Festival of the Arts (Grand Rapids)

The Festival of the Arts – known locally as simply Festival, typically with the year added (e.g. "Festival 2005") – is a three-day multimedia arts festival, held in Grand Rapids, Michigan on the first Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of June. The event features live performances of music, dance, and other performing arts; displays and sales of paintings and other visual arts; art and sculpture opportunities for children; film/video and literary presentations; and a wide variety of multicultural food booths operated by local non-profit organizations. Typically involving nearly 20,000 community volunteers and over half a million visitors,[1] according to the Library of Congress, Festival is the largest all-volunteer arts festival in the United States.[2]

This article is about the festival in Grand Rapids. For the defunct festival in Detroit, see Detroit Festival of the Arts. For the festival of the same name in Laguna Beach, California, see Festival of the Arts (California).
The Calder Sun, official logo of Festival

History

Festival was first held in 1970, a year after the 1969 installation of Alexander Calder's La Grande Vitesse, featuring two stages and a few food booths. The event grew quickly, filling the Vandenberg Plaza by the 1980s, and subsequently expanding into nearby streets, with several performance stages, and more than two dozen food booths. The public event was suspended in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, replaced with a virtual event.

References
  1. Festival of the Arts - Grand Rapids, Michigan
  2. Michigan: Festival of the Arts: The Nation's Largest All-Volunteer Arts Festival (Local Legacies: Celebrating Community Roots - Library of Congress)



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