Chalk Festival 2024
Chalk Festival 2024
Chalk Festival 2024

Guide to the 2024 Sarasota Chalk Festival & Floralia Infiorata

Expand your visual perspective and see how artists reimagine our beloved cityscapes with interactive 3D illusions, colorful flower tapestries, and chalk masterpieces at the Sarasota Chalk Festival.

Renowned pavement artists from around the world gather every November in annual pilgrimage to Sarasota's International Chalk Festival – creating a "Museum in Motion" and wonderous, interactive 3D experiences that in 2024 will include a magnificent display of flower carpets throughout Downtown Sarasota's Historic Burns Square.

3D pavement art naturally invites audiences to become a part of its intricacy, often viewed from a particular vantage point. Opportunities to scribble or create mini-masterpieces at the festival, mixing beginner or up-and-coming artists with professionals makes the Sarasota Chalk Festival unique.

Insight into the famous Chalk Festival:

The Sarasota Chalk Festival is recognized for hosting the world’s largest gathering of internationally renowned pavement artists. Founded in 2007, the festival invites 150 artists hailing from 30+ countries (the furthest being Australia and Japan) to travel to Sarasota County to create masterpieces. 

For decades, Sarasota’s Chalk Festival has provided locals and visitors the opportunity to experience modern-day applications of ancient art forms created from start to finish by renowned pavement artists from around the world. Now, with decades as an annual tradition under its belt, this year’s festival-themed “Floralia Infiorata” is certain to be both spectacle and spectacular, with a multitude of ways to become one with art. 

This year's floral inspiration:

This year’s Floralia Infiorata is unlike any other year, and sure to be one of the most colorful and creative on record - using over 75,000 flowers. The festival's theme is inspired by old-world Italian Infiorata artists, an art form like the pavement art form, deeply rooted in devotion and practiced for hundreds of years in Europe and thousands of years in places such as India. 

The "Madonnari" Artists who began the performance art form in the 16th century. Widespread recognition came centuries later with the start of the International Madonnari Festival in Grazie di Curtatone in Northern Italy. The first American recognized as a Madonnari who has performed at the festival over a dozen times, Kurt Wenner, invented 3D pavement art, as documented by the National Geographic Society in 1985.

At the Sarasota Chalk Festival, master artists will use chalk and other natural materials like flowers and sand. Spectators will be invited to immerse and interact with art – with some pieces patterned in the “Madonnari” fashion, including displays of flower carpets and tapestries.

What to expect at the festival:

From Friday, November 8th to Sunday, November 10th, artists will use their imagination and talent to create art using our very own Sarasota streets and sidewalks as their canvas (held throughout Burns Square District, Downtown Sarasota, S Orange Avenue and S. Pineapple Avenue). 

•    Street corners will come alive as interactive 3D illusions 
•    3D artistry that makes the ground appear to rise above or dip below
•    Floralia Infiorata flower carpets shaped as ground tapestries by Debut Master Flower Art Maestros
•    Digital murals where artists fuse ephemeral art with technology and architecture to transform our cityscape at night 
•    A Young and Young-at-Heart interaction zone for chalk play
•    A fantastical display of native Florida flora and fauna 
•    A closing ceremony that includes human puppets and stilt walkers
•    A wine tasting (seperate tickets) and many ways to engage, including pre-workshops and single-day and multi-day passes 

Purchase your Sarasota Chalk Festival tickets here!