Floating Lanterns Will Light Up the Night Sky Next Month!

Glowing paper mache lanterns return to the skies on Saturday, September 21 for the 13th annual Morningside Lights Festival. Starting at 8 p.m., handmade lanterns will fill the night in an outdoor procession from Morningside Park to the Columbia University campus.

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Participants can join at the starting point in Morningside Park parallel with 116th Street, or at any point on the route. The procession path is approximately one mile and is expected to reach Columbia’s campus at 8:45 p.m. Lantern carriers should plan to arrive at 7 p.m. for a rehearsal at 120th Street and Morningside Avenue.

The festival will be a culmination of a week of free neighborhood art workshops where community members are invited to come and make their own lanterns. The lantern-building workshops will take place daily from September 14-20 at the Miller Theatre on 2960 Broadway.

The workshops are open to all backgrounds and abilities, with tasks geared toward older kids (10+) and adults. Registration is required and opens on September 4. The workshops and festival itself are presented by The Arts Initiative and Miller Theatre at Columbia University School of the Arts.

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Every year the festival selects a theme, and this year’s theme is “IN RETROSPECT: 100 Years of New York Art.” According to an Aug 5 press release, this theme was chosen to “celebrate how a century of New York art has shaped our image of where and how we live.” Festival artistic directors Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles invite festival participants to “bring on your WPA murals and graffiti walls, your serene abstractions and subversive comics! Give us your Pop Art and Punk zines, your Hip-Hop and Harlem Renaissance, your moody urban realists and post-modern provocateurs, prominent public installations, and underground outsider arts!”

To find out more and to register for lantern-making workshops, visit morningside-lights.com.