Palo Alto Festival of the Arts – Italian Street Painting

Italian Street Painting Expo

Bellissimo! World-renowned chalk artists return to this year’s Palo Alto Festival of the Arts’ Italian Street Painting Expo for the 17th year. Each masterpiece will be carefully choreographed — numerous hours of painstaking preparation that is slowly revealed over the two-day event. The anticipation alone brings festival-goers back a second day to watch these talented artists create 100-square-foot and larger images. And kids can get involved, too, by creating their own chalk canvases in the special Chalk-a-Lot area.

Tasso Street starting at University will once again provide the canvas for this unique and beautiful art, where pastel paintings by chalk artists throughout the state will be created on the asphalt over the festival’s run.

The Italian Street Painting Expo, proudly sponsored by Volvo Cars Palo Alto and Polestar San Jose, will amaze visitors with a variety of themes that reflect each artists’ passion of this unique art form. Replicas from Old Masters to anamorphic styles (artwork that appears three-dimensional from a distance or as seen through the camera lens) will cover one full block on Tasso.

This Italian tradition dates to the 1500s where street painters became known as Madonnari for creating images of the Madonna on public streets. It has since flourished throughout Europe and the United States bringing many more innovative artists to the scene to try their hand at chalk painting, or pavement art as it’s known in England.

The word “canvas” takes on a whole new meaning if you're a street painter. In fact, this art form – using only chalk pastels – is traditionally very fleeting. Hours and hours are spent creating these works of art; only to have them washed away in a single hour, as if they had never existed.