The Yerba Buena Gardens Festival Is The Place To Be This Summer
The festival has dozens of free cultural, artistic, and community programs on the calendar now through October.
Yerba Buena Gardens Festival is now hosting fantastic free programming multiple days a week, and their upcoming schedule is worth putting on your calendar. The independent nonprofit organization is dedicated to presenting accessible cultural events during 6 months of the year, including world-class music, theater, dance, and more.
Highlights include the ever-popular weekend session flagship series, which presents unique multicultural concerts on Saturdays at lunchtime. Bay Area bands headline a Thursday lunchtime concert series, and and Poetic Tuesdays bring the best local poets and spoken word artists to the stage. Don’t forget Salsa at Jessie Square once a month; as well as the Children’s Garden Series, which presents live interactive performances for kids on Fridays. Additional programming outside the fixed schedule includes follow-along choreography days, garden tours, and more.
The Festival also facilitates special projects through local artist commissions. These “seed commissions” go towards art, music, and production-related expenses for up-and-coming creators, for everything from short films to musical albums to research projects.
The Yerba Buena Gardens Festival was founded in 2000 as a way to hold public space for San Francisco’s diverse cultural heritage and creators. The festival especially works to uplift the city’s low-income communities of color, many of whom were displaced during the city’s redevelopment plan of the 1970s and 1980s. Throughout the years, the festival has presented over 42,000 new artists for over 2.3 million attendees. You can donate to support this work here.
Be sure to open up your calendar for the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, happening now at SF’s Yerba Buena Gardens in the Financial District.
Featured image: Rosangela Perry via Shutterstock