- September 6, 2024
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In countries like Italy and Spain, massive images formed from flowers, stretching across streets in towns, are religious and cultural traditions practiced across generations.
In other countries, like Japan, they are a new art form.
One Sarasota couple is traveling the world to help their own city find its place in this art form.
Denise Kowal and her fiancé Bill Baranowski manage the Sarasota Chalk Festival, which Kowal founded, and this year, another ephemeral art — flower carpets — joins the event's lineup.
The “Floralia Infiorata" section of the festival will be a debut event for Sarasota and the U.S., with the country never having hosted a delegation of international artists devoted to the art, according to Kowal.
The reason it's happening now, she said, is due to the international renown of the Chalk Festival and the worldwide community the couple have been building via the festival and trips abroad.
A trip in June, which included stays in Italy and the Canary Islands, brought them together with some of the world’s leading organizations and artists producing flower carpets.
“By being there, we’re able to bring more awareness to what we do here, and our event here," Kowal said. "Anybody that knows me, knows our festival is built on relationships.”
When it is held in November in Burns Court, the Chalk Festival will partner with nine floral carpet organizations.
These partnerships will bring over a hundred artists from Mexico, Spain, Japan, India and Italy, who were initially scheduled to attend in 2022 before Hurricane Ian disrupted the event.
Popular in the community for its massive chalk paintings, which overtake the streets and often feature perspective illusions, the festival also showcases other arts including sculpture.
The floral carpets will occupy about a fourth of the festival space.
Although the artwork will quickly become a memory as festivalgoers march across the flowers in the tradition of the art form, the couple hopes the idea takes root permanently.
“It’s a sharing of knowledge,” Kowal said. “The one thing that the artists of the Chalk Festival have loved so much is we have built a global family locally.”
Kowal and Baranowski are also ensuring they reciprocate the global relationship.
During their recent trip, they sought out flower carpets wherever they were found.
Among their many stops, they visited the town of Genzano Di Roma, which is also participating in the Chalk Festival, to help with what, at about 21,500 square feet, is one of the world's largest infiorata and dates back some 250 years.
Baranowski said they received the "royal treatment," being allowed to work on pieces that included an infiorata on the steps of the church.
Kowal is convinced that flower carpets are an ideal fit for Sarasota and the Chalk Festival.
“One of the reasons I so much want to bring this to Sarasota is I genuinely believe we have enough flora and fauna, natural materials, here that would make beautiful flower carpets,” she said.
Bringing it together, however, will add to the challenging logistics of the festival.
The effort will involve the purchase of tens of thousands of carnations, and collecting many local flowers and natural materials.
It will also involve bringing together teams of artists, including area residents, although artistic skills are not required to volunteer and lay the flowers within the designated areas of the designs.
Also involved will be celebrations incorporating fantastical costumes designed around Florida's flora and fauna, as well as stilt walkers and puppets.
One of the major challenges of the festival each year, is funding.
“It’s so ironic that this year, the county commissioners decided not to approve our grant – right when I am traveling worldwide, exposing Sarasota and what we do, in such a big way," Kowal said.
The Sarasota County Commission cut funding to the organization on July 10.
The move also affected the other arts organizations, Embracing Our Differences and WSLR/Fogartyville.
Kowal noted the remark of Commissioner Neil Rainford at the time, “I don’t believe taxpayer dollars should be going to sidewalk chalk."
“It’s like, wow,” Kowal said. “First of all, we don’t even give normal sidewalk chalk to the children, when we have the children’s chalk area.”
Kowal said the funding, which amounts to about $40,000, is important for an initiative to provide VIP tickets to local nonprofits, schools and other organizations that benefit people in need, like the Child Protection Center and Girls, Inc.
Currently, the festival draws about half its funding from ticket sales, and also receives donations and sponsorships from the community.
It has now launched the “Grow the Heart” program, which is targeting a goal of $50,000, and which allows the public to contribute to a GoFundMe account or purchase fundraising VIP tickets.
Kowal also plans to engage with some of the commissioners.
“I need my representatives to understand what I’m doing, and if they haven’t taken the time to understand what our organization is doing, I need to do a better job of reaching out to each of them individually… so that they do understand what we are bringing to our community, so that they can be supportive in whatever way they are able to be,” she said.
Total expenditures for the Chalk Festival are estimated at $400,000 to $500,000.
Some expenses include the artistic chalk itself, which totals tens of thousands of dollars; flights, lodging and food for artists; storage space and venues; road closures and police services; and this year, around $40,000 for the "Floralia Infiorata" materials.
None of the grant money from the county was used to fund the international trips.
Kowal says everything ultimately goes toward a valuable service to the community.
“You have to be there to see how much it brings to people,” she said. “Our culture and our society needs memorable moments, and we need things to talk about. There’s so much going on that we need these things, we need these things that bring us together.”
