Chalk Festival Partners with SCVB, Opera

Just last month the . The city commission changed grant funding requirements that disqualified the festival from receiving .

On Tuesday afternoon at the Sarasota Opera House, Chalk Festival director Denise Kowal proudly announced that a new partnership with the Sarasota County Convention and Visitors Bureau would ensure the street painting festival would go on as planned.

Virginia Haley, president and CEO of the SCVB, said she went to the city to see if SCVB could partner with the Chalk Festival as its financial agent. “We went to the city with that crazy idea and [they] turned around in about two - three hours and said yes,” Haley said.  “It gets everyone what they want.”

“We are working with over 250 artists from around the world,” Kowal said. “The logistics are very complicated. What the SCVB has allowed us to do is focus on the relationships with the artists.”

Kowal expects the festival, which runs Nov. 1 – 7, to double in size and economic impact this year.

“Last year the SCVB estimated that it had an impact close to $3 million county-wide,” Kowal said.

In 2010, the festival’s artists filled nearly 200 hotel room nights in the county. This year, Kowal said that number is already more than 400 and they are still looking to place 25 additional artists.  Attendance, Kowal said, is expected to exceed 100,000 people this year.

Chalk Meets Opera

The Sarasota Opera announced Tuesday that it will be performing excerpts from its fall production, Madama Butterfly, on an outdoor stage with sets created in chalk by Baltimore designer and artist Michael Kirby.

There will be three one-hour performances on Nov. 6 at 11 a.m., 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. at the corner of South Pineapple Avenue and Dolphin Street.

“Unlike traditional opera sets were the best seats are center and level to the stage, this set will focus on floor painting and the seat will be stadium style,” Kirby said in a news release.

“We are so fortunate that the Sarasota Opera enthusiastically came on board,” Kowal said.

The Sarasota Opera is, “thrilled with this opportunity. Trilled with the city’s support of the chalk festival [to] make sure all the special aspects [of the festival] do indeed move forward,” said Sarasota Opera executive director Susan Davis.