The annual Eureka Street Art Festival is looking for interested property owners who have a blank wall to paint. Last year the festival painted 20 murals. Since the festival began six years ago, they have painted more than 100 murals around Eureka.
“We are looking for walls for our 2024 festival and what that means is we’re looking for the canvases that the artists will be painting on,” said Jenna Catsos, an organizer with the Eureka Street Art Festival. “So if you are a property owner, a homeowner, or if you have a space that you rent and you think the property owner would be excited about this, please reach out to us.”
The organizers don’t know which geographical area they plan to focus on and that is why they are putting out a general call out to see where the most interest is for next year’s festival. Organizers are looking for big, medium, or small outside walls that are visible to ensure that the public can see and appreciate the art.
The end of the month in January is the deadline to submit your wall as interested in being painted and a part of next year’s Eureka Street Art Festival. People can access more information through their website which is eurekastreetartfestival.com. There are questionnaire forms for people to fill out and submit to the organizers.
“The few things that we ask of you as a person who’s submitting a wall is that you help us fund the mural and we do a ton of fundraising, but it’s extremely expensive,” Catsos said. “So we ask for a contribution of $5 to $10 per square foot.”
As a festival, they provide the planning, permitting, insurance, and making sure that the artists can access the wall with scaffolding or lifts. The person who provides the wall is also involved in the partnership of choosing the artist to paint their wall, the content and the colors.
“There’s a lot of fun ideas that we’re bouncing around for this year’s festival,” Catsos said. “We’re still really early in the planning, but something that I have been excited about for years and it seems like it might finally be happening is some sort of sculptural installation throughout the city that focuses on banana slugs.”
The organizers are working with a couple of ceramic artists who are most likely going to create and install the banana slug in next year’s festival. The name of the festival was specific to not include the word mural because the organizers wanted to broaden the potential of what they might bring to Eureka, art-wise.
Some advice from the organizers is, don’t wait until the last minute to submit your blank wall for the Eureka Street Art Festival. If you go to redwoodnews.com under links you will find their link to submit your interest. If you are an interested artist who wants to paint at next year’s festival, you can also find more information there. Last year the Eureka Street Art Festival had more than 600 artist applications and 50 were chosen.
