Philly will host a five-week-long arts festival as part of America 250

A new arts festival will launch in Philadelphia in 2026 as one of the major events marking the nation’s 250th anniversary. What Now: 2026 is planned to be a five-week-long festival from the nonprofit ArtPhilly. The festival aims to showcase the city’s artistry and talent for both tourists and neighbors alike.

Dozens of Philadelphia artists across disciplines is meant to present more than 30 original works, staged from late May to July 2026 in venues around Philadelphia, coinciding with the Fourth of July and FIFA World Cup matches as part of the city’s Semiquincentennial events.

What Now: 2026 will feature new works by Philly artists such as filmmaker Walé Oyéjidé, poet Yolanda Wisher, opera singer/drag queen Cookie Diorio, photographer and pop-up book creator Colette Fu, and sculptor Pedro Ospina. Institutional collaborators in the region will include BalletX, BlackStar, Philadanco!, The Crossing, and Theatre in the X.

One highlight is The Basil Biggs Project, a new play from actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, an alum of Arcadia University. Her great-great-grandfather was a farmer and veterinarian in Gettysburg who, during the Civil War, took a job disinterring and reburying Union soldiers on the battlefield. Smith wrote the work using archival research on her family’s history.

The festival is the brainchild of renowned local philanthropist Katherine Sachs, a longtime trustee and benefactor of the Philadelphia Art Museum, and arts administrator Bill Adair, who previously led programs at the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and the Rosenbach Museum & Library.

Sachs began planning What Now: 2026 in the winter of 2021 to ensure that the arts remained central to the city’s celebration. She gathered a committee of regional arts leaders including Barnes Foundation head Thom Collins, Mann Center for the Performing Arts president Cathy Cahill, and Mural Arts former director Jane Golden to brainstorm meaningful ways to spotlight Philadelphia’s artists.

“I just thought we could do a better job than we did in 1976 [for the Bicentennial],” said Sachs, who serves as chair of ArtPhilly. “We want people to see what Philly has to offer every day of the year, so they come back.”

“We’re rah-rah sports. We’re rah-rah about our history and our Independence Hall, and Liberty Bell,” said Adair, ArtPhilly’s creative and executive director. “Those are amazing parts of our identity and who we are, but we know that the arts and culture sector is one of the strongest in the country and the world, and we deserve to be known for that.”

Part of the duo’s work involved creating the nonprofit organization ArtPhilly, that would provide infrastructure and allow for planning the inaugural festival in 2026 and also future years. Sachs and Adair plans it to be a recurring festival every two or three years.

The pair fundraised about $7.5 million for ArtPhilly and the festival with support from the William Penn Foundation and the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage along with private foundations and corporate sponsors. ArtPhilly also received $300,000 from the Philadelphia Funder Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial.

Working with choreographer Tania Isaac, ArtPhilly’s curatorial and deputy director, they selected 17 Philadelphia curators who proposed 45 projects. The team narrowed down the list to 32 works that received between $20,000 to $400,000 in project funding.

“Other cities have done [festivals like] this, and the return on the investment is about six times, meaning the economic impact is really pretty great, between the hotels and restaurants, and what the artists have to build and all the people that you have involved,” said Sachs.

Los Angeles’ Pacific Standard Time festival was a helpful model. Sachs said the result led to increased attendance at institutions in the city, a major goal for Philadelphia organizations that have struggled with foot traffic since the COVID-19 lockdown.

“Artists are going to interpret this anniversary in a way that no one else can … For us, this festival isn’t a celebration of the anniversary, as much as it is a kind of marking and interrogation of the anniversary. Hence the question, ‘What now?’,” said Adair. “We feel like we’re adding something very important to the public discourse around the anniversary by having artists as the interpreters, but also the provocateurs.”

What Now: 2026 projects include: