Kimball Arts Festival survey results: great event, more local artist representation and improved parking, transit

Photo: Claire Wiley

PARK CITY, Utah – After this year’s Kimball Arts Festival, Park City Municipal held a series of public input sessions to receive feedback on the yearly event held on Main street. The Arts council documented responses in open houses, collected emails, and conducted surveys to gauge the public’s opinion.

The event was a big success in 2022, with over 29,000 attendees, including over 6,300 free locals tickets on Friday night.

According to the City’s published survey results with 564 responses, the community loves the event and hopes to see it continue on Main street, as over 67% of survey respondents voted in favor of Kimball Arts Festival returning under the same parameters.

“It is common knowledge that locals tend to avoid going to Main Street to dine or shop yet they are eager to go to Main Street on the days of these two events. These two cultural events, held less than 5% of the days in a year, draw our community together and strengthens the bond of Art and Our City’s Culture.” one respondent said in an email.

While most people are in agreement about the event being held on Main street, people still would like to see improvements made to the parking and traffic plans for the event.

The Kimball Arts Festival encourages alternative methods of transportation, and Park City transit recorded 28,799 riders throughout the event. Kimball Arts Festival also hopes to ‘improve bike valet efforts in the future.’

In an open house session held in September, a possible parking solution proposed was for visitors and tourists of the Festival to be bused to Main street from designated parking zones outside of Old Town, which would cut down on traffic near the Festival.

Another one of the public’s primary concerns about the event is the representation of local artists, which has decreased in recent years. In the survey, over 28% of respondents said that the Festival needed to improve the number of artists from Summit and Wasatch Counties.

One respondent hopes to see more involvement for local artists:

“Even though my artwork has improved over the years I’ve had less and less opportunity to participate in the show. It was a wonderful program to allow the locals to participate in the weekend’s event. It has impacted me negatively financially. I’m sad to see that. I could understand their reasons for limiting local artists to participate. But I can also imagine a solution to the problem too.”

According to a City Council report, a total of 184 artists were selected from 975 applications. Of those artists, 14 (7.6%) of them are from the Wasatch Back, and 35 (19%) of artists are from Utah.

City Council is meeting on Thursday, October 25, to discuss the future of the Festival and Kimball Arts’ proposed contract renewal for 2023. To learn more about the event and the proposed renewal, refer to the Arts Festival debrief and next steps from City Council.