Culver City Arts Festival 2026

Craft Contemporary
Autumn Harvest Market

Join us in welcoming Craft Contemporary during the Arts Festival as they pop up with their Autumn Harvest Market! Explore Craft Contemporary’s vendors located throughout the Helms Design District, along our pedestrian plaza on Helms Avenue.

Celebrating food and craft, the Harvest Market will feature local artists whose creations will be sure to delight all the senses.

DJ Benofficial

From 12:00 to 5:00 pm, DJ Benofficial keeps the energy flowing on Helms Avenue with his signature open-format style. A staple of our Makers Markets, he’s back to set the vibe for a day full of creativity and community.

Studio Dream Factory Welcome Kiosk

Los Angeles has always been a dream factory, and we’re reviving that spirit. Studio Dream Factory (SDF) and Helms bring a storytelling kiosk to Helms Avenue as the welcome to the Culver City Arts Festival. Find us on Helms Avenue. The SDF team will point you toward everything happening across the campus and hand you your papers for the day. Pull a card, collect your stamps around Helms, and see where it takes you.

No experience required. Curiosity is the only ticket.

Arcana: Books on the Arts

8675 Washington Boulevard

Burntsienna Artbook Review
with Jason E.C. Wright

Join Jason E.C. Wright inside Arcana: Books on the Arts for a special Arts Festival edition of the Burntsienna Artbook Review, a gathering for artbook collectors, design enthusiasts, and anyone who finds inspiration on the printed page.

Jason will begin with selections of Contemporary Art & Sculpture from the Burntsienna Research Library, followed by an informal exchange where participants are invited to share books and periodicals from their own collections. The tables then open for browsing, reading, note-taking, photography, and conversation.

Bring your curiosity and up to two artbooks, design books, or periodicals you’d like to share.

Reservations encouraged. Free with RSVP.

Fireclay Tile

3260 Helms Ave.

A Taste of Color at Fireclay Tile

From 11:00 am – 5:00 pm, stop by Fireclay Tile for a little something sweet and colorful.

Choose a handmade Fireclay tile, topped with a mini sfogliatella from Pasta Sisters. Enjoy the flaky Italian pastry while you browse the showroom, then take your tile home to give it a second life as a colorful trivet. Pick a color. Enjoy a treat. Take home a little piece of Fireclay.

While supplies last.

Room & Board

3231 Helms Avenue

Colorful Kalina: Live Caricatures
at Room & Board

Take a seat and see yourself through an artist’s eyes. Colorful Kalina will be drawing live caricatures inside Room & Board during the Culver City Arts Festival, capturing festival guests in her playful, expressive style.

Stop in for a solo portrait, bring a friend, or make it a family affair. Watch your likeness take shape on the page, then take home your one-of-a-kind drawing as a keepsake from the day.

Complimentary. First come, first drawn.

Chris Hero: Views from the Palisades Fire

The 2025 Palisades Fire dramatically altered the landscape of the Santa Monica Mountains and the communities within it. When artist Chris Hero began returning to the Pacific Palisades in the months that followed, he encountered scenes that felt both ancient and startlingly new: concrete structures reduced to their bones, solitary chimneys, rubble, and unexpected traces of color.

Back in his Culver City studio, Hero began translating what he witnessed into paintings on reclaimed packaging cardboard. Torn and pieced together, the irregular surfaces echo damaged roofs, walls, and stucco. Layers of acrylic gesso and paint build upon those textures in a palette of ash white, black, rusted metal, tile, plastic, firehose, and construction tape.

The resulting works consider a landscape at the beginning of its next chapter and the tension between the lives we build and nature’s very different clock.

Studio II | Art Studio Tour

Step inside Studio II, a shared working space for three Culver City artists, including Chris Hero, Kate Leachman, and Stephanie Kerley Schwartz. During the Arts Festival, the studio will open its doors and invite visitors to see where the work happens, meet the artists, and spend some time with works in progress and finished pieces.

It’s a chance to experience a working artist studio from the inside and get to know the people and practices that are part of the Culver City Arts District.

Poster Territory Presents: REIMAGINE

What does it mean to reimagine?

To see something familiar differently. To reconsider what has been lost, what remains, and what might come next. To question the way things are and envision the way they could be.

For the Culver City Arts Festival, Helms Design District presents REIMAGINE, a selection of international graphic posters drawn from The 4th Block’s Reimagine the Future Ukraine poster collection.

Through different voices, perspectives, and approaches to graphic design, the selected works consider ideas of change, renewal, preservation, progress, and possibility, creating a visual conversation about the world we know and the one we might imagine next.

ABOUT POSTER TERRITORY
PosterTerritory is a global poster design community founded by Olga Severina, curating open calls, exhibitions, and stories that champion the poster as a living tool for social and cultural change.

Factory Settings @ Helms Design Center

Lore, Issue #0001
An Immersive Media Exhibition + Zine Launch

Every person, place, and object has two histories: the one on the record and the one everyone is expected to know but never writes down, that people collectively build and pass on to others through repeated telling and retelling. For one day only, Factory Settings brings “Lore” an immersive media exhibition and zine launch to the Helms Design Center gallery. Come for Issue 01, explore the experiential installation, shop a selection of limited run print media, create something to add to the exhibition, and leave with something of your own to keep.

Build Your Own Zine, A Hands-On Workshop

It’s time for a reset. Factory Settings is an independent, Los Angeles-based culture, arts, and lifestyle publication made for and by people who pay attention, and at the Culver City Arts Festival we invite you to step inside it. Move through the Helms Design District collecting ephemera, then build it into your own keepsake at the Design Center in a hands-on workshop, a custom object and a passport back to shared experience. The day marks the launch of our inaugural zine, the first of many.