Eastside Arts Society’s 6th annual Eastside Arts Festival returns with an expansive line-up of event for its summer celebration of Eastside artists. Taking place July 17–26, the festival spans neighbourhood, parks, studios, and breweries across the Eastside Arts District, including an all-day outdoor music event at MacLean Park. The district-wide celebration of the artists, cultural spaces, and the creative communities that shape Vancouver’s Eastside, invites people to experience the community in hands-on and unexpected ways through soundwalks, artist-led workshops, public art tours, immersive performances, and live music.
“As the Eastside Arts Festival enters its 6th year, I’m continually inspired by the creative energy, experimentation, and sense of community that exists across the Eastside Arts District,” says Sierra MacTavish, Programs and Development Manager at the Eastside Arts Society. “What makes the Eastside so special is the density of creativity that exists here–artist studios, community spaces, and longstanding cultural histories all existing side by side. At its heart, the festival is about creating opportunities for people to move through the neighbourhood differently, encounter moments of wonder, and connect more deeply with the artists, spaces, and communities that continue to shape Vancouver’s cultural landscape.”
The 2026 festival brings back its popular series of neighbourhood walking tours, featuring a number of new and enhances offerings, including artist-led tours across the Eastside communities of Chinatown, Strathcona, and Commercial Drive, and featuring a wide variety of topics: photography, soundwalking (an active listening experience that focuses on sonic environments), public art, and a choose-your-own-adventure format heritage tour. Walking tour guides include: Hogan’s Alley Society, Bill Yuen of Heritage Vancouver, and local artists Kate MacDonald, Jorma Kujala, Wendy D, and Candice Weber.
The Eastside Arts Festival introduces a series of new, unique and affordable art-making workshops to complement returning favourites, hosted by Eastside artists at a variety of venues; artist studios, local breweries and distilleries like Luppolo Brewing Co, East Van Brewing Company, Superflux Beer Company, and Odd Society Spirits, and open air workshops at Strathcona Park. Instructors for the workshops include: Terminal City Glass Co-op, Naomi Yamamoto, Christina Radvak, Janine Schroedter, Candice Weber, Serena Chu, Dima Gurevich, Sunfire Studios Inc., Tara Pople, Pilar Mehlis, and Sonya Iwasiuk.
July 18, the festival brings a live, interactive performance installation, The Whitty Wily Poetry Connection, hosted by artist Claire Davis to the Kamloops x Hastings Plaza from 12-2pm. Poetry is generated, performed, and playfully disrupted in real time with the audience invited to participate in spontaneous acts of writing, composing poems from unexpected objects, co-creating absurd or sincere texts, and amplifying their voices through analogue spectacle.
July 25, in collaboration with the Rickshaw Theatre, and presented by the Strathcona BIA, Eastside Arts Festival hosts its annual free, all-day outdoor event, at MacLean Park. Featuring live music, public art activities, food trucks (Dos Amigos, Stik Pop, Midnight Joe’s, and Chickpea), and a beer garden hosted by Strange Fellows Brewing, from 3-8pm. Free all-ages public art activities include a collaborative collage led by Enabling Arts, a kid-friendly writer’s prompt led by The Writer’s Exchange on-site, and an accessible art activity featuring recycled materials led by Alternative Creations Studio. The event will also feature an Art Shop showcasing work by local artists in various medium from ceramics to prints & paintings, textiles & apparel to mixed-media. Coinciding with the Strathcona Blocks Party, taking over the 800 block of East Hastings Street from 12–5pm, before heading over to MacLean Park for the Eastside Arts Festival Concert in the Park from 3–5pm.
Eastside Arts Festival 2026 will also feature in two co-presentations:
July 18, 19, 25, and 26, The Dance Deck, the popular outdoor summer series where acclaimed performers and creators share their works is performed, produced and hosted by Belle Spirale Dance Projects Artistic Directors Sylvain Senez and Alexis Fletcher in their own backyard.
July 26, MacLean Park Music, is another afternoon of free music at MacLean Park, featuring local performers Mizz Lisa, Lyndsay Wills & the No Frills String Band, and Sinéad X Sanders.
The Eastside Arts Festival runs July 17-26, 2026, bringing art workshops, activities & performances, to MacLean Park and across the Eastside Arts District – from the Waterfront to East 2nd/Great Northern Way between Victoria Drive and Main/Abbot Streets.
For the full festival schedule and to purchase individual event tickets, visit eastsideartsfest.ca.