Riverhead’s Community Mosaic Street Painting Festival turns 20 this weekend

This Sunday marks the 20th anniversary of the Community Mosaic Street Painting Festival, the first of its kind on Long Island when East End Arts executive director Patricia Snyder brought the idea to downtown Riverhead.

Snyder was then the director of the school of the arts — at the time a new venture for the East End Arts and Humanities Council, which had taken over the school’s operation from the failing Eastern Suffolk School of Music. She pitched the idea to the council’s board of directors as a way to gain attention for the school.

She was an art teacher prior to taking on the job of director of the school and had read about a street painting festival in Santa Barbara, California in an art teacher’s magazine. She was enthralled with the idea of bringing a festival like that to downtown Riverhead.

The festival and the school took root and grew — the school of the arts celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2015. This year, the street painting festival follows suit. Over the years it’s grown in popularity and size, with street painters of all ages and talents creating chalk art masterpieces on East Main Street between Roanoke and East avenues. There’s also live music and dance performances on the showmobile and art exhibits and vendors.

Each year on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, the Community Mosaic draws thousands of visitors to downtown Riverhead.

“It’s a nice family event, celebrating the diversity of our community and showcasing the importance of the arts as a means of bringing people together,” she said. It also shows that art can be accessible to all, Snyder said.

The value of the arts in fostering a sense of place in an area that has struggled as downtown Riverhead has as well as the economic impact of the arts are widely accepted propositions nowadays. But it wasn’t always so. In an effort to convince the town board of the value a downtown arts district would have in Riverhead, the East End Arts and Humanities Council in the 1980s commissioned a study of the economic impact of the arts. In 1997, the state Council on the Arts and New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs published a report, “ Gotta Have Art!” that detailed those impacts regionally and statewide.

Today, “creative place-making” is becoming a familiar buzz-phrase for accomplishing what the Community Mosaic Street Painting Festival has been doing in Riverhead for two decades.

And on the eve of the festival’s 20th anniversary this weekend, Vision Long Island — an organization focused on sustainable economic growth — announced that East End Arts has won a 2016 “Smart Growth” award for the street painting festival – “for creating a sense of place providing arts, music and culture in our downtowns.”

“We’re honored to receive a smart growth award from Vision Long Island for the street painting festival and its creative place-making role in downtown Riverhead,” Snyder said in an interview today.

The Community Mosaic takes place Sunday from 12 noon to 5 p.m. on East Main Street and the East End Arts grounds. Chalk artists are welcome to purchase a square of pavement as their canvas. The $20 donation includes materials. Pre-registered artists will be matched to squares sponsored by local businesses and organizations.