During the annual Lazy Daze summer event, eleven street painters from around the country took over Cary sidewalks along Academy Street and Frantz Plaza inside Downtown Cary Park. The dazzling chalk murals played with the kaleidoscope theme of the 2024 Lazy Daze Arts & Crafts Festival.

These featured artists are best known for their dynamic 3-dimensional illusion chalk artworks. Their performance art of rendering artistic designs with chalk and tempera paints on streets, sidewalks, and town squares with impermanent materials is a must see!

Click here to learn more about the Chalk Walk.

Noa Younse is a Vermont based artist specializing in large scale public art installations as well as 3d digital illustrations. His background in architecture and interest in 3d design give him the ability to approach projects from a spatial perspective and detail each step in the creation and fabrication process. His physical installations focus on some form of kinetic or electronic interaction and try to play with a viewer’s perception, while his digital pieces aim to conjure up strange and interesting new realities. You can find his structures around Cary, with his latest shade structure located by the train tracks at Ambassador Loop/N Academy.

Click here to learn more about Noa and his projects.

 ^{"Fly Away Home" by Patrick Dougherty, 2022. Photography by Kurt Hilton} 

In March 2022, artist Patrick Dougherty led a community art project creating a monumental willow sculpture in Carpenter Park. Known as the “Stick Wizard”, Dougherty has made willow sculptures all over the world - and now Cary! Dougherty lives in Chapel Hill, NC and his "internationally renowned art manages to make a permanent impact with a temporary footprint. It never strays very far from the notion that one day the wind will blow and this will all be gone –but not before we get a chance to revel in it.” -Jim Moriarty, Pine Straw Magazine

Click here to learn more about Patrick Dougherty and the Willow Sculpture Project.

Bryant Holsenbeck is a mixed media environmental artist, activist, educator, and author based in Durham, North Carolina. Holsenbeck uses a variety  of both natural and human-made materials to create art out of repurposed items that might otherwise be discarded. Holsenbeck's environmental art conveys importance of wildlife, draws attention to ecological devastation and the abundance of plastic waste in the United States, and promotes environmental stewardship. 

Previously shown in Bond Park for Spring Daze Arts & Crafts Festival in 2024, the jellyfish installation is currently featured at Downtown Cary Park underneath the library bridge. Working with students, Holsenbeck used plastic debris from our waterways and oceans to make this large-scale environmental installation of a 'smack' of jellyfish. 

Click here to learn more about Holsenbeck and the installation.

 ^{e/motion, a creation by Olivier Landreville© Init}

Academy Street Artwork Projects (ASAP) presents GLOW, a temporary outdoor display of light and technology art installations on view in downtown Cary from January to March. They are pop-up, temporary installations, with no corresponding event, and they are on view primarily evening hours for one week, two weeks, or a month. GLOW is designed with the intent to surprise and delight viewers when the artworks are discovered. Picture: rooftops, windows, open lawns, and on the sides of buildings…around every corner is a possible discovery and surprise. GLOW will create a dynamic sense of place that adds energy to the street environment, creating memories and moments of celebration for all who encounter the artworks.

Click here to learn more about GLOW.