Street Painting a Shared Experience at Arts Festival

When Holly Foy talks about the Italian Street Painting Festival, she is so excited that she can’t decide where to begin. First, there is the history, rooted in Renaissance Italy. And then there is her personal history with the project. But more than any of these, she has story after story of the person-to-person connections that come when the process of art is brought into public.

“We’ve even had two proposals at the event! It’s a place of new beginnings for so many people!” she says.

The Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts is full of artists and art. There are hundreds of vendors and incredible works on display, but the artists who are there are wearing their business hats. The art has been made, and it’s a time to display and sell their work. The art-making process can be this mystery left unexplored behind the finished, polished works in the booths.

On Heister Street, since 2000, the making is not hidden away in a studio. Instead, the artists are in public and demonstrate their process from beginning to end. The community also can participate.

The studio is the street and is a shared space.

“If you want to watch art happen, that is what we do,” Foy says. “It’s such a kick to see everyone covered in chalk!”

 For this year’s Street Painting Festival, artists will present comedic twists on famous works. An evening promenade, La passeggiata, will be from 7 to 9 p.m. July 15. There will be special photo opportunities, music, and Italian scooters and motorcycles. All of the artists will be in attendance, so the community can talk with them about their work.

And there always has been a real sense of community and shared experience around the Street Painting Festival. When it rains, everyone helps each other cover the street in special tarps to preserve the works.

Foy, a high school art teacher in State College, has been the coordinator of the Italian Street Painting Festival for many years. She began first as a volunteer when a friend invited her to attend a demonstration on street painting before the festival. Foy brought some of her art students with her. Together, they joined the team as street artists.

A few years later, the coordinator, James Ritchey, invited Foy to be an assistant. Now, many years later, she remains the beloved coordinator and brings a big heart and imagination to the project. She is quick to add that she has a great team, including co-cordinator Bob Baumbach and middle school art teacher Molly Gazda.

Abby Cramer started participating in the Street Painting Festival in ninth grade after an invite from Foy, who was her teacher.

“Holly was the fun teacher,” Cramer says. “Her classroom was such a different atmosphere. We actually did things in the community, like the Street Painting Festival.”

Since she started, Cramer has missed only one Italian Street Painting Festival — when she was studying art history in Italy. Even the summer when she married her husband, she rearranged their honeymoon schedule so she could participate.

She grew up in the area and graduated from Penn State with a degree in art education in 2006. As an art history teacher in the Pennsbury School District, she doesn’t get to spend a lot of time on her own art. Her year is devoted entirely to introducing others to art — the way Foy did for her. Now, the Street Painting Festival gives Cramer a chance to create and practice and bring the people she loves into the event. It’s a homecoming for her.

The community aspect is what she loves about the event. Every year, friends and family do a piece of her painting.

“It’s not just my creation then, I get to share it,” she says.

Her favorite year was when her son was old enough to participate for the first time, and he painted a little corner with Cramer. Foy made a T-shirt of one of Cramer’s previous paintings for her son to wear.

“I love that no art is for sale [at the Street Painting Festival],” Cramer says. “We just get to engage with people around our art. People come out and see art being made, rather than a finished product. It’s such a contrast to the finished art in the rest of the festival.”

Corinne Webster has participated since she was 17 years old. It should surprise no one that Foy, Webster’s art teacher at the time, invited her to participate. Webster had done some work for the high school Renaissance Fair and enjoyed bringing her art into public.

And being a public artist at the Arts Festival was significant to her as a young, creative person.

In September 2005, she was in a serious car accident and broke her pelvis in five places and shattered her femur. During her senior year of high school, she was in a wheelchair, but she wanted to participate in the Arts Festival, so her father built her a rolling cart that she could lay on and draw without straining herself.

It took her many years to recover, and there are still lingering effects.

Her choice to participate despite the physical barriers exemplifies the deep ties that she and other artists have had to this aspect of the festival. Making art in public has great significance to fine artists who spend much of their time creating and imagining alone.

Webster’s favorite piece that she’s drawn was a reproduction of the painting “Flaming June,” in which she changed the woman’s hair to bright blue. Many people gravitated toward it.

“I think that’s a key part of the festival,” she says. “We get to break with tradition. We get a new way of seeing old things.”

She stayed in the State College area as a Penn State student and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting, drawing, and print making. Currently, she spends her days working for Strawberry Fields, a nonprofit organization that assists disabled adults and children through their “quality community-based and residential services.” She says her daily work makes it hard to keep up with her art, but she finds a way.

Being part of community art is crucial to her work, which is one of the reasons she loves being part of the Italian Street Painting festival. Some of her art is displayed in local schools, including the cafeteria murals in Ferguson Township Elementary, Mount Nittany Elementary, and Park Forest Middle School.

What started as a high school activity for both Webster and Cramer has become a meaningful artistic and community engagement. The Italian Street Painting Festival remains a way for visual artists and community members to be in the same place and have a sense of shared ownership of both process and product.

Foy captures this dynamic cycle when she says, “To leave your studio and have the sun and have a constant, kinetic audience — it changes the process!”

The Italian Street Painting Festival is 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. July 14-16, and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. July 17.