POW! WOW! returns for a third year with all the ambition, imagination, and doggedness that marked earlier years, but 2018 promises to be even bigger. With 32 international and local artists lined up to paint 27 surfaces at 17 sites and to erect numerous surprise pop-up art installations spread across the city. The sites chosen and artists invited demonstrate yet again that POW! WOW! Worcester is about more than walls. You might even say POW! WOW! is about breaking down the metaphorical walls that separate everyday experience from art viewership, divorce the final product from the artistic process of creation, and blind us to the centrality of art to community building. To rebuild these connections, POW! WOW! is deepening its collaboration with Worcester Public Schools, spreading its visual mayhem further into the more suburban precincts of the city, and forging relationships with new community partners invested in reinventing Worcester. When the paint dries on the 2018 POW! WOW!, it will be hard to move through the city without being moved by its vitality and vision.