There will be time to murder and create. The words are painted and collaged onto a set of five entrance steps to an elaborately over-the-top front porch. The three-story, Victorian-style dollhouse is covered with a blitzkrieg of … everything. Small toys, buttons, shells, bottle caps, and other found objects have been hot-glued to its surfaces along with a loose collage of magazine cuttings, product packaging, and patterned prints. The decoration is not limited to the exterior of the house. No, the walls and floor of each interior room are decked-out, each in a different over-the-top theme.

The art piece, titled I Lost My Mind, is by Erin Harper. One hopes Ms. Harper was speaking metaphorically of both the losing of minds and murder, but she certainly found time to create. It was perhaps the most striking work at last weekend’s Art All Night, this year again at 31st Street Studios in the Strip District.

Let’s get something straight: there were boobs—lots of them—wangs too. And yes, there was at least one hoo-ha. In addition to the requisite nudes and soft-porn, other Art All Night perennial genres included sports art, paint-splattered baby dolls, skip-a-little-rope, smoke-a-little-dope doobie visions, skulls, skeletons, and zombies, visual puns, and lots and lots of renditions of the downtown Pittsburgh skyline. This being the first Art All Night since the Dobbs decision came down, women’s rights and body autonomy was an important topical issue.

These specialties are not the sum of the artwork included at Art All Night. Despite the focus of this piece, know that Art All Night also features landscapes in oil, portrait paintings, photography, ceramics, elaborate sculpture, delicate craft, terrific kids art, and all the rest. The event, of course, is so much more than paintings hung on plywood walls—the mass of people out-and-about, kids going nuts on cardboard, performance art, the drum circle under the 31st Street Bridge.

But it is this collision of the sublime, along with the ridiculous and the mundane that makes Art All Night so special. And what is most thrilling is that these individual bizarre expressions—created as jokes or under the influence of hallucinogens or mental health issues as they may—have an outlet for public exhibition.

I don’t know if there’s a gallery out there that would show Joseph Heckmann’s Brittany in a Sketchy Atlantic City Hotel, but I’m sure glad I got to see it. What was Brittany doing in Atlantic City and why is she dressed like a clown headed to aerobics? Does she really have a giant tattoo of another clown on her left leg? I want answers, sure, but Heckmann’s acrylic painting gives us that great gift of wonder—not just about the subject of the artwork, but about its creator too.

That is Art All Night’s great gift to the world—both to its event goers and its art contributors. It continues, 26 year on, to be a safe space of free expression for every kind of any person to do what they want to do and share it with everyone else. Hats off, yet again, to the fantastic crew that manages to pull this genie out of a hat year after year.