New Orleans Art Festivals
New Orleans is a city that celebrates performing, visual arts, and avant-garde art scenes with special events, openings, and festivals. Here are some of the New Orleans Art festivals you won’t want to miss!
LUNA Fête
LUNA Fête is presented by Arts Council New Orleans in Lafayette Square every year in early December. It’s quite a unique festival that connects the community to contemporary art. LUNA Fête stands for Light Up NOLA Arts and blends New Orleans’ historic architecture with sound installation, motion graphics, and lights and video mapping.
This festival is free and open to the public and uses the New Orleans’ architecture as the canvas for awe-inspiring outdoor light installations and highlights art through video mapping technology. All of this creates a display that compliments the other local holiday lighting displays in City Park and Canal Street.
Art for Art’s Sake
New Orleans’ Magazine Street stretches from Uptown to downtown and is filled with antique shops, art galleries, and so much more. To celebrate these businesses and the start of the arts season, the Magazine Street Merchants’ Association hosts the Art for Art’s Sake event every year. Every year, the festival takes place along Magazine and Julia Streets on the first Saturday of October. It is something that everyone can hop in on for an evening of touring galleries and shopping to your heart’s content.
Galleries and other local businesses stay open late, and many of them offer free beverages while you peruse everything from contemporary to classic art. You’ll also find cash bars out on the streets so you can continue sipping your drinks while listening to live music and wandering to the next gallery you want to see. You’ll also find food vendors, street performers, and other entertainment on your walks between the shops and galleries. The Contemporary Art Center also celebrates the festival with new exhibits and musical performances.
Algiers Folk Art Festival
The Algiers Folk Art Zone & Blues Museum presents the Algiers Folk Art Festival every year in the fall in Algiers Point. At this festival, you’ll enjoy regional folk art, food, live music, children’s arts and crafts, and much more!
Hancock Whitney White Linen Night
Hancock Whitney White Linen Night is hosted by the Contemporary Arts Center every year on the first Saturday in August. This event honors the local artists and galleries that line Julia Street in the Warehouse District. Everyone in New Orleans is invited to put on their white linen apparel and head out for an evening of gallery perusing, art shopping, eating, and drinking.
Dirty Linen Night
Every year, a week after Hancock Whitney White Linen Night, locals and tourists are invited to grab their “dirty linens” worn the previous week from exploring the Julia Street art galleries, and hop on over to Royal Street. You can expect to see galleries, shops, and eateries open to the public from the 200 block of Royal Street and onward. The art you’ll find here is unique to New Orleans, and you’ll see everything from antique to contemporary.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this list of festivals, and we encourage you to check out a few! And if you ever decide to take a break from the manmade art, come check out some of nature’s beauty with us at Whiskey Bayou Charters! We’re a fishing charter located in Delacroix, Louisiana, just 45 minutes from downtown New Orleans.
