Children to Paint Public Art Display at Family Festival May 23

The Messy Artist will be featured at Livingston’s Family Festival Day, a featured event during the town’s 18th annual Youth Appreciation Week. The Family Festival Day, scheduled for Saturday May 23, 2015 at the Oval, is a community-wide celebration, from 10am-3pm, offering many family friendly activities.

The Messy Artist will be displaying half of their Artist Harvest collection in the Food Day tent. Food Day is a nationwide celebration focused on access to healthy foods and it was created to inspire positive changes in our diets and our food policies. Livingston is an active participant in this real food movement and has hosted food day events for the past three years. The Messy Artist’s Artist Harvest collection, a concept conceived by Messy Artist CEO Donna Bernstein, excites children and adults alike about fruits and vegetables while also honoring the style of a famous artist.

On display at the Food Day tent will be 3 large-scale sculptures out of the 6-piece collection:

· Munch-Room- a mushroom painted in the style of Edvard Munch

· Straw-Dali – a strawberry painted in the style of Salvador Dali

· Peppered like Pollack- a pepper painted in the style of Jackson Pollack

But here is where you and your children come in! Because the Messy Artist wants to get even the youngest artists involved in this public art project, children will be invited to help them complete the Peppered like Pollack. The display will start at 10am with the pepper in plaster ready for paint and the display will end at 1pm with a work of art thanks to many visitors who will pick up a brush and splatter away.

Bernstein was inspired to create The Artist Harvest from other large-scale sculptures projects such as “The Cow Parade” and “The Great Light Way” (the West Orange light bulb sculptures). “I decided to create fruits and vegetables to instill healthy eating for children and to paint the sculptures in the style of famous artist to promote awareness of art history,” said Bernstein. She added, “Another wonderful part of the process has been to watch the students work cooperatively to create community art. I had never created large-scale sculptures, so it has been a learning process. We are thrilled with the end results and look forward to sharing them with the Livingston community.”

To learn more about Food Day go to www.foodday.org and or like the Livingston Food Day Facebook page at www.facebook.com/LivingstonFoodDay. To learn more about the Messy Artist go to www.messyartist.com. And to see the display, be sure to come out on Saturday for the Family Festival.