Everything, everywhere, all at once (kind of)

The 2024 Arts First Festival brought campus concert halls, galleries, and common areas to life for an exuberant five-day celebration of student, faculty, and staff creativity. The annual festival, produced by the Office for the Arts, showcases art in all its mediums and genres, with an array of music and theater performances, public exhibits, and hands-on activities.

In Paine Hall on Saturday, seniors Lucas Gazianis and Joshua Fang faced off in a “piano duel,” exchanging jazz licks from side-by-side pianos.

Gazianis, who had played with the Harvard Jazz Orchestra the night before, said he likes to keep one foot in the music world even while being a social studies concentrator. He likes the feeling the festival brings each year.

“I’m just walking around the Yard and the Science Center Plaza enjoying lots of different great music,” Gazianis said. “I feel great; it’s beautiful outside. There are so many talented students doing such different things.”

The event, which ended April 28, also featured a four-show run of “Little Shop of Horrors,” performed by the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club, a human-AI collaborative fashion show, and an ensemble of four cellists performing a Disney song medley.

At Thursday night’s drag show, nationally acclaimed performer Pattie Gonia led a high-energy evening of performances by students, and on Wednesday night, Kevin Young ’92 was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal

Taylor Fang ’25, Arts First’s student producer and student poet, participated in the Arts Medal ceremony, asking Young about the role of memory in his work during the Q&A session.

Fang, an English concentrator with a secondary in computer science, said she likes the sense of community the festival creates on campus.

“The fact that there’s so many different mediums means that there’s all these different ways of engaging,” Fang said. “I don’t think there’s only a unifying aspect to art, I also think it allows us to have different perspectives and opinions. Through art we can have a more open-minded and understanding dialogue since it’s not coming at issues head-on, but through other ways of expression.”