ArtPhilly to launch a major citywide art festival in May

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A citywide arts festival that will act as the opening gambit of Philadelphia’s semiquincentennial summer is beginning to take shape.

A new organization called ArtPhilly is producing its inaugural five-week festival called “What Now: 2026” from May 27 through July 3. It will feature over 100 events in five neighborhood districts around the city, to include music, dance, poetry, gallery art and film.

The organization commissioned 35 pieces of original work for the festival from widely recognized artists like playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith, who starred in ‘West Wing’ and ‘Nurse Jackie.’ In addition, the multiple Grammy Award-winning choir The Crossing will premiere a new work by Opera Philadelphia’ composer-in-residence Nathalie Joachim about the 13 virtues of Benjamin Franklin and the festival will see a new collaboration between fashion designer and filmmaker Walé Oyéjidé and jazz saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins.

The full schedule has not yet been released, but details about the featured works are now posted to the festival’s website. Tickets will go on sale April 1.

“‘What Now 2026’ unfolds as our nation marks the 250th anniversary of a document that is still highly relevant called the Declaration of Independence,” said executive director Bill Adair. “Apologies to the historians in the room: Artists are the best interpreters of history. They bring a new vision to the pursuit of understanding the past.”

Similar in scale to the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts held a decade ago, Adair said ArtPhilly will instead focus primarily on local artists. ArtPhilly is intended to be a recurring event annually.

“We knew from the start that success for us would be that the arts become recognized and valued as intrinsically important to the soul of our city as ‘wooder’ ice and the Phanatic,” said ArtPhilly founder Katherine Sachs. “We are, after all, a very creative place and dare I also say revolutionary.”

The lineup of events includes a modern reimagining of a 1938 dance “American Document” by the Martha Graham Dance Company.

Graham originally included a soundtrack of spoken words taken from seminal documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation to create a performance in response to the rise of fascism in the 1930s. The new version will feature dancers from Philadelphia’s PHILADANCO company and the Martha Graham Dance Company choreographed by Tommie-Waheed Evans.

The festival also commissioned Deavere Smith to create the documentary play “The Basil Biggs Project,” based on her own ancestor who was hired to bury Union soldiers killed at the Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War.

Through the festival, composers and singers Laurin Talese and Zeek Burse are in residence at the Museum of the American Revolution to create original music inspired by the collection and display of the nation’s origin story.

Trapeta Mayson, who was selected as Philadelphia’s fifth poet laureate in 2019, will create a two-part poetic interpretation and immersive experience about Dinah, a Black enslaved woman who helped rescue the historic Stenton House in the Logan neighborhood from being burned down by British soldiers in 1777.

Although few facts are known about the life of Dinah, recently a memorial to her was erected at Stenton.

“I asked the question: ‘What would compel an African American woman in that era to save a home?’” Mayson said. “The story I found is really narrow, so in this project Dinah is expanded. Dinah is multidimensional. She’s human.”

ArtPhilly is arriving amid an onslaught of major events touching down in Philadelphia, including the FIFA World Cup, the PGA Championship and a flood of historical tourism. Kathryn Ott Lovell, president and CEO of the Philadelphia Visitor Center Corp., praised the festival for encouraging artists to take a critical look at the state of American democracy.

“We stand collectively on a precipice, a political precipice, a precipice of technology, of war and, God willing, of change,” she said. “When we find ourselves on a precipice, we must ask the inevitable question: What now? This is the absolute right moment for ArtPhilly to pose this question, because the world will be watching.”

The festival will feature plenty of events that are not laser focused on the promises and disappointments of American democracy. Ballet X will perform a newly commissioned choreography for Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” filmmaker Glenn Holsten will present a “city symphony” film about Philadelphia shot by a small army of amateur citizen filmmakers and DJ and producer King Britt will present “Blacktronika,” a weeklong festival of performances and workshops about Afrofuturism in electronic music.

Adair described the roster of festival artists as exploring our current moment in America “with provocation and anger” as well as “delight and tenderness.”

“They offer work that asks us to look harder, feel more fully, when sometimes we don’t want to feel,” he said. “Together, we offer you this festival as an invitation, not an escape, but an encounter.”