The St. Pete Arts Alliance’s SHINE Mural Festival invites you to celebrate Pride Month while exploring the amazing murals around downtown St. Pete – on a fun SHINE mural scavenger hunt hosted by award-winning drag performer Matthew McGee.
Beginning on June 12 and continuing through June 19, throughout St. Pete Pride‘s Arts & Music Week, you can explore vivid mural art while deciphering clues shared by McGee – your Fairy Dragmother – as he tells tales of Cinderella’s wild night out and you search for her missing stiletto.
The mural hunt can be done solo or with a team of friends, and on your own schedule. You can find the details here. And throughout the year, the Arts Alliance offers an online mural tour that makes the art accessible from home or on smart phones, with photos plus audio and text descriptions of the murals.
The mural tour and this scavenger hunt are available on the free PixelStix app, designed for any smart phone and created by a Pinellas company focused on making it easy to find out more about this kind of public art, where there’s rarely a sign to explain it.
“SHINE is excited to present Once Upon a Shine as part of St. Pete Pride,” explains Jenee Priebe, associate director of the festival. “Bringing two of St. Pete’s best events together while finding new ways to interact with public art has been a fun process and will be even more fun for participants.
“We’re grateful to Regions Bank and Artistry St. Pete for making this event possible and thanks to PixelStix we have the technology to attach our Fairy Dragmother’s video clues directly to each mural.
“As far as we know, no one has ever created a drag queen mural scavenger hunt before so we’re excited to share this with St. Pete!” declares Priebe.
“Our hope is that people will appreciate the diversity of the artwork and the artists we’ve curated over the years, while celebrating Pride in a brand new way.”
Matthew McGee is a much-beloved drag performer, who also works behind the scenes at freeFall Theatre. “It is such a fun idea,” he says. “I was approached by the awesome Jenee Priebe and Jesse Miller about this project they co-conceived and co-wrote for Pride. Todd Burgess filmed the content and is doing all of the visuals and animation.
“I added some material here and there! Lots of ad-libbing lol. A fun bit of info is that Scott Daniel of Premier Postiche created my wig and THE Eric Davis designed and constructed my beautiful cloak. It takes a village to raise a drag Queen.”
