What is the Phoenix Festival of the Arts?
The Phoenix Festival of the Arts is a free December art fair run by the Phoenix Center for the Arts, the nonprofit community art school at 3rd Street and Moreland in downtown Phoenix, since 2012. In a normal year it fills the lawns of Margaret T. Hance Park next door with 150-plus local artists and makers, a dozen food trucks, fifteen or so performances by local bands and dance companies, a kids’ zone and a wine garden, and draws, by the Center’s own count, more than 12,000 people over a weekend.
The 15th festival is different: a single day, Saturday, December 12, 2026, from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., held on the Center’s own campus rather than in the park. The Center calls it a reimagined one-day experience, and the program follows the buildings: indoor and outdoor artist marketplaces around the campus, live performances in the newly renovated Third Street Theater, hands-on workshops in the visual-arts classrooms, a bar and gathering space in the courtyard, a Family Zone presented by Medieval Times, and a live-painting series in which local artists work on commissioned pieces during the festival. Admission stays free.
It is the smaller, scrappier cousin of the Tempe Festival of the Arts the weekend before and of the Scottsdale Arts Festival in March: fewer booths, a lower price point, and a mission, since the festival is the fundraiser for a community art school that teaches ceramics, painting, glass, music and dance. For a Scottsdale visitor it is 25 minutes away, a block from the light rail, and two blocks from Roosevelt Row, which makes it the easiest downtown Saturday in December.
How to do it
Tickets. None. Walk in. The Center posts the performance and workshop schedule in the weeks before. Bring a card as well as cash; the vendors are small makers.
Getting there. The campus is at 1202 N 3rd Street, on the east edge of Hance Park between Roosevelt and McDowell. The light rail stops at Roosevelt/Central and McDowell/Central, each two blocks away; from Scottsdale, drive to the Dorsey/Apache park-and-ride in Tempe or the Central and Camelback lot in Phoenix and ride in, which also solves the drinks question. By car it is 25 minutes from Old Town down the 202 and 7th Street or along McDowell, and the closest parking is the Burton Barr Central Library garage on Central Avenue and the park’s own lots, which fill by noon on a festival day. Street meters on the Roosevelt Row side are the overflow.
When to go. The booths are best before 1 p.m., when the ceramics and jewelry tables are full and the artists are talking. The evening hours, new in 2026, are for the theater and the bar. If you have children the Family Zone is the midday stop.
What to buy. Ceramics, glass, jewelry and metalwork are the festival’s strengths, reflecting the Center’s own studios; much of the work is by students, instructors and the downtown studio crowd, and prices start where a Scottsdale gallery’s end. Willcox Wine Country poured Arizona wine at the 2024 park edition; what the courtyard bar serves in 2026 was not posted in October.
What to eat. The food trucks in the park years ran to tacos, burgers and ice cream. The surer bet is to shop in the afternoon and walk south to Roosevelt Row for dinner, where the restaurants are a ten-minute walk down 3rd Street.
What to skip. Do not plan it as a full day the way you would Tempe. Two or three hours covers it, which is why it pairs so well with the library, the park or a First Friday-style wander down Roosevelt.
A student show that became a downtown festival
Phoenix Center for the Arts is a city-owned building and a nonprofit program: the Central Arts Alliance runs art classes for adults and children out of the complex at 3rd Street and Moreland, with support from the city’s Parks and Recreation and Office of Arts and Culture. In 2012 its students and instructors mounted a small art show on the grounds and called it the Phoenix Festival of the Arts; the following year it moved next door to Margaret T. Hance Park, the 32-acre deck park built over the I-10 tunnel, and grew into a two-day December fair with three stages. KTAR counted more than 170 artists and three stages at the eighth edition in 2019, which ran three days.
The festival has had a hard decade in a boom-and-bust downtown. In 2023 the Center announced it would not produce the festival at all, citing financial challenges after a year it said had drawn more than 12,000 people. It returned in December 2024 for a 13th edition with two new partners, Willcox Wine Country pouring Arizona wine and the fine-art promoter Vermillion Promotions bringing a juried component, and ran again at Hance Park on December 13–14, 2025. The 2026 move onto the campus for one long day, with the renovated Third Street Theater as the stage, reads as a festival sizing itself to what the organization can sustain: lower production cost, indoor space, and a bar that keeps the money on site.
What has not changed is the price, free, and the character. Where Tempe’s festival is run by a business district and juried for national circuit artists, Phoenix’s is run by an art school and populated by people who took a class there. It shows in the booths and in the prices.
Why it belongs on a Scottsdale calendar
Scottsdale’s own art fairs are in winter and spring, from Celebration of Fine Art in January to the Arts Festival in March, and they are priced for collectors. The Phoenix Festival of the Arts is the opposite proposition: a free December afternoon where a bowl or a print by a downtown potter is the typical purchase, in a park, with music. The real reason to go is the neighborhood. The campus sits between the central library, Hance Park and Roosevelt Row, which means a Scottsdale visitor can ride the rail in, shop the booths, see the library, eat on Roosevelt and ride home without touching the car, a downtown day Scottsdale cannot offer. Go on December 12, early, and save the evening for the theater.