Ocean City Arts Center's Boardwalk Art Show

From Ocean City Arts Center's Boardwalk Art Show Website:

The public display of Art is an old as mankind itself. The Spanish caves at Atlamira, the agora of ancient Greece, and the Renaissance guilds all included art as an essential part of human communication. The Boardwalk Art Show stands squarely in this tradition.

For the most of the year, and especially during the summer, people come from all over to enjoy the therapeutic effects that the beach and boardwalk provide. But the three days in August each year, the Boardwalk Art Show transforms the walkway into a vast public square where people meet, exchange ideas, and see themselves portrayed in the images that dozens of the artists display in their exhibitions booths.

It is on the boardwalk that the relationship between the artist and the public is at the purest. Without the cachet that a gallery owner, a teacher, or a guide would impart, and without the constraints that the exigencies of the family life and business schedules would impose, the artist and the viewer meet on a one-to-one basis that is seldom parallel indoors.

Thus the Boardwalk Art Show not only serves the artist by providing a venue for the display and sale of artwork, but also promotes the kind of exchange of ideas between the artist and the public that is the very basis of art itself. It is a small wonder that the first Boardwalk Art Show in 1962 served as the genesis of the Queen City Arts Center, which today proudly continues to sponsor the Show as much beloved and much anticipated tradition along Eastern seaboard.