About Sidewalk Festival
Sidewalk Festival is a vibrant biannual celebration of arts and culture featuring a variety of site-specific performances, interactive installations, music, dance, and community-centered workshops. It highlights creativity in outdoor and public spaces, often transforming unconventional locations like parks, streets, and neighborhoods into dynamic stages for artistic expression. The festival emphasizes themes such as environmental justice, spatial equity, and community engagement, creating opportunities for local artists and audiences to connect.
From 2013 to 2019, the Sidewalk Detroit team partnered with the Artist Village and community business owners to transform the streets of Historic Old Redford into a space for discovery, dancing, innovation, and joy. In 2021, we brought unique site-specific experiences to various locations across Detroit. Sidewalk Festival was hosted in the Joy- Southfield, Chadsey- Condon, Dexter- Linwood, and Jefferson- Chalmers neighborhoods. Sidewalk Festival doesn’t use traditional stages—artists are challenged to create site-specific performance and installation art for the alleys, gardens, storefronts, courtyards, parking lots and streets.
This festival serves as a sacred space for the convening of boundary-pushing artists, residents, curious art-lovers, and those of adventurous spirit. The hyper-local experience serves as an opportunity to shift your perspective about what to expect in Detroit and in yourself.
Sidewalk Festival is a biannual gathering and will return to Eliza Howell Park in 2027.
VIsit Sidewalk Festival to learn more.
Our on-going work
As the producers and curators of Sidewalk Festival, our process includes:
Working with the community throughout the year through community meetings. We work closely with small businesses to be sure they are being served while maximizing festival opportunities for artists. We recruit local artists and youth projects for inclusion in our festival.
Our team works collaboratively with artists to develop a curatorial theme, host artist site visits, help artists market their projects, and support them in their processes to create performances and art for our festival.
We work on every facet of the production side of the festival as well. This includes fundraising, location scouting for site-specific art, logistics with the City of Detroit, rent festival equipment and needed contractors, recruit vendors, produce the festival grounds layout and so much more!
