Orange County’s Uproar Festival of Public Art returns next month for its second iteration, bringing sixty outdoor installations and murals by Southern artists to the downtown streets and parks of Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Hillsborough.
Conceived as a way to support local artists and small businesses, the festival feels especially needed in the wake of Tropical Storm Chantal, which pummeled the county with storms and flooding two weeks ago.
“No, we don’t have the bandwidth to pull this off, and we’re absolutely struggling. But it’s like, we’ve got to do this thing,” Orange County Arts Commission director Katie Murray tells INDY. “The arts always heal. The arts are centered in community. … The community needs it.”
The Eno Arts Mill in Hillsborough, where the Arts Commission maintains artist studios and gallery space, was destroyed during Chantal. Floodwaters rose as high as four feet inside the 140-year-old building, Murray says, ruining much of the artwork that was stored there and rendering it uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.
Murray momentarily considered canceling Uproar in the wake of the storm, then decided the show must go on.
“This is something that is going to bring joy to our communities,” she says. “And we need it so bad right now.”
Organized primarily by the Orange County Arts Commission, Uproar is a free festival that debuted in 2023. After taking a break in 2024, the festival is returning this year with site-specific works by sixty artists from North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia. It opens on August 1 with a kickoff party at Eno River Brewing and runs through August 23.
Murray is excited about the range of artists involved: “It’s demographically diverse, but the art is also diverse. It spans from silly and goofy to really serious, and kind of pull-at-your-heartstrings.”
Uproar was designed with accessibility in mind, meaning all of the artworks are in easy-to-access places, with audio descriptions available for people with low vision. The Chapel Hill/Orange County Visitors Bureau is also running a free, handicapped-accessible and air-conditioned trolley through Chapel Hill and Carrboro on Saturdays in August so that people can view the installations that way.
On top of being a festival, Uproar is a competition. Members of the public are encouraged to “score” each piece they view by scanning a QR code posted near the installation. At the end of the month, the artist whose piece receives the highest cumulative score will win a $10,000 “People’s Choice” prize. The runner-up scorer will receive $500.
Uproar will award a second $10,000 prize to the artist chosen by the festival’s three jurors, the North Carolina-based artists Stephen Hayes, Elizabeth Brim, and Thomas Sayre. They, too, will award a runner-up prize worth $500. And the towns of Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Hillsborough will each award some prize money or purchase an artwork for their permanent collections.
Murray hopes Uproar can shine a spotlight on Orange County’s arts scene.
“We often get overlooked because there’s so much going on in Durham, so much going on in Raleigh,” she says. “But we have over 170 arts organizations in Orange County. We have a ton of artists.”
Plus, it’ll serve as a physical manifestation of the importance of the Orange County Arts Commission.
“We are going to have to have some serious fundraising to rebuild,” Murray says of the arts commission. “Even though we are funded by Orange County, our funding is very, very small. This is a visible thing that’ll be out in the community, saying, ‘This is what your arts council does. This is what we make possible.’”
Chloe Courtney Bohl is a Report for America corps member. Follow her on Bluesky or reach her at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].