What It Is

Type: festival
First held / when: early 1960s, held over Presidents&#039; Day weekend in February
Where: Coconut Grove
Related era: MiMo Postwar Boom
In a sentence: A juried outdoor art show that became one of the South&#039;s signature fine-arts events.

The Coconut Grove Arts Festival is a juried fine-arts fair that closes off the Grove's main streets and lines them with the booths of several hundred artists working in painting, sculpture, ceramics, glass, photography, and mixed media. It grew out of a small sidewalk art show first staged in the early 1960s and has run on Presidents' Day weekend for decades. Artists apply through a competitive jury process, and the festival pairs the visual-art booths with live music and food, drawing a crowd commonly estimated in the low hundreds of thousands across the three days.

Why It Matters

The festival is woven into the Grove's identity as Miami's bohemian, tree-shaded village — a counterweight to the high-rise city it sits beside. It predates most of Miami's contemporary cultural calendar and helped establish the city as a place where outdoor art events could draw national exhibitors long before Art Basel arrived. For the Grove specifically, the festival is a yearly assertion of the neighborhood's artistic self-image, and a reliable economic event for its restaurants and shops.

Neighborhoods: Coconut Grove Eras: The MiMo / Postwar Boom