Chalk It Up! Art and Music Festival

The Chalk It Up! Chalk Art & Music Festival is a three-day celebration of local artists and the arts community — one of the last of the free, family-friendly festivals in Midtown Sacramento. Since 1991, we have hosted a safe and clean festival at Fremont Park at 16th and Q Streets in Midtown Sacramento where the community can listen to live local musicians, patronize local craft, maker, and food vendors in the marketplace, and watch local artists create chalk art murals, turning the sidewalks around Fremont Park into an art gallery full of beauty and color.  This is part performance art, as the artists create the work during the festival.

Attendees regularly visit multiple times over the 3-day weekend to listen to live local music and watch the chalk art murals come to life on the sidewalks. The Chalk It Up Festival is a Sacramento tradition, a gift to the community, and we’ve kept it 100 percent free to the public for over 32 years.

Chalk It Up was first established in 1991 through the hard work of local artists and community art supporters. As a non-profit arts organization, we are best known for the three-day chalk art festival held annually over Labor Day Weekend in downtown Sacramento’s Fremont Park.  It is Chalk It Up’s mission to empower and support the next generation of Sacramento artists through targeted art grants for young artists and the programs that inspire them. We do this by awarding $500 mini-grants through our Youth Arts Grant Program biannually, and by holding the annual High School Self-Portrait Show each Spring to showcase our region’s talented high school artists.

The Chalk It Up Festival, the grants, and the student art show are all funded and operated by generous volunteers, donors, community partners, and sponsors!