In 2022, Katherine Sachs, a trustee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a longtime cultural collaborator in the city, felt like something was missing from Philly’s semisesquicentennial planning: art and artists.
So Sachs launched ArtPhilly, a collaboration among arts leaders, philanthropists, artists and makers. Now, ArtPhilly is debuting its first citywide festival, What Now: 2026, running through July 2, 2026, and timed to Philadelphia’s role in the nation’s 250th anniversary. The inaugural five-week festival will present more than 30 projects across music, theater, dance, film, performance, visual art, and other forms of interdisciplinary work to offer visitors and residents a broad view of Philadelphia’s creative life at a defining civic moment.
“Our goal is to demonstrate the power of a citywide, multidisciplinary arts festival in ’26 — and then repeat it every two or three years,” said Bill Adair, the festival’s creative and executive director. Rather than asking artists to illustrate history, the festival invites them to interpret the present. “It’s about marking the moment,” Adair says. “All of our projects are linked to something fundamentally soulful about Philly.”
That is the useful way into the festival: as a set of projects that reveal the city from a wild range of angles — and make room for pleasure, play, and imagination, too. A city needs chances to surprise itself.
ArtPhilly has the full list of events. Here, some suggestions to get you started:
Rewilding Kensington
A project in Kensington, where creative producer Pete Angevine is leading Rewilding Philadelphia, is one place to start. The pocket forest project is set to be a long-term collaboration with the New Kensington Community Development Corporation, Mural Arts, the Academy of Natural Sciences, and neighborhood residents.
Located in a part of the city long marked by disinvestment and the opioid crisis — but also by resilience and possibility — the project reclaims a vacant lot as a planted public space using the Miyawaki Method — a dense, native planting approach designed to accelerate the growth of small urban forests.
During the festival, the site will host public programming, alongside paid maintenance roles for local residents. “The idea is if you plant trees very close together, they feed off each other’s roots and grow into a forest much faster,” organizers said. It’s a microcosm of the city’s larger experiment.
BLACKTRONIKA
As a tribute to his local roots, King Britt, a veteran of Philadelphia’s music scene, will curate BLACKTRONIKA: Philadelphia Now and Then, a weeklong series of performances, workshops, and conversations unfolding across venues including Johnny Brenda’s, Underground Arts, and Silk City. The lineup spans generations, from Dexter Wansel and a Black Lily tribute featuring Tracey Moore to Rockers hosted by Moor Mother with Back2Basics.
Moving through the Sound of Philadelphia lineage — from Wansel’s synth mastery to Moor Mother’s future-facing poetics, anchored by Britt’s gravitas and groove — Blacktronika channels Philly at its best.
Chinatown Pop-Up Book
Another ArtPhilly-commissioned project turns to Chinatown, where artist Colette Fu and curator Dave Kyu are developing an exhibition-scale installation rooted in the neighborhood’s long history of cultural persistence amid development pressure. Drawing on Fu’s practice of creating larger-than-life pop-up books, the project takes the form of an interactive, hand-operated book that visitors physically activate, page by page, offering an insider’s view of Chinatown shaped by decades of lived experience, organizing, and civic struggle.
The mechanics of the piece carry historical weight. The oversized book is turned with a crank, a deliberate reference to a 1903 industrial device known as the “Iron Chink,” an invention designed to automate laundry work and accelerate the displacement of Chinese American laborers. By reworking that mechanism into a participatory object, Fu reframes a tool of exclusion as one of engagement. The installation will be accompanied by public programming, situating the work within Chinatown’s fight to remain a living neighborhood rather than a backdrop for redevelopment. That context includes recent, hard-fought efforts by residents and advocates to stop the proposed Sixers arena.
Opera Queens
One of the works commissioned for What Now is Long Live the Queen, a new performance by Cookie Diorio and composer Andrea Clearfield. Set to premiere at the Wilma Theater in June, the piece brings together drag, opera, and chamber music in an evening-length work structured around drag’s past, present, and future. Drawing on Philadelphia’s LGBTQ+ choral community alongside a contemporary chamber ensemble, the scale of the production — from chorus to chamber ensemble — reflects a cross-section of Philadelphia’s contemporary music and performance ecosystem.
That combination gives the project its spark: high form meeting high camp, with neither one apologizing for itself. At a moment when drag is being politicized and policed across the country, Long Live the Queen treats performance as both pleasure and power. Voice is democracy’s first instrument.
From May 27 through July 2, various venues and prices. See full schedule here.
MORE THINGS THE CITIZEN RECOMMENDS
