Graffiti News

Chalk Howard Street, billed by its organisers as Chicago's only 3D chalk art festival, took place on Saturday, August 22, 2026, from 11am to 7pm on Howard Street in Rogers Park. The site runs east of the Howard Red Line stop, between Ashland Avenue and Paulina Street. Admission is free, and the festival is run by the Rogers Park Business Alliance.

What a 3D chalk festival actually is

Three-dimensional chalk art is anamorphic drawing. The artist works on flat pavement but distorts the image so that it resolves into apparent depth from one fixed point, usually marked on the ground for the audience to stand on. A hole in the road, a staircase going down, a shark coming up — none of it holds together anywhere else, which is why the work is made to be photographed as much as looked at.

It is an old form. Street painters have worked on pavements in Europe since at least the sixteenth century, and the Italian madonnari, who copied religious images onto flagstones outside churches in exchange for coins, are the direct ancestors of the festival circuit that visiting chalk artists travel today.

Who drew

The Rogers Park Business Alliance listed three visiting 3D artists: Jonathan Buggs from Indiana, the Michigan-based artist working as Midnight, and Tracy Lee Stum from Pennsylvania. Four Chicago 2D chalk artists appeared alongside them: Andrew Vickers, Elizabeth Niemczyk, Natalie Glogowski and Yosmer Urrieta.

Around the drawing, the street carried food and drink from local businesses including Café Tola, Badou Senegalese Cuisine, Urban Tables, Sera Dining and Mickii's Desserts, plus artisan stalls, non-profits including CHIRP Radio and Centro Romero, and live music.

Anyone could buy a square

The thing that separates this from a gallery show is that the pavement was for sale. A chalk square costs $25 with supplies included, available while they last, and anyone can take one. That is a materially different proposition from watching a mural go up behind a barrier: the festival's premise is that the visitor also draws, badly or otherwise, on the same street as a professional.

Why a business alliance runs a street art festival

Chalk Howard Street is organised by a chamber-of-commerce-style body rather than an arts organisation, and that is not incidental. Howard Street is a commercial strip sitting on the boundary between Chicago and Evanston. A one-day event that brings people onto that strip, with the shops and restaurants named in the programme alongside the artists, is a retail strategy that happens to be made of art.

This is a pattern worth recognising. A good deal of the public art that appears on ordinary streets is commissioned by business districts and property owners rather than by museums or arts councils.

Chalk is the form of street art nobody argues about

Nothing about Chalk Howard Street is contested. The artists have permission, the surface is public pavement, and the work washes off. Every objection normally raised about painting in public — property damage, permanence, cost of removal — is answered by the material itself.

That is worth stating plainly, because the argument about graffiti and murals is genuinely unresolved and often bad-tempered. Chalk is the corner of the field where it does not apply. It is also, for the same reason, the easiest way into street art for a city that is nervous about the rest of it, and the easiest way in for a person who has never made any.

It is already going

The work drawn on Howard Street on August 22 will not survive the month, and most of it will not survive the week. Photographs taken from the marked viewing point are the only version that lasts, which makes documenting it the point rather than an afterthought.

If you photographed anything on Howard Street, or anywhere else, it belongs on the Wallscape map and feed. Chalk is the clearest case there is for photographing street art the day you see it.

The festival returns to Howard Street each summer; the Rogers Park Business Alliance publishes dates and the artist lineup at howardstreetchicago.com.