Throughout 2021, Chalk Riot teamed up with DC creative firm Pipkin Creative to co-curate, manage and produce five painted asphalt murals as part of a curb extension safety initiative of the DC Department of Transportation. Artists were selected based on location, visual style, ability to translate their art into ground murals, and their dedication to community practices.
Muralist Rosy Sunshine talks to passersby at her Columbia Heights intersection about the curb extension project. Photo by Nathan Mitchell Photography.
Curb extensions by design physically slow motorists from driving around corners too fast, therefore protecting people on the sidewalks and crosswalks. The space between the sidewalk curb and extension boundary creates an optimal space for murals! The data and feedback from the murals will be collected via DDOT’s NNWiii Livability Study.
We saw this opportunity of curation to welcome more than just visual artists into this space. In the spirit of unexpected collaborations, we first reached out to local spoken word artist Mazaré and commissioned a poem about the exact intersection of the mural at 14th and Meridian Street NW. She knocked it out of the park! The poem expresses the urgent need for safer streets while honoring the cultural highlights of the area. THEN, we sought Mazaré’s opinion on a visual artist she’d like to illustrate the poem! She introduced us to Rosy Sunshine, who brought the words to life in visual form. Chalk Riot artists then taught Rosy surface mural application methods and assisted her in production.
DDOT produced the poem performance video below:
Below are some production process photos. By Nathan Mitchell Photography.
In 2017, Chalk Riot was awarded the PNC Arts Alive grant, in partnership with non-profit organization Art Saint Louis. With an ambitious mission of experimenting with augmented reality pavement art (cutting edge at the time), we reached out to augmented reality experts Heavy Projects. They designed our own Chalk Riot app created to work with our custom pavement art activations. We created three pieces in total, to which Heavy added three unique animations. The canvases can be unrolled and displayed anywhere, ensuring that typically ephemeral street art can now be enjoyed indefinitely - well, as long as the canvas paintings last! The artwork is currently in storage in Austin, TX.
The video below documents our unveiling of the project at a Women in Tech event in St. Louis, MO at the CIC Cortex Center. The collection has also been proudly displayed at the St. Louis Science Center.
Overall, learning how to create pavement art in this new dimension was an invigorating creative challenge! We had to manage drone footage of the canvases, learn to adjust our smooth gradients to be more high-contrast for the augmented reality trigger, and learn many new tech vocabulary words as if learning a brand new language. This made it all the more satisfying to see everyone’s reactions once the project debuted!
We had total creative freedom with this project, so we got weird! We created a world of mermaids and cyborgs and monsters - oh my! Check out the screen recordings below of how each one comes to life:
From 2013-2018, Chalk Riot formally partnered with Art Saint Louis in pursuit of establishing a more successful public arts scene and providing paid opportunities for aspiring chalk artists in the Greater Saint Louis Area. Chalk art achieved our aims for social impact by:
Connecting artists directly with the audiences their work impacts
Bolstering the local art ecosystem, helping St. Louis attract and retain artistic talent by creating professional advancement opportunities
Helping establish a national identity for St. Louis as an emerging center for public art
The Executive Director of Art Saint Louis managed our engagement in the St. Louis market, which offered administrative support to our growing small business, and acted as fiscal sponsor for grant opportunities. And, whenever someone booked us through Art Saint Louis, a small portion of the total sales price went directly back to them. After several years of successful collaboration, we ended our partnership because we no longer had any artists on our team based in St. Louis. It proved an excellent model that was mutually beneficial, and we owe much of our growth in the first years of business to the motivated and creative team at the organization. Hopefully other non-profits can follow suite with similar models to support local small arts businesses in their areas!
We are always open to discussing future partnerships with non-profits, foundations, local government public arts committees, and school systems wherever our artists are based. If you have collaboration ideas, let us know! Send a note to chelsea@chalkriot.com.