An Art Extravaganza in Little Italy: Attend the 34^th Annual Mission Federal ArtWalk This Weekend

Photo: Jon Sullivan

San Diego’s a city overflowing in artistic flair, and coming up this weekend is one of the great annual expressions of that flair: Mission Federal ArtWalk!

Come stay at one of the great historic Downtown San Diego hotels, the Sofia, where you’ll be mere blocks away from this free, two-day artisan market and creativity-pumped festival in Little Italy!

The 2018 Mission Federal ArtWalk

The 34^th annual Mission Federal ArtWalk—which helps support the important art-education efforts of ArtReach San Diego—takes place Saturday, April 28^th and Sunday, April 29^th across 17 blocks of the Little Italy neighborhood in Downtown San Diego, just minutes away from our boutique hotel on West Broadway. Attending the affair, which runs from 11 AM to 6 PM both days, won’t cost you a red cent, though plenty of fine art will be for sale courtesy of the better than 350 artists from near and far who are participating.

Those artists work in a whole galaxy of different media, from oil, pastel, watercolor, and pen-and-ink to photography, printmaking, sculpture, pottery, and metal- and woodworking. A real highlight is the Artes de Mexico installation in front of the Consulado de Mexico, which spotlights the creations of better than 30 Mexican artists.

You can browse the work of the artists joining the 2018 Mission Federal ArtWalk here. The eight Featured Artists at this year’s event are AkZhana/Maxim, Tesa Michaels, Harut Hakobyan, Ann Golumbuk, Carolyn Johnson, John Straub, Dany Paragouteva, and Gedoin Nyanhongo.

Art at the festival also takes the form of live music and spoken-word performances as well as Dance on the EDGE shows, and there’s a lot of hands-on opportunities for expressing your own artistic side: New this year, for example, Artist & Craftsman Supply is hosting a communal interactive art project in which visitors can contribute to an abstract painting as well as a mural piece.

A Happy Art Invasion of Downtown San Diego

It’s looking to be a postcard-perfect weekend—we get a lot of those in America’s Finest City—so come enjoy some Downtown San Diego hospitality courtesy of the Sofia Hotel and mosey up to Mission Federal ArtWalk on Saturday and/or Sunday for some fresh-air visual and performance art under plenty of Southern California sunshine! Given the Little Italy locale, you won’t be hurting for options in the wining and dining department during or after your festival-going—and of course you always have the option of a world-class meal at Currant American Brasserie right here at the Sofia!