Number of special events planned for weekend
BROWNSVILLE – Today is Kennywood Day in Brownsville, but that’s just the start of the community activities planned for this weekend. “This week is a very big week for us because a lot of people are coming home for Kennywood Day and for their class reunions. We want them to see the best we have and the new wharf,” said Lou Orslene, the new executive director of the Brownsville Area Revitalization Corporation.
Orslene said a variety of activities have been planned for Brownsville History Month at the Flatiron Building and Melega Art Museum.
“We have a bunch of people from the Class of 1936 who have given us mementos and yearbooks, so we wanted to build our display around that,” Orslene said.
Orslene said a variety of yearbooks from the area will also be available for visitors to go through at the Flatiron Building.
Activities at the Brownsville Wharf and Riverside Park will highlight Friday. The Micarelli Trio will be performing at the wharf Friday from 6 p.m. until 8 p.m., with BARC selling ice cream and beverages on the wharf. The concert is the first in the “Music from the Wharf Summer Concert Series.”
“We’re thinking of making this our official Homecoming week and weekend,” Orslene said.
Two events are scheduled for Saturday at the Flatiron Building: a book signing by Richard Wells, author of “A Boy from Brownsville,” and the opening of an art exhibition by Charles Kovach.
The book signing will take place at the Flatiron Building from 1 p.m. until 3 p.m. Copies of “A Boy From Brownsville” will be available for purchase at the site.
From 2 p.m. until 5 p.m. the Frank L. Melega Art Museum will host an opening for an exhibit of Kovach’s artwork. The public is invited to meet Kovach and discuss his work. Several original pieces and limited edition prints will be available for sale, as well.
There will be at least 22 pieces of Kovach’s art on display, including works in graphite, pastels and photography.
“Chuck was chosen particularly for his depiction of local history,” said museum curator Patrick Daugherty. “I couldn’t think of anyone more appropriate for local history month.”
Daugherty’s parents were given one of Kovach’s prints, “Our Daily Bread,” as a present, since it shows a young woman baking bread in a beehive oven just as his mother did. Other aspects of life in the coal and coke region are also featured in the show, including one detailed drawing showing the period when steam engines were used to move coke into the ovens, while manual labor was also used entitled “Early Coke Workers.’ The technological progression is shown in “Afternoon Charge,” with electric locomotives replacing the steam.
“There have been three themes that have gone through everything I have done: appreciation for vintage architecture, appreciation for local history and appreciation for detail and authenticity,” Kovach said. “I’ve always been interested in local and regional history.”
Kovach, who lived in Ralph in German Township, until seventh grade, moved to New Salem for his teen years and now resides in Peters Township in Washington County. He lists himself as an artist, historic resource specialist and experimental anthropologist. He had formal training as an architectural engineer. His formal art training came in college when he studied architectural rendering, but he has been drawing and painting since he was a child.
“I first found myself in a position where people enjoyed what I was doing to the point they were willing to pay for it when I was in high school,” Kovach said.
To this day, he doesn’t necessarily consider himself an artist, despite having works hanging in collections across the country, including the corporate collections of U.S. Steel, Exxon and Wendy’s, as well as the Penn State University and Geneva College collections. Kovach holds degrees from both colleges. His first solo exhibition was in Uniontown in 1984. He was involved in numerous countywide projects in Fayette County during the bicentennial, including redesigning the Uniontown city seal.
“When I consider the people who are living and passed on that I consider artists, I can’t hold a candle to any of them, so I don’t think of myself as an artist,” Kovach said.
Kovach said his first introduction to working in graphite came from seeing the drawings of Paul Calle in Boys’ Life magazine when he was in grade school.