The tents went up under the redwoods at Old Mill Park for the Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival, which opened Saturday, September 19, and ran through Sunday the 20th, both days from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. It was the town's 69th edition of the festival, which means most residents who have lived here more than a decade have their own private history with the event: the year it rained, the booth they always stop at, the parking spot near the library they've claimed since the Clinton administration. What fewer people know is where the whole thing began, and that origin story explains more about how the festival operates than the festival's current scale does.
Before the Redwoods, It Was a Sidewalk Show
The Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival did not start in a park. It started in 1957, when a small group of local artists set up their work in downtown store windows, using Mill Valley's own storefronts as an impromptu gallery. That detail matters because it tells you what kind of institution this became. It was never conceived as a destination event bused in from outside. It grew out of the town looking at its own Main Street and deciding the art already living here deserved a wall, then a table, then eventually 135 juried artist booths spread across a redwood grove a few blocks away.
That lineage is part of why this year's poster carries local weight rather than just decorative value. The 2026 image, titled "Golden Beams," was created by Hilary Williams, a local artist selected for the honor the way the festival has always worked: from inside the community, not imported for the occasion. If you want a shorthand for what makes this different from a traveling craft fair, that is it. The people making the art and the people jurying the art and the people buying the art are largely the same people who will run into each other at the Mill Valley Market next week.
What the Scholarship Table Actually Funds
Here is the part that changes how you should think about the festival if you have only ever treated it as a shopping trip. Alongside the 135 artist booths, the festival runs an Emerging Artist Program and a student scholarship fund, and this year both got more serious. For 2026, the festival planned to award twelve scholarships to visual arts students, split evenly between six Junior awards at $250 each and six Senior awards at $500 each, and eligibility expanded beyond Mill Valley to include students from high schools across all of Marin County. Winners were also set to have their artwork featured on festival merchandise or to get a chance to exhibit in the Emerging Artists Grove during the show itself.
That expansion is worth sitting with for a second. A festival that could have kept its scholarship pool small and local instead widened the pipeline county-wide, which means a student in Novato or San Rafael now has the same shot at that stage as a kid who grew up two blocks from Old Mill Park. The Emerging Artist Program serves a similar function for slightly older applicants: it exists specifically for artists who have shown at smaller exhibitions but never had a booth at a major show, with an emphasis on local high school and college artists ready for their first real audience. Brett Crawford, who chairs the festival committee, has described the goal as building a platform for the next generation of artists to connect with the community, and the mechanics back that up. It is a functioning farm system, and it is one reason the festival has endured.
Three Weekends, Three Registers
With one date still to come this month, it is worth seeing the shape of the whole run. Downtown and the park have traded duties for weeks, and each event uses a different piece of the town for a different purpose.
- September 5, the Mill Valley Western Beer & Wine Festival took over downtown from 4 to 7 p.m., a Western-themed evening built around tasting and mingling on Main Street itself.
- September 19 and 20, the Fall Arts Festival took Old Mill Park, with juried fine art, live music, a Children's Grove for family activities, and for the first time a curated wine tasting package featuring six Northern California wineries.
- September 26, Concerts in the Plaza returns to the Mill Valley Downtown Plaza from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., a full day of live music back on flat downtown ground.
Line those three up and the pattern is obvious once you see it: downtown handles commerce and casual mingling, the park handles art and family programming under cover of the redwood canopy, and the plaza handles music and open-air gathering. It is the same roughly six blocks of Mill Valley, three different registers, across three September weekends. The town is not repeating itself. It is using its own geography on purpose.
That same park, incidentally, has spent the summer doing double duty as a performance stage in its own right, hosting free Shakespeare at the Old Mill Park stage behind the library. The Fall Arts Festival tents went up in a patch of redwoods that had already spent months alternating between community theater and quiet afternoon walks. The festival was not an isolated event dropped into the park. It was the biggest weekend in a park that had been working all season.
What's Actually New This Year
For residents who go every year and think they know the drill, a few things changed. Early bird pricing ended September 1, and general admission at the gate was $25, with senior admission at $20. Children, students, and teachers with valid ID got in free, a policy that has been in place for years and kept the event genuinely family accessible rather than priced for tourists.
The bigger change was the beverage program. Past years leaned on a general beer and wine offering, but 2026 introduced a curated wine tasting built around six California wineries, a step up in specificity from the festival's usual approach. If you skipped that line in past years assuming it was the same rotating taps, the 2026 offering was worth a second look. There was also a limited Festival Friends Pass, which bundled faster gate entry, the wine tasting, exclusive merchandise, restaurant gift cards, and an invitation to the Artist Reception, aimed at people who wanted more than a walk-through.
None of this changes what the festival fundamentally is: a juried outdoor art show under redwoods with roots in Eisenhower's second term. But the specific mechanics shift a little each year, and 2026 was the year the beverage side got more deliberate and the scholarship side got more generous.
After the Tents Came Down
After the festival wrapped Sunday evening, downtown did not go quiet. Concerts in the Plaza was scheduled for the following weekend, keeping the momentum going through the end of September, and from there Mill Valley will settle into its normal fall rhythm until Winterfest transforms downtown again later in the season with lights and a different kind of gathering. The town does not have one big weekend and then a lull. It has a sequence, and this one, the 69th running of an event that began in storefront windows, is the middle of it.
If you have lived here long enough to have a favorite booth or a running joke about the parking situation, this is your reminder that the thing you have been attending for years started smaller and closer to home than the current scale suggests, and that a meaningful piece of what your ticket supported was aimed at helping a Marin County teenager get a first real gallery wall.
For more on what makes this stretch of Marin distinct, block by block, the Mill Valley neighborhood guide from the Kristie Martinelli Team covers the parts of town that don't show up in a festival program. If you're weighing a move to this side of the county or thinking about what a Mill Valley address could mean for your own routine, that's a conversation worth having when the time is right. Work With Us.
