Main Street is expected to remain the canvas for the Park City Kimball Arts Festival, regardless of whether the organizers are based inside the municipal limits.
The Kimball Art Center plans to keep its event on Main Street even as the cultural institution plans to move out of the city limits. The festival has been held on Main Street throughout the years and is one of the top special events on the Park City calendar.
The Kimball Art Center on Wednesday, two days before the planned opening of the festival, announced plans to relocate to Kimball Junction, within the Dakota Pacific development. The art center is currently located along Kearns Boulevard and, prior to that, was in the Main Street core for decades. The organization sold the property at the corner of Main Street and Heber Avenue amid a dispute with City Hall about a concept for an ambitious expansion.
The Kearns Boulevard location has always been seen as temporary, but a permanent solution has been elusive. The art center was planned to be one of the anchors of a conceptual arts and culture district once backed by City Hall on municipal land off the intersection of Kearns Boulevard and Bonanza Drive. There has been limited clarity about the future of the land in recent years and the Kimball Art Center ultimately opted for the location at Dakota Pacific.
The agreement between the Kimball Art Center and City Hall to hold the festival on Main Street runs through the 2028 event. There has been occasional talk over the decades about moving the festival to another location in the Park City area, but the sides eventually agreed to keep the event on Main Street. Many view Main Street as a scenic historic backdrop to the festival even though the street presents certain logistical challenges. The festival this year runs through Sunday.
The leadership of the Kimball Art Center on Thursday said it wants the festival to stay on Main Street even after the organization moves to the Kimball Junction location. A timeline for the relocation of the Kimball Art Center is not clear, but securing the approvals needed for the project and the construction would almost certainly take at least several years.
“We’d love to keep arts fest in Park City proper,” said Aldy Milliken, the executive director of the Kimball Art Center. “I don’t see any reason why that would change.”
Milliken noted what he sees as the attractive Main Street setting and the organization’s familiarity with the operations of the event on the shopping, dining and entertainment strip. He said the Kimball Art Center staffers and Park City officials collaborate well with the Main Street location.
“We have the logistics of the arts festival down,” he said. “It just works well.”
Milliken said nobody on the staff at the Kimball Art Center nor members of the not-for-profit’s governing board has broached the idea of bringing the festival to Dakota Pacific once the building is developed there.
“It has never crossed our mind to move it,” he said.