11/20/09 – 11/22/09 – Modonarro Street Painting Festival

Last year’s Modonarro Street Painting Festival was a huge success with its first year ever in Pier Park.  This year the festival will be held at same place in Pier Park and will feature local artists from all disciplines showing off their awesome street painting skills.

Street painting has been popular all throughout Europe since the 16th century.  Street painters in Italy were known as madonnari because they often created pictures representing The Madonna, one of the central icons of Christianity.

Madonnari were nomad artists who traveled from town to town, festivity to festivity to cover the streets with their art.  Historically, using bits of broken roof tiles, charcoal and chalk, the artists would paint images, sometimes larger than life that would wash away at the first rain.  When the festivities were over, the artists and paintings would vanish.

Today, “street-artists” use varying shades of chalk to depict their creations and several forms of media, including digital photography, video and blogs to share their work with the world.