Closing Bell: Two Trees Ends Dumbo Arts Festival

The Dumbo Arts Festival won’t return this fall, after 18 years in the gallery-filled waterfront neighborhood, Two Trees announced this afternoon. It began in 1997 as the Art Under the Bridge Festival, a grassroots art initiative meant to attract art lovers and artists to Dumbo. One of the original organizers, Joy Glidden, ran the festival until 2009, when Two Trees took over organizing the event.

“But as the festival grew and grew – more than 220,000 visitors flooded the neighborhood for the festival weekend last year – it became clear that we could no longer mount the festival ourselves without commercializing it in a way that didn’t feel right. We were getting too far from the original mission of the festival,” Two Trees’ cultural affairs director Lisa Kim wrote in an email. 

Instead, Two Trees will spend the money for the Dumbo Arts Festival on other arts programming, including Dumbo galleries, the First Thursday Art Walk, a studio program that offers free work space to artists, subsidized rent for cultural organizations, public art commissions and art projects at the Domino Sugar site in Williamsburg.

Photo by Jane Kratochvil for Two Trees