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I Madonnari,
part Renaissance fair, part performance art, and one of Santa Barbara's
most popular open-air festivals, will once again transform the piazza
at the Santa Barbara Mission into an Italian Street Painting Festival
over Memorial Day weekend. This will be the festival’s 16th anniversary.
The festival will open at noon on Saturday, May 25 with a ceremony and
will run from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. through May 27. Admission and parking
are free. New this year will be an expanded street painting area for
children, just west of the Mission. The first 100 of the 600 available
children’s squares will be provided free on a first-come, first-served
basis. The remaining children’s squares can be purchased for a
nominal fee.
The festival is a benefit for the Children's Creative Project (CCP),
coordinated through the County Education Office to sponsor special fine
arts programs in local schools.
The CCP became essential as more and more school districts were forced
to cut arts offerings from their budgets. To fill that void, the Children’s
Creative Project retains artists-in-residence who travel to classrooms
throughout the county, and performance artists who also tour the schools.
The cost-effective program provides a multiplier effect for local districts:
For a small investment of pooled resources, thousands of students are
able to benefit from arts education.
I Madonnari is another good example of this multiplier effect,
and a real celebration of the arts. It includes music, food, and an
Italian street market, in addition to the unique chalk paintings that
serve as its inspiration.
Street painting, with chalk as the medium, is an Italian tradition dating
to the 16th Century. The early Italian street painters—called "I
Madonnari" because of their practice of reproducing the image
of the Madonna—were vagabonds who would arrive in small towns and
villages and transform the sidewalks and public squares into temporary
galleries for their ephemeral works of art. With the first rains of
the season, their paintings would be gone.
With I Madonnari, the Children's Creative Project has brought
this delightful public art form to the West Coast. For the festival,
a grid is drawn on the pavement in front of the Old Mission, dividing
the piazza into squares that bear the names of sponsors. These sponsors
include both large and small businesses, organizations, and private
individuals.
As the public watches, local artists fill these pavement canvases with
elaborate compositions in unexpectedly vibrant colors. Some squares
are sponsored by business partners for the express purpose of enabling
school children to work with the medium and create their own chalk paintings.
The festival is a good example of the power of local partnerships, with
major support from private industry, service clubs, and government agencies.
The Children’s Creative Project is a good example of pooling resources
at the county level to help fill the void creative by budget constraints,
and to benefit local school districts and children directly. I salute
the hard work and creative energy that is evident in all these projects,
and the positive impact they have on the young people of our county.
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