Artist Jessea Gay Marie created a 12-foot by 16-foot chalk work of a Chumash cave with art on the walls
A misty morning turned to a sunny afternoon as thousands celebrated the final day of Santa Barbara’s 28th annual I Madonnari Italian Street Painting Festival at the Mission on Sunday.
With the smell of barbecued chicken wafting through the stalls of the Mission’s front lawn, visitors wandered around the margins of the hundreds of chalk artwork covering the 30,000-square-foot asphalt space below the bell towers.
Colorful drawings recreated old masters and family photos. Others were original works drawn large.
Space is ready for the I Madonnari Italian Street Painting Festival to begin today.
STEVE MALONE/NEWS-PRESS PHOTOS
The 20,000 square feet of dark asphalt surrounding the Santa Barbara Mission will bloom into a rainbow of colors today as hundreds of chalk artists join in the 28th annual I Madonnari Italian Street Painting Festival.
Artists from Santa Barbara and beyond will turn the usually utilitarian surface into a patchwork of art works, created lovingly in chalk over the next few days, with the finished works presented on Monday.
Jessea Gay Marie is the featured artist in the 28th edition of IÊMadonnari at the Santa Barbara Mission. She has participated in the event since 1997.
Jessea Gay Marie was hard at work Thursday afternoon under the two bell towers of the Santa Barbara Mission.
As this year’s featured artist for I Madonnari, the 28th annual Italian Street Painting Festival, she was working solo on a 12-by-16-foot space directly below the Mission steps. Above her dark clouds threatened rain – and would later sprinkle all over Santa Barbara – but she was ready.
Members of the Santa Barbara Arts Collective, the Summer Solstice Celebration and dignitaries, including Santa Barbara Mayor Helene Schneider, attend Friday’s ribbon-cutting for the new home of the Solstice Parade.
STEVE MALONE/NEWS-PRESS PHOTOS
Wearing hard hats and holding shovels that were more metaphorical than practical, members of the City Council, the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission and the Summer Solstice broke ground Friday afternoon on a permanent home for the parade’s workshop.
The arts community also got a year-round work space in the bargain, a result of years of work by all involved.
With Friday’s ribbon-cutting, Summer Solstice returns to the complex at the corner of Ortega and Garden streets that it used from 2005 to 2011 on a year-to-year lease.
Festival season has arrived at Oak Park and this Sunday visitors can get a taste of Jewish culture from America back to Europe and Israel with the one-day Santa Barbara Jewish Festival.
It is a chance to celebrate a worldwide heritage on a day near to another anniversary, the 66th year of Israel’s independence.
Climbing Trango Towers on the north side of the Baltoro Glacier in Baltistan, a district of the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan, in the film ‘A New Perspective Corey Rich photo
Every year the Telluride Mountainfilm Festival receives 500 submissions from all over the world, and Emily Long gets to whittle them down not just for the Fest, but working with UCSB’s Roman Baratiak, she’s reduced them to 14 gems for this touring production. The Mountainfilm in Telluride Tour comes to UCSB’s Campbell Hall this Wednesday, bringing a selection of shorts that, as the Fest’s slogan goes, “Celebrate the indomitable spirit.”
Some of that may mean the kind of crazy, death-defying adventure found in the opening film, “Cascada,” from Skip Armstrong and Anson Fogel, where kayakers head to the Mexican jungle and brave the elements and plunging waterfalls. Some include cute, animated films like “The Squeakiest Roar” by Maggie Rogers about a tiny lion cub learning to be just like mommy and daddy. (Yes, the evening is family friendly.)
Howard Hall and IMAX 3D crewfilm Lemon Shark,Ginglymostoma cirratum, in the Bahamas for “Under the Sea 3D.” Michele Hall photo
The history of offshore diving in Santa Barbara is a long and convoluted one, full of tangents and trivia. One tangent ties together Brooks Institute, underwater photography, nature documentaries, and the Santa Barbara Channel, and ties it together at the Arlington this Saturday night. The sporadic Underwater Film Festival, a loose affiliation of enthusiasts who program events every couple of years, hosts a tribute for Ernie Brooks, photographer and diver, and uses this evening as a chance to screen new and rarely seen footage, invite friends and colleagues on stage, and raise money for the Maritime Museum and the Historical Diving Society.
The brainchild of SBCC diving instructor Ed Stetson and assisted by faculty member Don Barthelmess, the evening is designed to give back to Mr. Brooks what he has given to generations of students, both in photography and in marine education. Ernie Brooks was raised in Santa Barbara — his father started Brooks Institute. The younger Mr. Brooks was president of the institution for many years as well, and has made a career passing on the excitement of both his loves.
Artist Jimmy Mirikitani is the subject of “The Cats of Mirikatani,” being presented as part of “Sharing Our Common Ground:The Fourth Annual Asian-American Film Series Mongrel Media photo
Back in the early years of Santa Barbara, the Chinese community and Japanese community lived across the street from each other, a Chinatown and a Japantown, living in perfect harmony on the site where Jimmy’s Oriental Gardens looks out over the Presidio. Those days are long gone, with only a few remnants remaining, but the Asian-American experience continues. That’s the subject of “Sharing Our Common Ground: The Fourth Annual Asian-American Film Series” put on by the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation. The three-film series starts tonight and continues until July 26, with screenings at the Alhecama Theatre.
The three films are all documentaries on the Asian-American experience and take in adopted Chinese children, Bruce Lee (born in San Francisco), and a Japanese-American homeless man who has a painful history of the internment camps in sunny California.
Featured artists at this year’s I Madonnari are Wayne and Cheryl Renshaw. The artists have been preparing their chalk works for the opening of the festival today. MIKE ELIASON/NEWS-PRESS
Lovers of street painting, the weekend you’ve been waiting for has arrived.
The 20,000-square-foot area in front of the Santa Barbara Mission will be turned into a walkable art gallery starting today when the I Madonnari chalk art festival returns for its 27th year.
The festival of the traditional Italian art form was the first in the U.S. and is an inspiration to others that have appeared since.
Once upon a time, there was a film festival in a far off distant land called Alberta, and when it was finished with its selection of short features, it would gather the best of the best and send them out into the world on tour, for other people to see. At first only a few people knew about this tour of festival films, and a place like, say, Campbell Hall at UCSB could comfortably hold those fans of mountaineering, skiing, and environmental travel videos.
But word of mouth spread, and now we find ourselves this coming week with two different film programs on two different nights — Wednesday and Thursday — filling the Arlington. It’s time for the Best of the 37th Annual Banff Mountain Film Festival.
