The Sweetwater Center for the Arts has taken its annual festival that showcases Black art and culture online and outside.
The center’s 24th annual MAVUNO Festival (Mavuno is Swahili for “harvest” and “roots.”) of African American Arts and Culture, which runs through November 7, offers a self-guided walking tour of African Americans’ role in Sewickley. The festival also includes an online virtual art exhibition.
For the outside tour, participants can download a mobile app that guides them to 12 landmarks throughout the borough. Each stop has a description to read and a video to watch. It kicks off at the Tuskegee Airmen Memorial in Sewickley Cemetery.
The memorial, touted as the largest of its kind in the country, honors around 100 Tuskegee Airmen from Western Pennsylvania. Of those, eight were from Sewickley.
The two-mile tour then takes participants to churches, businesses and other Black meeting places established throughout Sewickley, including Smitty’s Bar on Walnut Street (now the site of Studio B Interior Design) and St. Matthews AME Zion Church on Thorn Street. It ends on Chadwick Street at the former Walter Raleigh Robinson American Legion, which was founded in 1922 and named after Robinson, a Leetsdale native and the first Black man to die as a result of an injury in World War I.
“I would like people to have a greater understanding of Black history overall. We can’t really understand American history if we leave out the African American story,” Barbara Pontello, Sweetwater’s chairwoman said. “We cheat ourselves by only having the narrow view taught in most schools. If we find out about something that happened in the past that we weren’t taught about, we should research it to find out more, then wonder what else we don’t know.”
For more information, visit the Sweetwater Center for the Arts online or at 200 Broad Street, Sewickley.