SANTA BARBARA BOWL
The I Madonnari Italian Street Painting Festival celebrated its 34th anniversary over the Memorial Day weekend through an online festival experience. SBBowl proudly sponsored the CCP event and provided the secret location for the feature painting along the Bowl’s Scranton overlook.
This year’s featured street painting is a reproduction of a piece by Thomas Hart Benton. This 12’ x 50’ painting was created by Sharyn Chan, Ann Hefferman, and Jay Schwartz, with the assistance of Emily Hefferman.
I Madonnari is produced by the Children’s Creative Project (CCP), a nonprofit arts education program of the Santa Barbara County Education Office. The organization was the first to create a festival in North America featuring the art form of street painting. After traveling to a street painting competition in Grazie di Curtatone, Italy, CCP Executive Director Kathy Koury created the festival and the concept of sponsored street paintings as a fundraiser and produced the first local festival in 1987. The late Father Virgil Cordano and the Santa Barbara Mission’s bicentennial committee members also worked with Koury to include the I Madonnari festival in the yearlong series of official events that celebrated the Santa Barbara Mission’s bicentennial.
The festival has continued to grow and now is being replicated in more than 200 cities throughout the Western Hemisphere. In November 2019, four I Madonnari street painters — Jesse Altstatt, Ann Hefferman, Delphine Louis Anaya, and Jay Schwartz — traveled to Santa Barbara’s sister city of Puerto Vallarta to create street paintings with local artists and children. Koury has continued to work with Santa Barbara and Puerto Vallarta Sister City representatives to further develop the festival that has taken place in the city’s main plaza since 2006. The project is co-sponsored by the Santa Barbara-Puerto Vallarta Sister City Committee.
Street painting, using chalk as the medium, is an Italian tradition that is believed to have begun during the 16th century. Called “Madonnari” because of their practice of reproducing the image of the Madonna (Our Lady), the early Italian street painters were vagabonds who would arrive in small towns and villages for Catholic religious festivals and transform the streets and public squares into temporary galleries for their ephemeral works of art. With the first rains of the season, their paintings would be gone. Today, the tradition lives on in the village of Grazie di Curtatone, Italy, where the annual International Street Painting Competition is held in mid-August.
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Photo Credit: Ashly Othic
