An exhibition gathers pictures. A community gathering gathers people, and the art is the reason they came. It is the oldest way of meeting art there is, older than the museum, the salon or the fair, and it is also the most stubbornly local. A community gathering is any moment when a town sets a date, opens a door or closes a street, and invites everyone within walking distance to make, see or celebrate art together. It asks for no ticket booth and no jury. Its only real requirement is that people show up.

Because it is so ordinary, this kind of event rarely gets a history of its own. The grand institutions absorb the attention, and the church fair, the open studio and the street painting slip past unrecorded. Yet these gatherings are where most people actually meet art for the first time, not on a museum wall but on a pavement, a porch or a high street, and the forms they take have a long and surprisingly continuous story. What follows is a short tour of that story and of the main kinds of gathering it produced, ending, as our series always does, much closer to home.

The feast and the procession

The earliest community gatherings around art were religious, and they did not happen in galleries because there were none. They happened in the street. Across medieval and early modern Europe a saint’s feast day would draw a whole town out of doors, and art was carried along with it, in painted banners, gilded statues borne on shoulders, and the temporary decoration of squares and church fronts. Great private pictures were sometimes brought out of the palazzi and hung in cloisters or porticoes for the occasion, so that for a single day the public could see what was normally kept behind closed doors.

The craft guilds gave these gatherings a second engine. Painters, carvers and goldsmiths belonged to organised trades, and the trades marked the calendar with their own processions and celebrations, displaying their skill as a kind of communal pride. The feast and the procession established a pattern that has never really gone away, namely that a fixed date, a shared faith or trade, and a willingness to take art into the open could turn an ordinary town into a gallery for a day.

Street painting and the madonnari

Out of that feast-day world came one of the most charming gathering traditions of all. In Italy, travelling artists known as madonnari began making images of the Madonna directly on the pavement, in chalk and coloured powder, near churches and along the routes of religious festivals. The name comes straight from their favourite subject. They worked for the coins of passers-by, and their art was deliberately temporary, washed away by the next rain, which was part of its honesty.

The tradition could easily have died, but instead it was revived as a community event. The Italian town of Grazie di Curtatone has hosted a gathering of madonnari every August since the early 1970s, and the idea travelled, most famously to Santa Barbara in California, whose I Madonnari festival has filled the pavement in front of the old mission since the late 1980s. The street-painting festival is now a fixture of community calendars around the world, and it keeps the medieval bargain intact, an artist on their knees in a public square, a crowd gathered to watch the picture appear and then accept that it will vanish.

The studio opens its doors

If the procession brought art to the public, the open studio did the reverse and brought the public to the artist. The premise is simple. For a weekend, working artists unlock the rooms where they actually paint, throw, weld or print, and let anyone wander in. There is no curator and no wall label, only the maker standing beside the half-finished work, willing to explain.

As an organised community event the open studio is a relatively modern invention, taking shape in the second half of the twentieth century when artists in cities such as San Francisco began banding together to open their buildings on the same advertised dates. The format spread because it solved two problems at once. It gave isolated makers a way to find an audience without a gallery, and it gave the public an intimacy that no exhibition can match. The studio tour, in which a printed map sends visitors from barn to garage to spare bedroom across a whole town or county, is the same idea stretched across a landscape, and it has become one of the most popular forms of arts gathering in rural and small-town America.

The art walk and the first friday

Where galleries cluster, a different gathering grew up to link them. The art walk, or gallery crawl, sets aside one evening when the galleries of a district open late together, pour a glass of wine and let visitors stroll from door to door as a kind of moving party. The art is free to see, the mood is social, and the neighbourhood itself becomes the exhibition.

The best-known version is the first friday, in which this happens on the opening evening of each month. Philadelphia’s Old City district helped make the name famous from the early 1990s, and the model proved so portable that thousands of towns now run a first friday of their own. The art walk works because it lowers the threshold to almost nothing. A person who would never buy a ticket to a museum will happily wander a lit-up street on a warm evening, and somewhere between the second gallery and the third they find they have been looking at art for an hour without meaning to.

The mural and the made-together work

Some gatherings do not just show art, they make it, and the community mural is the great example. The modern tradition runs back to the Mexican muralists of the 1920s, who argued that art belonged on public walls where ordinary people lived and worked rather than locked in private collections. That conviction crossed borders, and by the late 1960s a community mural movement was painting the outside walls of American cities, often with residents themselves holding the brushes.

The most celebrated heir to this idea sits just across the river from our own patch. Philadelphia’s mural programme, which began in the 1980s as a way of channelling the energy behind graffiti into something the whole city could own, has since produced thousands of public works and turned mural-making into a genuine community ritual, with neighbours designing, funding and painting walls together. The made-together work is the purest form of the gathering, because here the crowd is not the audience. The crowd is the artist.

The arts festival comes of age

The grandest descendant of the feast day is the modern arts festival, which gathers many of these threads into a single weekend or season. A festival might fold together open studios, street painting, live music, a craft and maker market, food, and a parade, and offer the lot under one banner and one set of dates. Some grew enormous, such as the Edinburgh fringe that sprang up in 1947 and now swallows a whole city each August, but the form scales all the way down to a single afternoon on a village green.

What every version shares is the medieval inheritance, a fixed point in the calendar, a public invited in, and the understanding that the event will soon pack up and leave. That impermanence is not a weakness but the engine, the same logic that powers the fair and the biennial. People come precisely because the gathering is brief, because the chalk Madonna will be gone by Monday and the open studios will be locked again by Sunday night. Scarcity, oddly, is what fills the street.

South Jersey, where the gathering comes home

All of these forms are alive and well within a short drive of where you are reading this. South Jersey is, by its nature, a region of small walkable downtowns, and the small walkable downtown is the natural home of the community gathering. The historic main streets of towns like Mullica Hill, with their antique shops and converted storefronts, lend themselves to the art walk and the seasonal street fair, while a college town like Glassboro keeps a steady pulse of public exhibitions and events around the university.

The same instincts that filled a medieval portico show up here in modern dress. A restored old movie house such as the Broadway Theatre of Pitman gathers a town for an evening exactly as the feast day once did. Community art centres across the region run member shows, open-studio weekends and workshops that put the public in the same room as the maker. And the great regional anchor, the mural tradition of nearby Philadelphia, sits close enough to shape how this whole corner of the map thinks about art in public space. The grand history of the gathering, it turns out, is also a local one.

From the feast day to the front porch

Read in one sweep, the history of the community gathering is the story of art refusing to stay indoors. It began in the procession and the saint’s day, learned to kneel on the pavement with the madonnari, opened the studio door, lit up the gallery street on a first friday, handed the brush to the neighbourhood at the mural wall, and gathered all of it into the festival. The institutions changed around it, but the basic act did not.

That act is a small and hopeful one. To set a date and open a door is to bet that art is worth gathering for, and that strangers will come if you ask them. From the porticoes of Rome to the front porches of a South Jersey main street, every community gathering is the same wager made again, that the best place to meet a work of art is in the company of other people who came to see it too.