MUSIC - ART - FOOD - COMMUNITY - DRONE LIGHT SHOW
FREE COMMUNITY EVENT
Day time activities, food vendors, live music, and more!
12:00pm - 5:45pm - Daytime Activities & food
5:45pm - Opening Acts
8:00pm - Albany Symphony Concert
Immediately following the concert - Drone Light Show
Jump to Accessibility Information
Daytime Activities
SFM Skatepark activities from noon to 2pm
Chalk Mural (12:00 PM – 2:00 PM, outside the pump track)
Spike Ball (12:00-2pm, adjacent to skate park)
Nets and equipment to be set up in a designated area within the park
Skate Clinic (12:00 PM – 2:00 PM, skatepark flats)
A mini skate clinic will take place on the flat area
Bellamy Harbor Park Activities Starting at 2:30pm
Slow-Looking Water Walks with Sarah Cameron Sunde: 2:30, 3:30, and 4:30pm
Rome Art Association - Community Art Show Art Display in Terminal Building
Rome Art Association - Kids Art Activities near Terminal Building
Rome Historical Society - Display Tent
Rome Waterways and Trails Advocacy Group - Information Tent
3:00pm- 5:30pm: Albany Symphony - Open Rehearsal
5:00-7:00pm: Sip and Paint with The Thirsty Painters under the big tent
5:45pm-7:15pm: Opening Acts
8:00pm-9:30pm: Albany Symphony Concert
9:30pm-9:40pm: Drone Show
Food Vendors
2:30pm-9:30pm:
FoodZone – Filipino cuisine
Chimo’s Catering – Local Rome favorites
Scotty’s Hotdogs – Traditional hotdogs, burgers
Sugar Ray’s – Smashburgers, pulled pork and fried pickles
Copper City Brewing Company – Local brewery
Brian Freeman – Light up kids’ toys
Accessibility Information
Accessible Parking:
The parking lot directly adjacent to Bellamy Harbor Park will be designated for accessible parking use only.
Access aisles for 6-8 spaces in the parking lot.
The stage and activities are 500 feet from the accessible parking lot.
Quiet/Sensory Area:
Albany Symphony will provide a sensory area under a tent with various amenities including noise reduction headphones and fidget toys.
While the area will not be completely quiet, the area will be staffed with resources available.
Seating:
Guests are encouraged to bring a blanket or chair! There will be a small amount of bench seating.
Wayfinding:
There will be signage directing to the stage, art building, the quiet area, accessible seating, parking lot, and accessible bathrooms.
Restrooms:
Portable restrooms will be available at the site near the entrance bridge including ADA Accessible or better. Check Site Map here for visual location.
Sound:
The concert will be lightly amplified so that everyone on the lawn can hear, but not as loud as traditional outdoor concerts.
ASL Interpretation:
There will be ASL interpretation of the concert so that everyone can come to feel the beat and enjoy the concert. Albany Symphony will be performing a number of works with lyrics or spoken text - the text will also be available online.
For questions regarding accessibility, please contact Tori Conner: Toric@albanysymphony.com
Parking and Additional Information
Parking
Parking is available within proximity to the event. There is a series of 4 large parking lots between Race Street and Mill Street. There is an additional large parking lot off Mill Street.
Animals
Service animals shall be allowed on site. Other animals shall be allowed onsite on a leash no more than 6 feet long and under direct supervision of owner at all times unless specifically prohibited by site owner. Owner is expected to clean up after their pets at all times. Animals and handlers shall comply with all host venue site requirements and precautions.
Featured Composer and Artist
Composer Jack Frerer will shape a dynamic concert that celebrates creativity, civic pride, and community stewardship, collaborating with local student performing groups to create an intergenerational musical experience. His program blends bold, expressive music with storytelling rooted in local voices and shared history, and celebrating Rome, New York as the location of the first shovelful of earth dug to create the Canal system.
