At the opening of the festival last year, Clayton Turner, the director of NASA’s Langley Research Center, helped “turn on” the exhibit at the launch event, and told Kasic he hoped for another of Jerram’s existing works to make an appearance.

“He turned to me and said, ‘Next year, I want you to bring ‘Mars.’ We’re doing the Artemis mission, it’s going to be perfect,’ ” Kasic said. “Mars,” another of Jerram’s works, features detailed NASA topographical imagery of the red planet, with each centimeter representing 10 kilometers of the surface of Mars, according to information provided by the artist.

“At the time I was like, ‘Yeah, we’re not doing this again,’ ” Kasic said.

When Hemphill told her otherwise, with less than a year to put together an even bigger and better festival and with a tie-in to NASA’s Artemis I mission, the choice was obvious.

This summer, NASA made the first launch attempt for Artemis 1, which NASA describes as “the first in a series of increasingly complex missions that will enable human exploration to the Moon and Mars.” The series of missions includes one to land the first woman on the moon in 2024 — which will be the first time a human has set foot on its surface since 1972. Successful moon exploration, NASA scientists have said, will pave the way for the first humans on Mars.

“Well, Luke Jerram it is, second year in a row,” Kasic said. “Next year, it’s totally not Luke Jerram … don’t get too comfortable.”

That shift may be foreshadowed this year by the range of performances and events, which Kasic described as “totally trippy.”

“It’s getting really really weird, in a good way,” she said. Last year, the show was “surreal but beautiful,” she said, and this year, the team decided to lean into “sci-fi and strange.”

The festival’s timing, leading up to Halloween, might be inspiring some of the enthusiasm, Kasic acknowledged. Along with interactive exhibits, performances and talks, there will be a fashion show featuring custom costumes made by ODU students, along with a costumed contingent from MarsCon, which describes itself as Tidewater Virginia’s longest-running convention. The Monarch Marching Band will perform “Thriller” in the streets. Even the facilities and landscaping students have gotten involved, and the parking carts will be turned into “Rover 1″ and “Rover 2.”

“It’s just turned into, like, a massive, wild, fun, expanding thing,” Kasic said. “I think one of the things that’s really cool about it is that we have all these incredible people we can partner with and collaborate with.”

“Most of the people who are working on this are completely volunteering, and it’s just … a passion project,” she added. “I think that people feel that when they come.”

Katrina Dix, 757-222-5155, katrina.dix@virginiamedia.com

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If you go

When: 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Friday through Sunday

Where: Around and inside the Barry Art Museum, 1075 W. 43rd St., Norfolk

Tickets: Free

Details: tinyurl.com/marsfest22, 757-683-6200