Gasparilla Festival of the Arts in Tampa, Florida

The Raymond James Gasparilla Festival of the Arts is a free two-day juried outdoor art show held each late winter beside the Hillsborough River in downtown Tampa.

It is produced by Gasparilla Festival of the Arts, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose programs and events are organized and staffed entirely by volunteers, with money raised through sponsorships, community grants, on-site retail sales and corporate and individual gifts. Raymond James is the title sponsor, which is why the Tampa festival carries the firm's name.

The organizers schedule the 57th Annual Raymond James Gasparilla Festival of the Arts for Saturday, March 6, 2027, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, March 7, 2027, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., at Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park. Admission is free, and the organization lists an estimated attendance of 30,000 and prize money of up to $92,000. The previous Tampa festival, the 56th by the organizers' 2026 highlights, ran on February 28 and March 1, 2026, at the same park, according to the event overview and the festival home page, which advertised more than 250 artists.

Attendance figures differ by source. The organization's festival facts give 30,000, its artist overview speaks of 25,000+ art enthusiasts, and an older City of Tampa page, last updated October 1, 2023, put the crowd at over 100,000 visitors at Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park. Artists sell work from rows of booths the festival calls the Artist Village, while a Main Stage, a Children's Stage, food trucks and a children's activity tent fill the rest of the Tampa riverfront park. The organizers also sell VIP tent tickets and run a Collectors Krewe program for pre-purchasing art bucks to spend at the festival.

The Gasparilla Festival of the Arts grew out of the juried art exhibit at the old downtown Florida State Fair in Tampa.

The City of Tampa writes that the best art from around the state was shown at the fair, held in Tampa every February in conjunction with the Gasparilla pirate invasion. After the fair left downtown, local art activists wanted to keep putting quality art in front of people who rarely visited museums, and the city records that the concept of a sidewalk art festival was conceived in the summer of 1970 and the first show occurred in 1971.

The two official accounts differ on what the fair exhibit became after the move. The City of Tampa says it evolved into a display of local art work, while the organizers' own history says it changed into a display of high school student art work. That history credits a group of downtown Tampa business people in 1970, including the manager of WDAE radio on Whiting Street, a Tampa Electric Company contact and two developers then renovating old brick buildings on Whiting Street between Ashley Drive and Franklin Street.

The first Gasparilla Sidewalk Art Festival was juried in 1971 by Pierre Apraxine, then assistant curator of painting and sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and in 1973 the Tampa event received the First Annual Governor's Award for the Arts. Later jurors named by the organizers include Robert Hughes, author of Shock of the New, art historian Barbara Rose and William J. Cowart, curator of 20th Century Art at the National Gallery of Art. Beginning with the 1999 festival, the board invited two nationally prominent jurors each year instead of one. In 1995 the name and logo changed to the Gasparilla Festival of the Arts, widening the focus to Tampa institutions such as the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library, and the festival moved from blustery February to the first weekend of March.

The Tampa festival has moved several times around downtown while staying close to the Hillsborough River.

The organizers' history traces the moves from Whiting Street to the present riverfront, and the event overview and festival facts place the 2026 and 2027 shows at Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park.

Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park, at 600 N Ashley Drive, remains a major downtown Tampa event lawn; the City of Tampa reports that the park attracts over one million people annually to its special events. Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park, at 1001 N Boulevard, is described by the city as a 25-acre park just north of the University of Tampa and across the Hillsborough River from the David A. Straz Center for the Performing Arts. Its Festival Lawn is designed as public event space for large festivals and concerts, and the park is open 7 am to 10 pm.

Gasparilla exhibitors are picked from applications by selection jurors, and a nationally respected juror then reviews the displayed work in Tampa and decides the awards announced Saturday evening.

The artist overview says the Gasparilla festival offers up to 40 awards and that in 2026, $92,000 was awarded; the organizers' home page introduces the 2027 selection jurors. The 2026 award list, as the festival published it, is below.

Purses have grown sharply. The festival history puts the first prize pool at $3,900 and records that applications rose from an initial 140, when everyone who showed up was accepted, to more than 1,000. The City of Tampa page, last updated October 1, 2023, described over 1,000 artists applying for 233 spots and a share of $74,500 in awards.

The 2027 rules accepted applications until September 7, 2026, and require Gasparilla exhibitors to be at least 18 on the first festival day, to show original work created within the three years before the festival, to exhibit at least five works and to stay with their booths for the full Saturday and Sunday hours. Commercially reproduced items such as posters, greeting cards and t-shirts may not be sold, and a piece that has won an award at the Tampa festival is ineligible for awards in later years. The artist overview lists the accepted media as ceramic, digital, drawing, fiber, glass, jewelry, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, watercolor and wood.

Gasparilla Arts runs a Local Artist Spotlight, an Emerging Artists category, a Young Artists Expo and collegiate scholarships for Tampa Bay artists and students.

The Local Artist Spotlight was established in 2020 with support from the Gobioff Foundation and showcases five local artists each year; for the 2027 Gasparilla festival the board will choose them from applicants in its six-county region who were not invited to the main show because of space limits. Emerging artists apply in a separate category under the festival rules, and an artist accepted as an emerging artist may not apply as one again in later years.

Younger artists have their own space at the Tampa festival. The Young Artists Expo, formerly the Scholastic Showcase, debuted in 2017 to display work by the community's youngest artists, and Gasparilla Arts offers collegiate scholarships to local undergraduate and graduate students pursuing visual art; the 2026 application deadline was March 22, 2026. The 2026 Tampa festival also featured a Community Outreach Village showing work by artists from Arts4All, Pyramid, MacDonald Training Center and Paint22, according to the organizers' 2026 highlights.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, by re-reading the Gasparilla Arts festival facts, artist overview, 2027 rules, spotlight and student pages, and the City of Tampa pages for the arts festival, Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park and Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park.