After Paducah’s Lower Town Arts & Music Festival was canceled earlier this year, a new organization has come together with the goal of bringing the event back in 2026 and beyond.
For more than 15 years, the Paducah festival has been a celebration of local arts, community, and music in the western Kentucky city’s historic Lower Town Arts District – drawing crowds of over 10,000 attendees.That changed earlier this year when the festival’s previous host organization, the Yeiser Art Center, cancelled the 2025 festival and decided to no longer be the main sponsor of the community event.
Now, Friends of Lower Town Arts & Music Festival – a newly formed nonprofit that includes previous festival organizers and residents of Paducah’s Lower Town neighborhood – will take over as the main organizers for the annual event, which is expected to return in 2026.
Former Lower Town festival director Will Brandon is a member of this new group. He said the organization is dedicated to continuing what he calls the pinnacle of western Kentucky’s arts culture.
“When the 2025 Lowertown Arts Music Festival had to get canceled, it was gutting for the community,” Brandon said. “Festivals are difficult. Festivals are really hard. They take a lot of money. They take year-round effort, and it was just tough to see beautiful things that we had worked on together not come to fruition.”
Brandon said he and other advocates for the festival decided to take it upon themselves to make sure it could return next year and would be in a position to continue operating far past 2026. He noted that, since many of the group’s members are already familiar with planning and operating an arts and music festival, bringing back the celebration isn't a case of reinventing the wheel.
“It's mostly the same organizing team from the last seven years, and along with some new faces and new board members and new organizers to say, ‘Hey, we love what we've done. We want to keep doing what we've done. And, how can we do better and make sure that we never have to be without a festival ever again?’” Brandon said.
The former Lower Town festival director said the group’s first major task will be generating the capital needed to cover the event’s operating costs. Plans are being made to kick off a funding campaign later this year. The organization hopes to open registration forms for the 2026 event soon after securing funds.
“We have all the people, and all the places and all the pieces, but we're starting from the ground up. And so, the number one focus is just having everyone and everything in place so that we can get started in the third quarter of this year,” Brandon said.
Next year’s festival is currently slated to take place May 8 and 9 in Paducah’s Lower Town Arts District.
