Pittsburgh is literally on track as one of the nine stops for “Station to Station: A Nomadic Happening.”

An LED-emblazoned train loaded with an artist-driven collaboration of contemporary art, experimental music and film will arrive Sept. 8 at Pennsylvania Station, Downtown, for a one-night extravaganza of site-specific artwork, performances and food.

Multimedia artist Doug Aitken based the project on the idea of a nomadic happening — a series of experiences that move across the landscape by rail.

“The idea of the train seemed like such a fascinating way to realize this,” Aitken writes. “The train system runs across the American landscape like untapped arteries. I was interested in using the train to become a nomadic broadcast tower, broadcasting new and experimental culture while tapping into unknown and amazing creators from the locations in which the train stops.”

Pittsburgh will be the second stop on this rail journey that begins Sept. 6 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and ends Sept. 28 at the 16th Street Station in Oakland, Calif.

Some events at each stop will be admission-free.

But in each city, there also will be a $25 ticketed Happening with proceeds from the combined events to be shared by Station to Station’s partner institutions, such as the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh was chosen as one of the stops because of its relationship with Aitken, whose video “Migration (Empire)” was part of the Carnegie Museum’s 2008 International and later purchased by the museum.

“It’s just a really exciting project,” says Maureen Rolla, deputy director of the Carnegie Museum of Art. “There are going to be some major artists participating in this project.”

Specific art works and performers are still in the planning stages; the Happening in Pittsburgh will feature performances by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, No Age, YOSHIMIO (OOIOO / Boredoms) & Hisham Akira Bharoocha (Soft Circle / Boredoms) & Ryan Sawyer (Lonewolf) TRIO. Others will be announced.

Also featured at each Happening will be five nomadic sculptures created by Kenneth Anger, Urs Fisher, Liz Glynn, Carsten Höller and Ernesto Neto, and a procession organized by Meshac Gaba with a dozen participants wearing different African headdresses.

Though the exact location of the Pittsburgh event is still undecided, Rolla says it’s expected to be close to the train station, possibly in the rotunda or inside lobby of the Pennsylvanian apartment building.

“It’s a very ambitious project because it has a lot of pieces,” says Jonathan Gaugler, media-relations specialist at Carnegie Museum of Art, who has been coordinating publicity with Station to Station publicists. “It’s nothing like the scale of other projects (Aitken) has done. He has fantastic people he (is) working with. I thought it was ambitious, brilliant and exciting.”

It was also a project that was easy to say yes to, says Irene Hofmann, the Phillips director and chief curator for SITE Santa Fe, a contemporary art gallery in Santa Fe, N.M., which has a large community of artists.

“It was such a unique project with so much that aligns with our mission and our interest in new media arts,” Hofmann says. “Just the alignment and visibility with a project that includes so many institutions bigger than us is nice.”

Gaugler had similar thoughts: “It puts us in line with museums like the Walker (in Minneapolis) and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art … positioning Pittsburgh as a vibrant art scene. This will generate a lot of excitement about contemporary art and how to view art in a nontraditional way.”

Tickets for the each of the Happenings, including the one in Pittsburgh, are now on sale for $25 at www.stationtostation.com/tickets/.

Alice T. Carter is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. She can be reached at 412-320-7808 or acarter@tribweb.com.

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