The Plaza Art Fair is an annual three-day outdoor art fair held on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri each fall, typically the third weekend after Labor Day. Founded in 1932, it is one of the longest-running outdoor art fairs in the United States. The contemporary fair spans nine city blocks, features 240 juried artists, draws more than 250,000 attendees over its Friday-through-Sunday run, and anchors Kansas City’s fall arts calendar.
History
The Plaza Art Fair began in 1932 as a Depression-era promotional effort by the Plaza Merchants Association to draw visitors to the Country Club Plaza and raise community morale during a period of economic hardship. The inaugural fair was modest in scale: roughly 90 artists gathered on an empty lot at the southwest corner of Nichols Road and Central Street — now the site of Tiffany & Co. — and displayed paintings priced between one and ten dollars.
Under the stewardship of J.C. Nichols and The Nichols Company, the fair grew through the late 1930s into a recognized annual civic event. Like many public gatherings, it was disrupted during World War II, then resumed and expanded in the postwar decades. Through the 1950s and 1960s, artist participation and attendance increased steadily, and the fair developed a national reputation as one of the premier juried outdoor art fairs in the country.
The event continued essentially without interruption across the remaining decades of the 20th century and into the 21st, passing through successive Plaza ownership groups. In 2020, the fair was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic — its first full cancellation since the wartime years — marking the 89th year without a live event. It returned in 2021 as the 90th annual Plaza Art Fair. The 2025 edition was the 94th; the 2026 edition marks the fair’s 95th year.
Format
The fair is a juried exhibition, meaning artists compete for inclusion rather than purchasing booth space outright. Applicants submit five digital images — four of individual works and one of their current booth display — for review by a five-person jury drawn from practicing artists and arts professionals. Approximately 240 artists are selected each year from a national applicant pool, with the jury weighing originality, technical quality, medium diversity, and geographic representation.
Selected artists work across a wide range of media: painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, glass, jewelry, photography, fiber, wood, and mixed media. Each artist sets and sells their own work directly from their booth, with no gallery intermediary; the fair generates no gate admission fee.
The fair occupies nine city blocks of the Country Club Plaza street grid for its three-day run. Streets closed during the event include Nichols Road, Ward Parkway, Pennsylvania Avenue, Broadway, and Central Street. Artist booths line the closed streets at regular intervals. Three live music stages operate simultaneously across the fair footprint, and more than 20 Plaza restaurant booths and additional food vendors provide food and beverage service throughout.
Cultural significance
The Plaza Art Fair is the largest annual visual arts event in the Kansas City metropolitan area and one of the largest free outdoor public events in the region. Annual attendance exceeds 250,000 across the three days. Because artists sell work directly and independently, the fair functions as a meaningful economic engine for the participating artists — many of whom circuit multiple national fairs throughout the year.
Within Kansas City’s arts calendar, the fair occupies a distinct position: it brings gallery-quality work to a fully public, street-level setting, drawing an audience that extends well beyond regular museum and gallery visitors. Alongside the Plaza Lighting Ceremony in November, it is one of the Plaza’s two signature annual civic events. It also fits into a broader fall season of large Kansas City gatherings that includes the American Royal and Boulevardia.
Nationally, the Plaza Art Fair’s 1932 founding predates most comparable American outdoor art fairs by several decades. The Ann Arbor Street Art Fair dates to 1960; the Cherry Creek Arts Festival (Denver) to 1990; the Saint Louis Art Fair to 1994. The Plaza fair’s longevity — running in all but a handful of years across nearly a century — makes it one of the foundational institutions of the American outdoor-art-fair tradition.
See also
country-club-plaza, country-club-district, jc-nichols, the-nichols-company, plaza-lighting-ceremony-origin, american-royal, boulevardia