Hani Shihada has been doing sidewalk street painting in NYC since 1985, having first started in Perugia, Italy, where sidewalk art is a tradition going back to 16th century Italy. In 1972, the Italian village of Grazie di Curtatone hosted the first known festival of street painting. Street painters were known as madonnari because of their work drawing the Madonnas of Raphael. Hani, a Palestinian who was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Jordan, specializes in reproductions of Michelangelo and Raphael, working in pastel chalk. It is estimated there are a few hundred sidewalk chalk artists today, traveling and making a living from their work.

Although I’m sure that some may see this as crass commercialism or debasement, it does appear that the artists take their work seriously – most work in various media and have had formal art training (some in Europe), such as Kurt Wenner and Mark Cummings (currently residing and studying in Florence). Click here for Mark’s site, which has an excellent history of the artform. Like many of his contemporaries, Hani has done many large-scale commissioned works – sidewalk art, murals, public, and private. Everywhere I look, what appears to be a small, unique, or incidental thing turns out to be a world…