What is the Scottsdale Arts Festival?
Every March since 1970, the lawns of Scottsdale Civic Center turn into a three-day open-air gallery: 150-plus juried artists from across the country, tents in tidy rows between the fountains and Dale Wright’s dancers and the LOVE sculpture, live bands playing while people carry wrapped paintings to their cars.
It’s one of the longest-running juried arts festivals in America, and “juried” is the load-bearing word — artists compete for these booths, and the selection panel keeps the quality closer to gallery walls than county fair. You’ll find serious painting, sculpture, ceramics, jewelry, photography, glass, and fiber art, sold by the people who made it, who will happily tell you exactly how.
The setting does half the work. The Civic Center — Scottsdale’s 1970s-era arts campus, freshly renovated — was designed as a place for exactly this, with SMoCA and the Center for the Performing Arts anchoring the grounds. The festival isn’t visiting a park; it’s an arts institution using its own front yard.
The short version: modest admission, three days in mid-March, go Saturday for the buzz or Sunday for the browsing room.
How to work the festival
The lap rule. The booth rows loop the Civic Center green. Walk the whole circuit once, coffee in hand, before opening your wallet — you’re calibrating. Second lap is for conversations and decisions. Artists here expect and enjoy questions; every booth is staffed by its maker or their partner, and the story behind a piece is part of what you’re buying.
Price reality. Headline works run gallery prices — that’s the caliber. But nearly every booth carries an accessible tier: prints, small studies, earrings, minor ceramics. It’s a genuinely good place to buy your first piece of real art, and Sunday afternoon — when nobody wants to pack inventory home — is when polite interest in a larger piece sometimes meets flexibility.
Beyond the booths: two music stages run all day (the lineup skews quality local acts with occasional touring names), the food row and drink gardens are better than festival-average, and the kids’ zone does hands-on art-making that buys parents a real browsing window. SMoCA usually runs festival-weekend programming too — check what’s in the galleries before you leave the campus.
Logistics: Old Town parking garages are free and a short walk; ride-share drops cleanly on Drinkwater. March weather is the festival’s co-headliner — 75 and cloudless most years — but shade is booth-made, so hat and sunscreen.
The festival and the campus that made it
You can’t tell this festival’s story without the ground it stands on. In the late 1960s, Scottsdale made an unusual bet for a small Western town: it hired architect Bennie Gonzales to build a Civic Center that treated culture as core infrastructure — his sculptural white adobe-modern City Hall and library, a performing arts center, and a great lawn to bind them. The Arts Festival launched in 1970, essentially christening the place.
That decision compounded. The Center for the Performing Arts professionalized the city’s arts programming; Scottsdale Arts (the nonprofit that runs the festival today) grew into the umbrella for the whole cultural apparatus; and in 1999 SMoCA — the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, carved out of a former cinema — completed the campus. The festival is the annual open-air expression of that fifty-year civic thesis: same organization that stages Canal Convergence every fall, same city that has run an ArtWalk every Thursday since 1975.
The recent Civic Center renovation — new lawns, permanent stages, better shade and grading — was built with festivals explicitly in mind, and this one benefits most: the 2020s editions are the most comfortable in the event’s history.
Where it sits in the season
Mid-March is Scottsdale operating at maximum: spring training at full boil ten minutes’ walk away, resort pools open, Old Town restaurants on wait-lists. The Arts Festival is the calm, grown-up center of that storm — the thing you do the same weekend you catch a Giants game, and the reason half the houses in town have at least one piece bought “at the festival, years ago, from the artist herself.” Fifty-plus years in, that’s the quiet achievement: it turned buying art from an intimidating gallery transaction into a sunny local habit — one March lap at a time.