Arts & The Park Festival

Ten Days That Make the Case for Hot Springs as the South’s Most Artistically Serious Small City

The Hot Springs Area Cultural Alliance has organized Arts and the Park 2026 under the theme “We the Arts,” a ten-day celebration running April 24 through May 3 that draws its language deliberately from the preamble to the United States Constitution in the year of the nation’s 250th anniversary. The intention, according to HSACA leadership, is to show how art unifies a community across its varied experiences and demographics, an aspiration that the festival has been working toward since its founding and that the 2026 edition pursues with the most ambitious program in the event’s second decade. Premier sponsorship comes from Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort, which allows the majority of Arts and the Park’s programming to remain free and open to the public.

The festival opens April 24 with two concurrent activations. The Art Moves exhibit is unveiled along the Hot Springs Creek Greenway Trail, and a meet-and-greet evening with Patrick Shearn of Poetic Kinetics takes place at Garvan Woodland Gardens, where Shearn’s large-scale installation “Where the Wind Lives” opens and will remain on view through October 31. Shearn is known for monumental suspended artworks that respond to air movement, and the Garvan Woodland Gardens setting, with its 210 acres of botanical landscape overlooking Lake Hamilton, provides a frame that few urban festival venues could approximate. The opening night conversation with Shearn is the festival’s first formal gathering, and it sets the intellectual register for the ten days that follow.

Art Springs: The Festival’s Public Heart

Art Springs takes place at Hill Wheatley Plaza and the adjacent Entertainment District on Malvern Avenue between Bridge Street and Spring Street on Saturday, April 25, and Sunday, April 26, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM each day. The two-day outdoor festival fills the plaza with juried fine artists and artisans, food trucks, beverage vendors, and two distinct zones of activity: a participation-focused area where visitors can engage directly with art-making, including the Under Pressure steamroller block-printing event and interactive workshops, and a more passive observation zone where the Art Springs stage hosts musical performances. A chalk walk event for kindergarten through high school students takes place on Saturday, April 25, from 8:30 AM to noon, with judged categories and free children’s books distributed throughout the day.

The week between Art Springs and the closing events is where Arts and the Park becomes fully itself. Pop-up performances and learning experiences run April 27 through 30, including culinary events on the new Chef’s Table restaurant passport program, design workshops, poetry readings, and an international musicians’ concert featuring IBLA Foundation competition winners, pianists and vocalists selected through a global competition held annually in Ragusa, Italy, whose winners have previously performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. The festival wraps with the Gallery Walk on May 1, when Hot Springs’ galleries open their doors from 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM, followed by studio tours on May 2 and 3.

> Good to Know
> Garvan Woodland Gardens, where Patrick Shearn’s “Where the Wind Lives” installation opens the festival, charges a separate admission fee from the general Arts and the Park program. The gardens are located at 550 Arkridge Road on the north shore of Lake Hamilton and are accessible by car from downtown Hot Springs in approximately 10 minutes. The botanical setting is one of the more unusual outdoor gallery environments in the American South and rewards a dedicated visit independent of the festival itself.

The Water That Defines the City

Hot Springs is, at its geological core, a thermal water city. The 47 hot springs that give the city its name flow at 143 degrees Fahrenheit from the southwestern slope of Hot Springs Mountain, and Bathhouse Row, the collection of eight Spanish Colonial Revival bathhouses completed between 1912 and 1923 along Central Avenue, constitutes the country’s only surviving full assemblage of the American spa building type from that era. Several are now occupied by restaurants, a brewery, and a visual arts center. Lake Hamilton and its companion reservoir Lake Catherine both lie within the city’s boundaries, giving Hot Springs a lake geography that most Ozarks towns can only approximate. Lake Hamilton, with its 135 miles of shoreline, supports significant boating, fishing, and waterfront dining activity, and its shores are lined with properties that make the drive from the Bathhouse Row arts district to the waterfront a genuine shift in character rather than just a change of scene.

For visitors who want to walk out of a gallery opening and into a lakeside property the same evening, the historic home near downtown Hot Springs on Lake.com provides a property with genuine architectural character appropriate to a city that has organized its civic identity around both its historic fabric and its natural thermal landscape.

> If You’re Going With Kids
> The Art Springs children’s area is one of the more thoughtfully designed youth programming zones in the festival circuit. The book giveaway partnership with the Hot Springs Community Foundation distributes free children’s literature regardless of purchase, and the interactive art stations are set up for participation rather than passive observation. The steamroller printing event is particularly compelling for children who have never watched a physical printing process and frequently produces the most memorable moment of their festival visit.

Find Your Spot on Lake.com

Search Lake.com for vacation rentals near Hot Springs and Lake Hamilton to find properties within reach of both the festival venues along Central Avenue and the lake’s waterfront parks and marinas. Spring booking in Hot Springs is competitive with the racing season at Oaklawn and the festival calendar; reserve at least four to six weeks ahead.