What is the Fountain Festival of Fine Arts & Crafts?
Fountain Hills was a new town in 1974, four years into Robert McCulloch’s experiment in selling desert lots by building the world’s tallest fountain in a man-made lake. That year the young chamber of commerce put 60 artists on the Avenue of the Fountains and called it a festival. Fifty-two years later the Fountain Festival of Fine Arts & Crafts fills that avenue and Saguaro Boulevard with 400 to 500 juried artists every November and February, and the chamber still runs it.
It is free. Admission is free, parking is free, and the show is deliberately broad: oil painters and bronze sculptors next to metal garden art, turned wood, jewelry, photography, pottery, textiles and the inevitable hot sauce booth. There are two VFW beer gardens with live music, a wine garden, food trucks and, every hour on the hour, the fountain firing a 300-foot column of water at the end of the street.
Attendance is the one number nobody agrees on: the chamber has said “tens of thousands” on one page and “upwards of 100,000” on another, and older marketing claims 150,000 and even 200,000. Every lot within a half mile is full by mid-morning Saturday. That is big enough.
How to do it
Pick your day. Friday morning is the quiet version, and the artists have time to talk. Saturday is the show at full volume. Sunday after 2 p.m. is when booths start dealing.
Parking is the whole game. Saguaro Boulevard, the Avenue of the Fountains and Verde River Drive are closed, so the free town lots at the River of Time Museum, Town Hall and the library, and along Fountain Park, take the load. Come in on Shea from Scottsdale, about 20 minutes from the 101, and approach from Palisades on the north side rather than Saguaro from the south. Expect to walk, and look at the chamber’s parking map, because closures shift.
Walk it with a plan. The Avenue is the spine; Saguaro is the long leg. Do one in the morning and the other in the afternoon, and stand on the park side at the top of an hour for the fountain.
Buying and staying. Everything is handmade by the person in the booth, which is the jury’s rule; prices run from $20 to five figures, and artists ship. Hidden in the Hills, the Cave Creek and Carefree studio tour, often overlaps a November festival weekend; do one Saturday and the other Sunday. Stay up the hill at ADERO, in the town’s Dark Sky community, and pair the festival by day with stargazing by night.
How it differs from Scottsdale’s festivals, and why that matters
Scottsdale’s art fairs are curated experiences. The Scottsdale Arts Festival at the Civic Center, which ran from the early 1970s until 2019, charged admission and juried a tighter show with a serious music stage. The Kierland Fine Art & Wine Festival and its Waterfront sibling are free, compact and organized around a wine glass. None of them was ever a town closing its main street.
Fountain Hills is a chamber of commerce show in the old sense: the festival exists to bring a hundred thousand people into a town of about 25,000 with no freeway and no mall. Booth fees fund the chamber, the VFW runs the beer, and the art ranges from very fine to very fun because the jury is admitting a market, not building a collection. You will see more art, buy more art and spend less than at any Scottsdale show, under a fountain built for exactly this purpose: to make people drive out and look.
The two seasons
The November show opens the Valley’s art season, a week before Thanksgiving, when the weather has finally turned and the winter residents are back. The February show, the one that marked its 50th in 2024, lands in the thick of it, between the car auctions and spring training, with the desert about to bloom. Ours is February, because the light on the fountain at 4 p.m. is better.