The WMODA team joined over 600 artists as they transformed the streets of downtown Lake Worth Beach into a stunning outdoor museum during the Annual Street Painting Festival on February 22 and 23. Mural artist Eduardo Mendieta created a WMODA painting inspired by museum highlights to generate excitement about the Cultural Arts Campus proposed in Lake Worth Beach and entice art lovers to the new Hollywood location.

Eduardo Mendieta is originally from New Jersey but has lived in Florida for the past 30 years and has become well known for his murals and urban art. In his teens, he began painting graffiti on abandoned buildings, which opened his mind to the ideology behind public art. He has worked as a muralist in numerous areas throughout Florida and other states.

During the street painting festival, Eduardo’s work attracted hundreds of visitors to learn more about the museum. The WMODA team provided details about the development planned in collaboration with the City of Lake Worth Beach and the Community Redevelopment Agency. The proposed 33,000-square-foot WMODA museum will be the anchor of this visionary cultural arts campus, which includes 110 rental apartments, artist lofts and a community workshop for local art classes and activities in downtown Lake Worth.

The Lake Worth Beach Street Painting Festival was started by a group of residents in 1995 to revitalize their city. It is now the largest free festival of its kind in the world, attracting tens of thousands of visitors each year to watch original artworks and reproductions of masterpieces come to life, only to disappear with the next rain.

The first street painting festival in America was held in 1987 in Santa Barbara, California and was named I Madonnari after the street artists in Italy. Pavement or sidewalk art is believed to have originated in 16th-century Italy, where traveling artists created chalk images of the Madonna in return for coins tossed in homage to the Virgin Mary and appreciation of their artistic skills.

Street painters began appearing in London in the 19th century and were known as “screevers,” meaning “to write.”  They wrote begging messages on the pavements and included topical pictorial imagery to encourage the well-to-do to give pennies. Screevers can be seen in vintage postcards of London life. During Women’s History Month, it is fascinating to discover Alice Colman, the first female screever who supported her family with street illustrations at the turn of the last century. Alice was renowned for her political and satirical works, which embraced the suffragette movement. There’s even a book about the first Lady Screever!

Read about the Lake Worth Beach Development Project at WMODAlovesLWB.com