Chalk It Up festival seeks to keep Sacramento art community thriving for years to come
Thousands went to Fremont Park in midtown Sacramento to watch artists transform the sidewalk into vivid masterpieces over the Labor Day weekend.
At the annual Chalk It Up festival, organizations and individuals pay $250 to sponsor one of the 240 squares surrounding the park and volunteer artists use that square as a blank canvas. This is Chalk It Up’s 34th year of putting on the public art festival, which raises money for local youth art education. The nonprofit has distributed more than $80,000 in grants to local schools and arts programs since 2012.
Within the colorful perimeter, the festival hosts interactive art activities for families and dozens of local restaurants and artisans. Event organizers said that while they are grateful for the corporate sponsorship of Taco Bell Cantina and Dignity Health, they wanted to make sure that the festival is populated with local vendors selling their own work.
Fees collected from the vendors help offset the cost of holding the event, while all merchandise sales, donations and sidewalk sponsorships go to grants that fund field trips, art supplies and creative enrichment programs at Sacramento-area schools.
By Sunday afternoon, most of the artworks were well on their way to completion. Subject matter ranged from parodies of fine art, pop culture references, Sacramento landmarks and even prompts as vague as “galaxy cats.”
That’s the theme Susan Stewart, owner of Strapping Store, chose for her square this year. She has sponsored Chalk It Up squares at past festivals but decided this year to try her hand at drawing her own work. She enlisted the help of employee Lucia Colombo, who is also a fine art major in her last semester at Sacramento State.
Their colorful cats in space caught the attention of many passersby, and both were happy with how their chalk creation was coming along. In addition to the creative success, Stewart said she was happy to support the nonprofit’s mission.
“I think that art is super important to a city, and if you lose that you lose a lot of your culture and you lose a lot of personality, and then you become a cookie cutter like everything else,” she said. “We are a city. We should support our artists, support things like this, get people out, and support small businesses.”
Generations of artists and volunteers
For many of those responsible for the event, the effort is a labor of love rooted in a deep appreciation for the annual festival going back decades.
Executive director of Chalk It Up, Christy Jourdan, enjoyed the festival back in the ’90s, when she and her friends would spend most of their time in the beer garden enjoying live bands. Their attendance stayed consistent as she and her friend group had kids. In the 2010s, Jourdan started volunteering in the beer garden and became more involved through the next several years, eventually taking over as executive director in 2018.
In addition to the nonprofit’s goal of supporting new generations of artists, Jourdan is also focusing on bringing up a new crop of volunteers to keep the tradition alive. She still imagines herself enjoying the beer garden for years to come.
“We’re slowly bringing on the next generation to take this on,” she said. “I told a couple of people, we’re going to get some rocking chairs so we can sit in the beer garden and watch the bands as we get into our 60s.”
Volunteer Shawn Peter, whose band Ghost Town Rebellion is a mainstay in the capital region’s music scene, said that Chalk It Up has been one of his favorite local festivals since he started attending in its early years. He credits the festival, alongside other artist-led community events like concerts in the park and the farmers market, with helping to revitalize the city’s core into what it is today.
“In the late ’80s, early ’90s, when downtown-midtown was a desolate place, the only people that were moving here, because it was cheap, were artists,” he said. “This is one of the oldest of those events that is still going, and it’s just beautiful and family-oriented.”
The festival wraps up with its final day Monday.
This story was originally published September 1, 2024 at 2:14 PM.
