The Sundance Film Festival will move from Park City to Colorado starting with the 2027 edition.

And the Kimball Art Center on Wednesday announced plans to relocate to Kimball Junction after keeping its headquarters inside the city for decades.

Sundance’s announcement in March and the Kimball Art Center’s statement on Wednesday both struck at Park City’s status as an arts and culture hub. The impact, though, will stretch well outside that sector.

The departure of Sundance and the Kimball Art Center’s pending move out of the Park City limits leaves a high-profile City Hall-led project, once envisioned as an arts and culture district, without either of the two anchors initially identified.

Sundance and the Kimball Art Center each originally gave the concept different levels of cachet, with Sundance bringing an internationally prominent name and the Kimball Art Center offering a regionally recognized institution. An arts and culture district with those two anchors, many had believed at the time, would nurture the broader creative sector. The thinking was that an arts and culture district with the Kimball Art Center and the Utah offices of Sundance as the anchors would further the community’s efforts to become a cultural destination and advance Park City’s work to diversify the economy.

The municipal government in mid-2017 announced a nearly $20 million agreement to acquire five acres at the southwest corner of the Bonanza Drive-Kearns Boulevard intersection. The deal, widely celebrated, was negotiated after the previous owner, the Bonanza Park partnership, encountered deep-rooted resistance to an ambitious development concept on the acreage. City Hall instead desired the land to create an arts and culture district.

Progress, however, was slow even before the pandemic. The Kimball Art Center repeatedly signaled its interest in pressing ahead with the district even as Sundance did not appear as committed to the location.

City Hall itself gathered input from the community as it considered the ultimate possibilities for the land. There were eventually questions about the price tag of an arts and culture district like the one initially considered, which at one point neared an estimated $90 million.

Sundance in spring 2024 launched a process to weigh whether to move the festival from Park City after it had been the host since the 1980s, raising new questions about the future of an arts and culture district. That work ended with the selection of Boulder, Colorado, as the location of the festival starting with the 2027 edition. A combined bid for the festival by Salt Lake City and Park City, which would have shifted most of the event to the capital city, was one of three finalists before the selection of Boulder.

In the meantime, the possibilities for the City Hall acreage were reworked. A location for the Kimball Art Center remained included, but much of the rest of a development concept moved away from an arts and culture district. It is now seen as a project with a mix of uses and a large bloc of income-restricted housing. Neighborhood retailers are also expected to be included in the designs, as are cultural offerings.

Park City leaders in June selected a Chicagoland firm called Brinshore Development for a project on the municipal acreage where the arts and culture district was anticipated to be built. Transit infrastructure and underground parking are also included in the concept. A spot for the Kimball Art Center was noted in the materials that were presented during the selection process.

A project will be required to move through the City Hall approval process. It seems likely there will be questions about the traffic a development would be expected to generate, the design of the buildings and the overall layout. Those topics typically are raised during any approval process involving significant development concepts in Park City. The location at the intersection of two of Park City’s busiest roads will likely generate additional scrutiny once a project is formally sought.

“Kimball’s decision shifts some of the vision for the Bonanza 5‑acre site, yet it also opens the door to new opportunities — to be explored in alignment with community priorities and council direction — as we move forward with this project,” City Hall said in a prepared statement on Wednesday.