- June 18, 2026
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When artist Sam Conable bikes down the Legacy Trail in the morning to create art alongside artist Beck Lane in Burns Square, he calls it a chance to get away from screens and into the community.
He enjoys conversing with people he meets on the sidewalks, and he says the community appreciates seeing the local color the artists bring.
The Sarasota Int'l Chalk Festival organization, in which he has long participated, also has its eye set on the local landscape.
Over three nights leading up to the night of June 14, volunteers turned out to help prepare materials, from dried leaves to flowers, for what festival chair and founder Denise Kowal says is a first.
The infiorata flower carpet outside the Burns Square Hotel was the first one created by an entirely Sarasota team, she says.
The community had the chance to become acquainted with infiorata, a tradition that comes from Italy, during the 2024 Sarasota Int'l Chalk Festival.
That event brought in the country's first delegation of international floral carpet artists.
Although the festival is not taking place this year, Kowal says the project, which took place with limited promotion beforehand, was a shout out to friends abroad. It took place during the month of the Feast of Corpus Christi, a time when many European towns host infiorata events.
As participants worked throughout the night of June 14, she says a steady stream of community members came by, the result for which she had been hoping.
However, an infiorata designed for Sarasota's community had to have a fittingly Sarasota theme.
Conable says in creating the centerpiece image, the goal was to integrate Sarasota's history with its natural beauty.
The painting featured Barbara Bowers of the Sun-Debs, a group of young women assembled in 1949, who posed in photographs to promote the city as a tourism destination.
The display, which also incorporated artwork by Lane and artist Lorenda Fore, included features like flamingos with palm frond legs, paintbrushes with bristles of pine needles and handles of bamboo, and a section of shells that also serves as an Italian motif for pilgrimage.
“This is a beautiful thing," Conable said. "Also, to bring people together for real, instead of staring at screens and social media. With the advent of AI, it's driving me crazy because it's changing the landscape for artists who are working artists. It's taken a lot of work away from me personally, through people using AI. So things are changing rapidly, and it's hard, so this kind of really organic, natural community event, to me, is a beautiful way to kind of offset that.”
Some materials were provided by Marie Selby Botanical Gardens and Stocking Savvy Environmental Consulting, while about 1,300 carnations were purchased.
Kowal says they learned a lot about what materials are available and in bloom.
“I think that when we do it again, we'll be able to use just locally sourced materials,” she said.
Helping fill out the display was a turnout of close to 20 volunteers each night, who broke down as well as placed materials.
Alexa Villegas, 15, who volunteered for three nights, said even though activities like crushing up dried leaves could be tedious and took awhile, it was "just great" to meet everyone else who was volunteering.
On June 14, she got the chance to sort flowers and take apart the petals. She called this “one of the main reasons why I came here" and said it was fulfilling work because it was fun to work with all the different colors.
“I hope this will help spur a lot more art projects throughout here,” she said. “Even though this is very ephemeral, because it's going to be gone in a day, it’s just great. I hope it spurs a lot more connections to the history of Sarasota and infioratas, and just art history altogether.”
The infiorata was an all-night effort, Kowal says. She and her partner, Bill Baranowski, the Chalk Festival’s chief operating officer, did not sleep until 6:30 a.m. the following morning.
Yet there was more to do even that day, as the project was refreshed with new materials before it was eventually dismantled on June 16.
“We’ll start planning times throughout the year where maybe there will be several made throughout the city, and people can walk and see the different ones,” Kowal said.
