I Madonnari was the name given to street painters in 16th- and 17th-century Italy, itinerant artists who traveled from town to town and city to city rendering images of the Madonna on sidewalks and in public squares. Like street musicians, the "Madonna painters" supported themselves by small donations — usually coins thrown to them by appreciative passers-by and festival-goers. Using chalks and handmade pastels, the artists sometimes created works of remarkable majesty and scale. But the art was always ephemeral, vanishing with the first rain.
Today, the tradition of street painting lives on in cities
across Europe and in a growing number of communities
in North America. 2009 marks the 22nd anniversary
of the I Madonnari Festival in Santa Barbara,
California. When it started in 1987, it was the
only street painting event of its kind in the
United States. Today, the three-day
event, held
each Memorial Day weekend in the plaza in front
of Santa Barbara's historic mission, draws crowds of 25,000 or more from around the world.
The art ranges from small chalk drawings by local
artists to large-scale street murals by nationally
recognized street painters. There is also a special
chalk-drawing area for young artists.
I Madonnari is a fundraiser for the Children's Creative Project, an innovative program that provides visual and performing arts education to public schools in and around Santa Barbara. At a time when arts education has been all but eliminated from school budgets, entrepreneurial communities have to take matters into their own hands. The I Madonnari Festival represents one of the more successful such initiatives — a community-building effort aimed at both making art and ensuring its survival in the local school system.
This photoessay brings together images from 2006-2008. Some of them are included in the cover story of the Spring 2009 Broughton Quarterly, a travel and lifestyle magazine.