When students walk on the south side of the Parade Ground today, they may see more than a plain sidewalk.
Students and local residents participated in the third annual Sidewalk Chalk Art Festival on Sunday morning. The Union Art Gallery hosted the event.
Contestants paid a $15 fee to compete for the four $100 prizes.
Contestants began drawing at 9 a.m. and continued until the Memorial Tower sounded at noon.
Judi Stahl, Union Art Gallery coordinator, said some students came for the extra credit while others came for the art. She said they hoped to expand the festival to performing arts in the future but have a restricted budget.
Drawings included titles like “Make Art, not War,” “Gnome Nation” and “Here’s Looking at You.”
Marigny Armand, art history senior and member of the Union Art Gallery Committee, was a judge for the event and said she hoped the drawings would be left alone so future visitors to campus could see them.
“We ask facility services to keep it up for a week,” Armand said. “As people come to the Parade Ground inevitably because it’s a beautiful day, they say ‘Oh, look at the art’ and come check it out.”
Dallas Teague, 17-year-old high school graduate, was one of the four winners with a drawing of a unicorn in the woods entitled “Cypress Dreams”.
“This year, I was having trouble coming up with something I wanted to do,” Teague said. “I was trying to think back to what originally inspired me to do art and it was definitely unicorns, being a little girl loving horses.”
As the noon bell sounded, Wylie Garcia and Elise Toups, who teamed up this year, raced to finish their drawing. They received one of the prizes with their storybook theme drawing entitled “Little Red Alice has Left Wonderland.” Toups and Garcia are local artists, and Toups is a University alumna.
The drawing included a little girl with a wolf in the background. Garcia said they could not decide whether the girl had seen the wolf.
“We came up with [the idea for the drawing] this morning,” Garcia said. “We decided we wanted to do something that had to do with story book but with a twist to it. It’s kind of dark. We started slow and finished furiously.”
After the winners were announced, more people showed up to view the newly-created sidewalk art, and the Union Art Gallery Committee offered attendees a chance to climb the rock wall.
—-Contact Megan Williams at [email protected]