Artsplosure, Raleigh’s  arts festival, hosted hundreds of regional artists who worked alongside national artists to expose the public to an explosion of artwork that they normally wouldn’t see. 

More than 80,000 people were predicted to attend the arts event for its 36th anniversary. 

The event covered several blocks downtown with an art market, Kidsplosure, food track and live music stages.

The art market had more than 180 visual arts and crafts exhibitors, with artists from across North Carolina and the United States. Stalls of artists sold everything from paintings to craft brooms. 

Kidsplosure centered in Moore Square and showcased multiple interactive educational activities and entertainment for children and their parents. Some of the activities and entertainment included a chess center, a piano and a giant sand sculpture of a birdhouse castle.

Specially commissioned, large-scale, interactive visual art installations were placed throughout the festival. 

Dan Nelson’s 58 portrait sculpture titled “Points of View” drew crowds. The artwork, originally created for Grand Rapids, Michigan, revealed “meta-images” from different viewpoints and was was surrounded by crowds throughout the festival.

Nelson collected emails from onlookers who wanted a similar sculpture in Raleigh. 

The Student Art Exhibition showcased two- and three-dimensional art-work of Wake County public and private middle and high school students.

There was live music stages on Fayetteville Street where there were on-going performances by national and regional jazz, blues, and alternative musical acts, the majority of whom had not played in Raleigh, and emerging local and regional performers.

Unique variety performers were placed around the event included aerial-ists, a puppeteer guitarist, a windup doll street performer and others.

As the festival winded down, aerialist equipment toppled onto an uni-dentified man in the audience and was taken away in an ambulance, ac-cording to The News & Observer.