The Davis Arts Center is open during the festival. Walk in. It is right beside Community Park and it is one of the most useful buildings on the site.
Inside you will find:
- Monster arts and crafts. Making things, getting covered in it, taking something home. Free, and aimed at children who would rather do than watch.
- Restrooms. Indoor ones, which on a busy afternoon in a park is not a small thing.
- The zombie video game station, which lives indoors. Our own festival video game, playable on the day. More about the arcade.
- And possibly an art showing by a local artist in the gallery, which is worth walking through even if you came for the crafts.
None of that happens by accident. Sam King, their Executive Director, and Nicole Hebert, their Director of Operations, are the people who make the building available and staffed on our busiest day of the year. They are a genuinely important partner to this festival and we would be a poorer event without them.
The Davis Arts Center
They have been doing this in Davis since 1960, starting as a group of teaching artists running classes in rented rooms and moving into their own building in 1987: ten thousand square feet with studios for clay, weaving, visual art, dance, drama and music, plus the Tsao Gallery.
The scale of it surprises people. Around seventy teaching artists run more than three hundred classes a season, over a thousand a year, for children, teenagers and adults.
In 2024 they rewrote their mission around access: making sure every child and family, whatever their circumstances, can get to arts education. A free craft table at a free festival is the smallest possible version of that, and it is exactly the same idea.
Their classes run all year at davisartscenter.org.
