For one weekend each August, Phoenicia becomes less a Catskills hamlet than an open-air arts campus. Galleries spill into storefronts, films screen at the playhouse, musicians perform on the boardwalk, and even the annual parade takes on an artistic bent. That’s the vision behind the fourth annual Phoenicia Festival of the Arts, which returns August 21-23.
The festival arrives as Phoenicia continues its evolution from a sleepy tubing town into one of the Catskills’ more intriguing creative enclaves. The village has lacked a signature event that pulls those strands together, however. For one weekend each August, Phoenicia Festival of the Arts attempts exactly that, using the village itself as its venue and inviting visitors to wander from gallery to storefront, performance to sculpture garden.
For founder and curator Christina Varga, the festival has always been about more than staging a busy weekend. It’s an invitation to reconnect with creativity.
“I’ve always wanted to organize a big townwide event,” Varga says. “I like curating. I like filling spaces. I like making art happenings and art events. I really love celebrating artists. It’s work, but it’s happy work.”
An artist and founder of Varga Gallery, Varga moved to Phoenicia in 2009 and opened her gallery there a decade later. She found plenty of artists living in the area, but few opportunities to bring them together in a public way.
Now entering its fourth year, the festival feels different. “This fourth year feels like it’s leveling up,” she says.
The biggest leap is the pilot launch of the Phoenicia Film Festival, supported by Arts Mid-Hudson and presented in partnership with the Phoenicia Playhouse. After introducing film screenings last year, Varga decided the medium deserved a larger platform. Saturday night’s centerpiece is the North American premiere of Everyone Dies Trying to Make a Masterpiece, the latest feature by Brazilian artist and filmmaker Gustavo Von Ha. Created during a residency at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, the surreal film unfolds inside the historic Trask Mansion, exploring artistic ambition, obsession, and mortality. Before the screening, acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Phoebe Legere—who composed seven original songs for the film—will perform selections from the score live.
Sunday afternoon continues the cinematic focus with the inaugural Phoenicia Film Festival shorts program, featuring official selections alongside work by featured local filmmaker Jack Warren.
Elsewhere, the festival spreads through the village. Varga Gallery hosts exhibitions while a large-scale installation fills the former hardware store. The village green becomes an outdoor artist market and sculpture garden featuring artists including John Van Orsouw, Noah McGrath, Gulnar Babayeva, Shannon Frey, Christine Moss, and Aleksandra Scepanovic. Friday’s opening celebration features music, poetry, a ceremonial gong performance, and a reception at Varga Gallery, while an open mic on the Phoenicia Boardwalk welcomes musicians, poets, and storytellers throughout the weekend.
Then there’s the inaugural Pet Parade. Joining the community’s existing Shandaken Eagle Day Parade, the new event welcomes elaborately dressed pets and their humans alongside Legere’s giant wearable sculptures depicting endangered Hudson River animals, turning a community parade into a whimsical piece of environmental performance art.
That mix of high art and playful spectacle is intentional. “I am deliberately attracting a wide variety of audiences,” Varga says. “I don’t want it to be just for one audience. I want there to be something for everybody.”
Experimental films, children’s workshops, sculpture, live music, artist talks, open mics, and variety shows all become part of the same cultural conversation. “When you pull in more people doing different things,” she says, “they bring their audience. That builds a community.”
Ultimately, Varga hopes visitors leave with something less tangible than a souvenir. “I want them to be inspired,” she says. “I want them to go home and make something or think differently. I want them to be uplifted.”
That aspiration extends beyond a single August weekend. Varga hopes eventually to establish a permanent arts center in Phoenicia, with exhibition space, workshops, performances, and creative businesses under one roof. Until then, the Phoenicia Festival of the Arts serves as a prototype—a glimpse of what she imagines the village can become: not simply a destination for outdoor recreation, but a year-round hub for contemporary art in the Catskills.
This article appears in August 2026.