Sarah Cameron Sunde is an interdisciplinary environmental artist working in performance, video, conceptual, and participatory public art. She investigates scale and duration in relation to embodiment, environmental crisis, and deep time. Her work is part of an emerging field of art made on, in, and with bodies of water in response to ecological change. It has been presented across the United States and on six continents. Sunde is a co-founder of Works on Water, a cultural leader with the World Economic Forum, and the recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship.
She was a 2025 Artist-in-Residence with the Erie Canal, and her video and photography work is currently on view in CANAL AS COLLABORATOR at the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, now through September 27.
SARAH CAMERON SUNDE
Video Installation
As a 2025 Artist-in-Residence, I studied the Erie Canal as a complex portrait of the United States itself: an innovative act of engineering built on Indigenous displacement; a waterway that created New York City as the bustling financial and cultural capital of the country but cut through entire Native communities and ecologies and paved the way for the expansionist’s dangerous propaganda of “Manifest Destiny.”
Through photography, video, mapping, and performance, I approach the canal as both a monument and a wound, a machine and a landscape, a dream and a consequence. My work considers the canal not as a nostalgic artifact but as a temporal, living system whose currents still shape the present. This system continues to organize bodies, economies, and histories, and has the potential to move towards reconciliation and be re-envisioned for the future -- if we slow down and pay attention.
— Sarah Cameron Sunde
SURRENDER
2025
Sarah Cameron Sunde and Jeremy Dennis (Shinnecock Nation)
HD digital slideshow, 40 images
2 minutes, 40 seconds
In this series of photos with the Erie Canal, Sunde places her body in direct relation to the water and reaches for it - as witness, as question, as offering. On the cusp of winter giving way to spring, before the canal opened to boaters, Sunde and Dennis explored several sites along the canal's central section.
Sunde situates herself at the water’s edge, surrendering to its presence and history, acknowledging the immense human effort that carved it into the land, the environmental manipulation that took place, and the devastating displacement of the Haudenosaunee people. Dressed in the canal’s emblematic colors of blue and yellow, she reaches toward the water not to claim it, but to ask: can there be reconciliation between our engineered past and an ecological future? What does it mean to reimagine the Erie Canal now, 200 years after it was built? What does the water want?
This quiet gesture of presence and inquiry is a bodily recognition of the systems we’ve built and the waters we’ve altered. Sunde collaborates with photographer Jeremy Dennis, who captures the encounter, holding space as time passes.
Drone Show
Painter Jenny Kemp explores abstraction through systems of line, color, and repetition that balance fluidity with structure. Her paintings often begin with a single gesture that unfolds into layered forms through subtle shifts in rhythm and scale, creating compositions that evoke movement, memory, and transformation.
Special thanks to Adept Advancements for bringing this sky-breaking drone light show to life!
An Erie Canal Bicentennial Event
DID YOU KNOW?
Bellamy Harbor Park is where the Erie Canal was first dug in Rome, NY and the near the location of two forts that proceeded the historic Fort Stanwix.
More about Bellamy Harbor Park:
Bellamy Harbor Park in Rome, NY is situated next to the Mohawk River and Erie and Barge Canals. This park is filled with canal history as the first shovelfuls of earth that became the Erie Canal were dug in the vicinity. Today, it is the intersection of the modern Barge Canal and its largest feeder, the Mohawk River.
Park Trails connect to the larger Erie Canal Trailway/Empire State Trail System and the water is park of the Erie Canal Water Trail. The park is bike friendly with racks about to lock your equipment to. A kayak launch is available for those wanting to paddle and explore or fish. There is a large frontage for docking the boats of those traveling the canal. A welcome center available in the summer for both cyclists and boaters. There are picnic tables for those who'd like to have a meal with a view and there are many restaurants available in the area that provide delivery.
Scattered throughout the park and its connecting trails are markers and signs dedicated to the original Erie Canal, trade along the Mohawk River, and the historic forts built in the location.
Fort Stanwix National Monument sits 1 mile walking distance from the location, via Mill Street and Dominick Street.