Gasparilla Festival of the Arts — Tampa, Florida

The Raymond James Gasparilla Festival of the Arts is a two-day juried outdoor art show held each late winter on the Hillsborough River in downtown Tampa. It is produced by Gasparilla Festival of the Arts, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose programs and events are organized and staffed entirely by volunteers, with money raised through sponsorships, community grants, on-site retail sales and gifts. Raymond James is the title sponsor, which is why the Tampa festival carries the firm's name.

The organizers schedule the 57th Annual Raymond James Gasparilla Festival of the Arts for Saturday, March 6, 2027, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, March 7, 2027, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., at Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park. Admission is free, and the organization lists an estimated attendance of 30,000 and prize money of up to $92,000. Artists show work for sale in rows of booths, which the festival calls the Artist Village, while two stages, food trucks and a children's area fill the rest of the riverfront park.

The festival grew out of the old downtown Florida State Fair. The City of Tampa writes that the forerunner of the festival was the juried art exhibit at the Florida State Fair, staged every February alongside the Gasparilla pirate invasion. After the fair left downtown, local art activists wanted to keep putting quality art in front of people who rarely visited museums, and the city records that the concept of a sidewalk art festival was conceived in the summer of 1970 and the first show occurred in 1971.

The organizers' own history names the founders. Donald Clark, who managed WDAE radio on Whiting Street, took the outdoor show idea to Jim Turner of Tampa Electric Company, who connected him with Robert John Dean and Richard Redman, then renovating old brick buildings on Whiting Street between Ashley Drive and Franklin Street. The first Gasparilla Sidewalk Art Festival was juried in 1971 by Pierre Apraxine, then an assistant curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and in 1973 the Tampa event received the First Annual Governor's Award for the Arts.

Later jurors included Robert Hughes, author of Shock of the New, art historian Barbara Rose and William J. Cowart of the National Gallery of Art. Beginning with the 1999 festival, the board invited two nationally prominent jurors each year instead of one. In 1995 the event took its current name, the Gasparilla Festival of the Arts, and widened its partnerships to Tampa institutions including the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library.

The show has moved several times while staying near the river. Its history lists Whiting Street first, then Doyle Carlton Drive behind the Tampa Museum of Art and the Curtis Hixon Convention Center. After Curtis Hixon was razed in 1994 the show moved to Ashley Street, and in 1995 it expanded into the newly built Curtis Hixon Park. In 2003 it shifted to Franklin Street and Lykes Gaslight Square Park while the new Tampa Museum of Art was under construction, and in March 2010 it returned to the river at the redesigned Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park.

Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park, at 600 N Ashley Drive, remains a major downtown event lawn; the City of Tampa reports that the park attracts over one million people annually to its special events. The 2026 and 2027 festivals are listed across the river at Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park, which the city describes as a 25-acre park just north of the University of Tampa and across the Hillsborough River from the David A. Straz Center for the Performing Arts. Its Festival Lawn is designed as public event space for large festivals and concerts.

The Tampa festival is juried twice: once to select exhibitors from applications and once on site, when a nationally respected juror reviews the displayed work and decides the awards announced Saturday evening. The artist overview says the festival offers up to 40 awards and that in 2026, $92,000 was awarded. The largest is the Raymond James Financial Best in Show Award of $15,000, followed by a $10,000 Board of Directors Award and a $6,500 GFA Founder's Award, with 30 Awards of Merit of $1,300 each. The Tampa Museum of Art Award carries no cash prize; the museum instead buys the winning work for its collection.

Purses have grown sharply. The festival history puts the first prize pool at $3,900 and records that applications rose from an initial 140, when everyone who showed up was accepted, to more than 1,000. The City of Tampa page, last updated October 1, 2023, described over 1,000 artists applying for 233 spots and a share of $74,500 in awards, with more than 100,000 visitors at Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park; the organizers' current figures are more than 250 artists and an estimated 30,000 attendees.

The 2027 rules require Gasparilla exhibitors to be at least 18, to show original work created within the three years before the festival, and to stay with their booths for the full Saturday and Sunday hours. Commercially reproduced items such as posters, greeting cards and t-shirts may not be sold, and a piece that has won an award at the Tampa festival is ineligible for awards in later years. The event overview lists the accepted media as ceramic, digital, drawing, fiber, glass, jewelry, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, watercolor and wood.

Two programs aim at artists from the region. The Local Artist Spotlight was established in 2020 with support from the Gobioff Foundation and showcases five local artists each year; for the 2027 Gasparilla festival the board will choose them from applicants in its six-county region who were not invited to the main show because of space limits. The Emerging Artists program, with its Ann Sklar Memorial Emerging Artist Award, gives newer artists a separate category.

Younger artists have their own space at the Tampa festival. The Young Artists Expo, formerly the Scholastic Showcase, debuted in 2017 to display work by the community's youngest artists, and Gasparilla Arts awards collegiate scholarships to local undergraduate and graduate students pursuing visual art, with a 2026 application deadline of March 22, 2026. The 2026 festival also featured a Community Outreach Village showing work by artists from Arts4All, Pyramid, MacDonald Training Center and Paint22, according to the organizers' 2026 highlights.