
Saturday + Sunday, August 23 - 24, 2025 | 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Eleven prominent street painters from around the country take over sidewalks along Academy Street and Frantz Plaza inside Downtown Cary Park. Rendering artistic designs with chalk and tempera paints on streets, sidewalks, and town squares, these artists use impermanent materials to create dazzling chalk murals. Some of these artists are best known for their dynamic 3-dimensional illusion chalk art.
Street painters or chalk artists, most commonly called in the US, are Madonnari which comes from the word Madonna because these street painters recreated images of the Madonna. Tracing back to the sixteenth century, the Italian Madonnari were itinerant artists, many of whom had been brought into cities to work on cathedrals. When the work was completed, they needed to find another way to make a living, and thus often would recreate paintings from the church onto the pavement.
Click here to learn more about the Chalk Walk.
Artist Map
Artist information