Atlantic City streets decorated with chalk art

 

This is a place that specializes in the ephemeral.

 

Sand sculpting. Bathing beauties crowned one moment, dethroned the next. Temporary art parks built on borrowed empty casino lots. The summer season.

 

And now, chalk art.

 

Situated on Indiana Avenue near what is perhaps the most ephemeral thing of all - the eroding shoreline - artists from around the world are in Atlantic City this week for a 3D Chalk Art Festival.

 

With chalk and tempera paint, they are creating works that, when viewed through a lens from a fixed point (marked by the artists with tape or a footprint), look three-dimensional. The art will be completed Sunday, when forecast rain may start its inevitable disintegration.

 

The technique is called anamorphic projection. The pavement craters, the train roars up from below, the frog jumps, the Delahaye Sedan teeters off a cliff, the Rock'Em Sock'Em Robot rises from the ring.

 

Mr. Monopoly jumps up over the board.

 

It is an art form dating back to Leonardo da Vinci (and possibly cave dwellers), given currency by the ubiquity of cellphone cameras and social media.

 

The particular mix of Atlantic City onlookers - tourists from Jersey to Missouri to Turkey, casino executives, Bally's dealers, DJ's, rappers, bicycle cops, and slot players - has been gathering in appreciative growing numbers since Tuesday. "It's amazing," said Chris Meredith, of Mays Landing. "It breaks my heart that when the rain comes it's done."

 

Actually, the artists are untroubled by the fact that their work will be either washed away by rain, hosed off by municipal workers after they leave, or left to fade over time, said curator and Monopoly artist Tracy Lee Stum, who has curated festivals all over the world and was brought here by the Atlantic City Alliance (DoAC).

 

Their gig is about the process, the moment, the photo captured and disseminated over social media. Popular in 16th-century Renaissance Italy when artists began chalking images of the Madonna and Child on pavements outside churches, it was revived in the early 1970s in Italy and then California.

 

The artists see wisdom in creating art that does not last, comparing themselves to the Tibetan monks' sand mandala. And since the 3D shows up in photos, it seems meant for the iPhone age.

 

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