What was the Scottsdale Arts Festival?
For almost half a century, mid-March in Old Town meant the Scottsdale Arts Festival: three days of white tents on the Civic Center lawns, juried artists selling their own work, two stages of live music, food trucks and a children’s art studio. In its last years it had more than 170 jury-selected artists from across the United States and Canada and nearly 25,000 visitors, and its organizers called it “long recognized as one of the top art fairs in America.” Its director called it “Scottsdale’s oldest, continuous arts festival.”
It has not been held since 2019. The 49th festival, March 8–10, 2019, was the last on the lawn. The 50th, set for March 13–15, 2020, was canceled in person over COVID-19, and the organizers built a virtual festival instead. The 51st, scheduled for March 12–14, 2021, was canceled outright. In 2022 the festival’s website promised to see visitors in 2023; no festival came. Since 2023 its web address has forwarded to Scottsdale Arts’ “Civic Center Live” page. We found no announcement that the festival was retired, but the historian Joan Fudala now gives its run as 1971 to 2019.
What it was like
The festival’s own pages and the Scottsdale Progress’s 2019 and 2020 previews show what the event had become by the end.
The art. More than 170 artists, chosen by jury from the United States and Canada, in ceramics, digital art, drawing and pastel, fiber, glass, jewelry, metal, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture and wood. Each year had a featured artist. In 2019 it was Michelle McDowell Smith, a Florida painter who works in layered acrylic and collage. In 2020 it was the Chandler printmakers Stephen and Bonnie Harmston of HarmstonArts, who had first shown there in the early 1990s and called it “the best show in the whole state.”
Everything else. Two stages of continuous music. In 2019 the lineup included Cale Tyson, QuiQue Escamilla and Brian Chartrand. Food trucks and vendors grew from 14 in 2018 to 19 in 2019. The Community Art Studio offered hands-on art-making for children and families, along with yard games, morning yoga and collaborative projects, and a ticket included free admission to SMoCA. An online art auction raised money for arts-education programs at the Center for the Performing Arts and SMoCA; the 2018 auction brought in more than $13,000.
The money. Tickets were sold as single- or two-day passes. Proceeds, the festival said, supported “the dynamic and diverse performances, exhibitions, installations and arts education and outreach programs presented by the Scottsdale Arts.”
Who ran it
In its later decades the festival was a production of the Scottsdale Center for the Arts and then of Scottsdale Arts, the nonprofit the city has contracted since 1988 to run its arts facilities; Fudala lists the Arts Festival among the outdoor events the Center and Scottsdale Arts sponsored. Its last director was Jamie Prins. Who organized the first festivals on the Civic Center Mall in the early 1970s, before the Center for the Arts opened in 1975, is not in any source we found.
The lawn it grew up on
The festival belonged to the Civic Center as much as to any organization. Bennie Gonzales’s City Hall and library opened in 1968, and the Center for the Arts followed on October 23, 1975. The lawns between them, called the Civic Center Mall, became the city’s front yard, and the Arts Festival was the event that used them most fully. It also shared the season with the city’s other spring traditions: spring training a few blocks away, the Celebration of Fine Art tents on the north side of town, and, in April, the Culinary Festival on the same grounds.
How it ended
The ending was not one decision but a sequence. The Civic Center was being rebuilt in 2019 and 2020, and the 50th festival was to be held on the newly renovated, 20-acre Civic Center Park on March 13–15, 2020. The organizers canceled the in-person event “out of an abundance of caution given rising concerns around COVID-19” and moved it online, with a virtual artist catalog and virtual tickets.
The 2021 festival was scheduled for March 12–14. In March 2021 the Progress reported it canceled. “The decision to cancel the event for a second year in a row was heartbreaking for our organization and the artists who would have participated,” Prins said. That spring Scottsdale Arts brought back its Sunday A’Fair concerts as smaller outdoor shows.
In 2022 the festival’s website showed only a “Save the Date” and “Looking forward to seeing you in 2023!” By 2023 the site forwarded to Scottsdale Arts. The renovated Civic Center now has two amphitheater stages, the East Bowl and the West Bowl, and Scottsdale Arts programs it as “Civic Center Live,” with concerts, markets and community festivals. Its fall 2026 calendar listed the Scottsdale Fall Festival, the Día de los Muertos Fiestas and the Scottsdale Italian Festival, but no spring art fair.
The dates that don’t agree
The festival’s start is uncertain by a year. Its own numbering called the 2019 festival the 49th, the 2020 festival the 50th and the 2021 festival the 51st. Counted back, that puts the first festival in 1971, and Fudala gives 1971 in two columns. But the 2020 coverage also described that year as the festival’s “50th anniversary,” which would mean 1970, and earlier versions of this page said 1970. The Scottsdale Progress and city records for spring 1970 and 1971, in the Scottsdale Public Library’s local-history collection, would settle it.
What’s still unknown
- The founders. Who started the festival, and whether the city, a civic club or an arts group ran the first ones before the Center for the Arts opened.
- The decision. Whether Scottsdale Arts formally retired the festival, and why it did not return after the pandemic. Its board minutes and its management reports to the city would say. The city auditor’s reviews of the Scottsdale Arts contract are public and are a starting point.
- The archive. Fifty years of artist rosters, posters and prizewinners. Scottsdale Arts and the Scottsdale Historical Society are the likely keepers.