Watch pavement transform with color at Denver Chalk Art Festival

The first lesson of the Denver Chalk Art Festival is that the finished image is only part of the point.

“You can see pictures of finished chalk art on the internet,” says Renee Ortiz, event director for the Denver Chalk Art Festival. “This is really about watching the process. So to see the progress made between the first day and the second day, you really have to be there both days.”

The 24th annual Denver Chalk Art Festival returns Saturday, June 6, and Sunday, June 7, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. in the Golden Triangle Creative District, bordered by Speer Boulevard, Colfax Avenue and Lincoln Street. Presented by CherryArts, the free, family-friendly festival will bring 232 total artists to downtown Denver, including adult participants and nine Youth Challenge teams made up of about forty students.

“The way I describe the Denver Chalk Art Festival is as a bubble of nice,” Ortiz says. “The artists are nice. The attendees are nice. The vendors and sponsors are nice. It’s just amazing to watch the interaction between the public and the artists. People come down ready to be immersed in the process and in the event.”

This year, the festival also adds a Friday night kickoff, Party Before the Pavement, from 4 to 7 p.m. June 5, with activity centered near the festival stage at 13th Avenue and Bannock Street. Ortiz says the new event grew out of a desire to create space for participating artists to show and sell work beyond the temporary chalk pieces they will create over the weekend.

“Every year the artists come down, volunteer their time and aren’t paid for it, but a lot of them sell artwork for a living,” Ortiz says. “So we felt like it was time to carve out a space so they could come and sell their work.”

The Friday kickoff will include food trucks, drinks, artist sales, live music and an art demonstration by a madonnari, the Italian term for a street painter.

“It’s still very art-focused,” Ortiz says. “We didn’t want to stray from that, but it is definitely designed to have more of a block party feel.”

For Ortiz, who joined the festival in its fourth year and is now marking roughly two decades with the event, the Chalk Art Festival remains an unusually beloved assignment.

“It’s such a phenomenal annual tradition,” she says. “I am blessed to work on multiple different events, and people will ask me, ‘Do you have a favorite? You probably can’t have a favorite event,’ but I do. It’s the Chalk Art Festival. Hands down.”

Michael Rieger, the festival’s longtime artist director, has been involved since the beginning. He says last year’s event felt like the festival had finally returned to full strength after several years of pandemic-era disruption and rebuilding. The festival went virtual in 2020, temporarily relocated to Cherry Creek in 2021 in conjunction with its new partner, the Cherry Creek Arts Festival, and moved to its current home in the Golden Triangle Creative District in 2022.

“Last year’s event went great,” Rieger says. “I would say the festival is finally back in full force since the pandemic. With COVID, we changed locations, and everything came back slower, but last year was just phenomenal. We were fully back on artist count and have been for three years, but the crowd was back last year.”

Rieger says the Golden Triangle location has given the festival more room to breathe. The festival has roughly the same number of artists it had on Larimer Square, he says, but the current footprint allows more space for artists, viewers and the stage. Last year, organizers worked with nearby museums to bring festival activity onto their property, an expansion Rieger says was successful enough to repeat this year.

“I really love that we moved it over there to the Golden Triangle District,” Rieger says. “It allowed us to spread out more.”

Rieger believes the festival’s success comes from the fact that people want to watch the image emerge. One year, the festival tried an optional viewing day when only about 20 artists returned to work on their drawings. The crowd was not enormous, he admits, but the people who did come gathered around the working artists rather than the finished pieces.

“They wanted to see the creative process,” Rieger says. “It drove the point home to me that chalk art is a performance-based medium.”

This year, Rieger says, the festival will hand out 3,320 pieces of chalk to participating artists. Some seasoned artists bring extra chalk, particularly when they need specific colors, and the festival also offers a trade-in program or lets artists buy additional sticks at cost. The youth teams, he says, tend to use chalk with less restraint than the veterans.

“They put too much chalk down and they have piles of dust,” Rieger says. “If you see pros, there is barely dust. When done correctly, a box of 24 pieces of chalk can easily fill an eight-foot by eight-foot square.”

The 2026 festival will also include a large-scale community mosaic recognizing America’s 250th anniversary and Colorado’s 150th anniversary. Designed by featured artist Lance Leber, the mosaic will be divided into hundreds of sections for the public to fill in throughout the weekend. Lt. Gov. Dianne Primavera is scheduled to fill in the first section, symbolically launching the collaborative artwork. Ahead of the festival, the design will also be released as a downloadable coloring page so Coloradans can participate before the image appears on Denver’s streets.

According to Rieger, that kind of public participation is central to the festival’s identity. He says the event has always been about bringing artists and audiences into the same space.

“I call this event drawing together, creating community,” Rieger says. “That’s what this event is about: creating art and coming together.”

Last year, Ortiz says, organizers used Placer.ai to track attendance through cell phone data and counted about 21,000 visitors over two days. This year, with the added Friday component, she says the goal is closer to 25,000.

For all the data, though, Ortiz says the moments that stay with her are smaller. She still remembers seeing a father walk with two young children past a chalk drawing of a dinosaur-like tree chasing two M&M characters, one of which had a bite taken out of its head.

“The little kids were like, ‘I hope the M&Ms are able to get away,'” Ortiz says. “It was so genuine. It drove home that people aren’t just seeing these things as drawings but are really immersing themselves in the art and experience. That, to this day, is still my favorite memory.”

That is why Ortiz recommends visiting both days. Saturday offers the beginning of the work, when artists are laying down outlines and early color. Sunday brings the final push, when images sharpen, details emerge and the public can vote for the People’s Choice Award until 4 p.m.

“Come both days,” Ortiz says. “And don’t be afraid to interact with the artist. They are eager to have conversations with folks as they work. Oh, and make sure your phone is charged, because you will need it to take and share photos.”

The Denver Chalk Art Festival will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year, and Rieger says organizers are already thinking about how to mark the milestone.

“It’s hard to believe it’s really 25 years next year — it makes me feel old,” Rieger says. “But yes, there are plans to celebrate the anniversary. We are bouncing around ideas. I want to celebrate it in a big way. Now, exactly how, I can’t tell you yet. Once we finish this event, we’ll really start thinking about what we can do to truly celebrate the work and 25 years of doing this festival.”

For now, the focus is on this year’s return: 232 artists, more than 3,000 sticks of chalk, a new Friday kickoff and a weekend built around watching temporary art come to life.

“It’s always so fun to watch the creative process in action, and that’s what the Chalk Art Festival is all about,” Rieger says. “There always seems to be one animal that is central to the festival. One year it was wolves, another was elephants and this year it’s cats, so expect to see a lot of cats scattered around the pavement, along with a slew of other chalk creations.”

The Denver Chalk Art Festival is Saturday, June 6, and Sunday, June 7, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Golden Triangle Creative District; the closest address is 123 W. 12th Avenue. Free. Learn more at denverchalk.art.