Creativity is infectious.

Two years after the inaugural Queen City Urban Arts Showcase, Michael Calloway hasn’t stopped bringing creatives together. Their two-year anniversary, “Paint & Play (Summer Edition)” takes place at Apostrophe Lounge in Uptown on June 29 at 6 p.m.

The initial event served as a springboard for festivals of all kinds, including Create Amazing LLC’s 2018 Queen City Father’s Day Festival June 16 at the Carole Hoefener Community Center from 1-5 p.m.

“Just being in that room with those types of minds, this is what came out of that,” Calloway said. “We’ve had to tweet a lot of things because there is constant change, constant evolution. We’re trying to stay on-trend with different technologies and things that are happening. We try to incorporate that into the events.”

While the industry may change, the mission remains the same.

“We have live painters and spoken word,” Calloway said. “Paint & Play is really just the model for the Urban Arts Showcase scene here in Charlotte.”
Calloway introduced the showcase in response to federal cuts in arts funding in 2016. Initially intended solely for painters, the response and demand for other mediums opened the event to include vendors as well as other forms of artistry.

“The response has been very strong,” Calloway said. “It makes you want to get creative. It inspires a lot of people to get creative and go follow their dreams. You see a lot of people come to the event, and say ‘I’m going to start doing an event kind of like this, but I’m going to add this to it.’ They’ll take our model and add their own spin to it. It is definitely a positive thing, and that is how things grow.”  

On the Net:
www.createamazingllc.com/events

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