Chalk artists and onlookers who flock to Main Street next Sunday for the 21st Annual Community Mosaic Street Painting Festival will have the chance to express their creativity in a new way: in clay.
Internationally known sculptors Jill Burkee and Giancarlo Biagi will host free water-clay modeling on a vacant site in the heart of Main Street where Viva L’Arte/Artida Cultural Center will be built. Burkee and Biagi are inviting the public to the grassy lot located at 33 East Main Street (next to Barth’s Drug Store) to learn about and experiment with clay during the popular annual street painting festival. Musician Bob Barta will perform New Orleans jazz at the site.
They are also hosting a free concert after the festival at the Vail-Leavitt Music Hall, where the New York City band Bailen, an award-winning Italian band, Madaus, performing in the U.S. for the first time, and the mother-daughter singer-songwriter duo Michelle Biagi and Germana Pucci will take the stage.
Burkee and Biagi will have just returned from Italy, where they are finishing a commission, Pucci said last week at a press conference about the Artida event, dubbed “Mud to Music on Main.”
Pucci and Biagi, who are married, fell in love with the North Fork when they visited years ago.
“It reminded us of our childhood in Tuscany,” Pucci said.
The couple bought land on Sound Shore Road in 2001 and built a home and studio there.
“One day we were walking downtown and looked at this lot,” Pucci recalled. The spot spoke to them and they envisioned an art gallery and cultural center there.
Riverhead architect Martin Sendlewski designed the building they plan to erect on the site. He said he expects to have building permits in hand this summer.
Artida Cultural Center is a nonprofit founded to bring all forms of art to the community through various educational programs, exhibits and performances, according to its organizers.
Biagi is dedicating a new life-size marble sculpture, “Crystals” to sponsor the building of the cultural center, Pucci said. The sculpture will be carved in white statuario marble from Michelangelo’s quarry in Carrara, Italy.
Biagi originally created Crystals in plaster in 1986. The plaster sculpture is in the Museo dei Bozzetti collection in Pietrasanta, Italy. Biagi found inspiration for Crystals in the work of choreographer/dancer Martha Graham, according to an artist’s statement. “The struggle of humanity is captured in that bolt of energy that connects Earth and sky, an instant of life, a perennial crystallization,” Biagi said.
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