Video: Chalk Art Meets Opera at Community Mosaic

Artists, families and plenty of people just out for a Sunday stroll gathered on East Main Street on Sunday for the 15th Annual Community Mosaic Street Painting Festival.

About 100 plots lined the northbound side of East Main Street for local artists to draw up sidewalk chalk scenes of their choosing. The mosaics ran the gamut from cartoon characters to memorials to a fallen soldier ... and anywhere in between.

Whatever the choice happened to be, the beautiful weather and community atmosphere gave locals and visitors alike the opportunity to express themselves while having a good time doing it.

"We do this as a family, so everyone chips in," said Rob Rodriguez, a Shoreham resident on his eighth year at the street festival whose plot contained characters from Monsters, Inc. Noting that his family usually draws, "whatever the kids are into," past years have seen Star Wars and Sesame Street mosaics. 

Tracey and Leon Guarani brought their six kids from Oyster Bay after reading about the festival. They booked two plots as soon as they heard about it, painting an MTV logo in one and a nature scene in another. 

Pay Snyder, executive director for the , which organizes the festival, came up with the idea for a street festival soon after coming to the EEAC. She said she read about a street painting festival in Santa Barbara, Calif. and adapted the idea to fit Riverhead. Since then, it's grown to raise anywhere from $8,000 to $10,000 each year to benefit scholarships to the East End Arts Council School for the Arts. 

In addition to the street painters, the EEAC hosted local dancers, singers and musicians. The EEAC hosted a drum circle on its newly renovated grounds, and the Riverhead Free Library set up a storytelling tent for kids to sit and take a break.

Sag Harbor resident Denise Gentile was drawing at the festival for her third year. She called a full moon rising over Sag Harbor's Long Wharf a "powerful sight," and after stumbling across an old photo of a full moon rising in the winter, found her inspiration for this year's mosaic.

"This is exciting," said Pegi Cohill, who coaxed her friend Sue Blizzard to come out to her first community mosaic fair this year. "There's a lot of very impressive art here, and the live music is very cool."