Aqualumina is a nighttime festival featuring music, art, performance, and a sea of illuminated aquatic creatures.
The Festival is an opportunity to celebrate our perch along the Delaware River and the interconnected beauty of the world’s rivers, oceans, coral reefs, icebergs, and rain systems. All are welcome to attend in their aquatic finest and join the festival’s lantern parade, featuring hundreds of community members donning handmade rain cloud hats, iceberg fascinators, or shibori-dyed river suits and carrying illuminated jellyfish parasols and fish lanterns.
Like ArtYard’s Hatch Festival, Aqualumina is held every other spring and brings the organization’s mission to life by inviting people not just to experience art, but to make it together. In the months leading up to the festival, participants of all ages take part in hands-on workshops to craft aquatic lanterns, costumes, and large-scale puppets. Since its debut in 2021, when a site-specific acrobatic dance performance by Brian Sanders’ JUNK illuminated refugee stories along the river, Aqualumina has evolved into an interdisciplinary celebration of water’s elemental power as both a necessity and a delicate, vital resource.
“The Aqualumina Festival was designed to bring the community together around the dreamy charms of a riverbank at dark,” said Jill Kearney, ArtYard founder and executive director.
The most recent Aqualumina was held May 9, 2026. The Festival featured performances by waterglass artist Cindertalk; steel drumming by Pan Evolution Steel Orchestra, choral music by Vermont-based FarmSong, New York-based Supruli, and NJWomensong, dance performances by Kalyan Sayre and Michael Sazonov’s Movement Lab, and a trio of illuminated sculptures by Elsa Mora.
Festival partners include visual artists Sandra Dillon, Eric Fiorito, Laura Heit, Rebecca Kelly, Kate Lambdin, Ginny Perry, Kristen Spencer, David Weinhold, and Summer Yates, as well as coLAB Arts, Frenchtown Elementary School, Frenchtown Borough, Frenchtown Business & Professional Association, Frenchtown Police, Lambertville Library, Mudtown Ceramics, the Milford-Holland EMTs, and Studio Route 29.
ArtYard’s second biennial Aqualumina Festival was held on May 18, 2024 as a celebration of water itself — as a vulnerable resource, necessity, bellwether, and mirror of the sky.
In the lead-up to the event, more than 150 community members created aquatic costumes in ArtYard’s Aqualumina Workshop and others created their own costumes at home or in workshops with partner organizations, like Studio Route 29, Frenchtown Elementary School, Secret Garden Montessori School, and coLAB Arts in New Brunswick.
The evening of the Festival, more than 500 community members donning illuminated jellyfish parasols, crocheted coral reef hats, cardboard boats, fish tank skirts, and other unique creations joined an illuminated procession along the rail trail with stops on ArtYard’s campus to experience dance and choral performances.
The festival featured a site-specific dance performance by Brian Sanders’ JUNK, musical performances by PhilHarmonia and Sister Cities Voices.
ArtYard launched Aqualumin in 2021 with a performance of Brian Sanders’ JUNK in Ancestral Lights, a site-specific outdoor dance performance illuminating refugee narratives and kindling light in a time of darkness and displacement. Ancestral Lights grew from JUNK’s residency and hugely popular open rehearsal at ArtYard in June and employs community-constructed lanterns made in the ArtYard workshop by members of our community. The music was a three-way collaboration between Brian Sandrer’s JUNK, Oran Etkin, and Mad Beatz Philly during a residency at ArtYard.
You can view more pictures of the inaugural event on this Flickr album
Photos by Laura Billingham
