Starting this week, Laguna Canyon Road quiets down one festival at a time. The Festival of Arts closes its gates on September 3. Pageant of the Masters runs its final tableaux the following night, September 4. Sawdust Art Festival and Laguna Art-A-Fair both hold on through September 6, with Art-A-Fair cutting its last day short, open only from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. before the canyon goes dark until next June.

Most residents already know the shape of the summer: three art shows within walking distance of each other, all somehow different, all somehow the same. What most people who have lived here for years have never had reason to ask is why there are three at all, crowded onto the same half mile of canyon road. The answer is not planning. It is a fight from the mid-1960s that never fully ended, and this closing week, in this particular anniversary year, you can still see the seam.

The Fight That Started Three Festivals

Before there was a Sawdust Art Festival or a Laguna Art-A-Fair, there was only the Festival of Arts, a juried show that had been running since the early 1930s. By the mid-1960s, a group of traditionalist painters found themselves shut out of that jury as the show's tastes moved toward the abstract and contemporary work dominating Southern California at the time. Rather than accept the rejection, they hung their own paintings on fences at the corner of Glenneyre Street and Park Avenue, a few blocks from where the Festival of Arts crowd gathered every summer.

The fence show drew enough attention that the group needed real ground. They moved to a vacant lot on North Coast Highway. And then, after just two seasons together, the group that had banded together to fight one juried show split into two, citing what history now records simply as irreconcilable differences.

Half the group headed up into Laguna Canyon, where they spread sawdust over the dirt to keep the mud down between the eucalyptus trees. Local reporters started calling it the Sawdust Festival, and the name stuck. The other half stayed closer to the highway and eventually became what is now Laguna Art-A-Fair. Both are marking their 60th anniversary in 2026. The rebellion is old enough to collect Social Security, and it still has not fully reconciled with itself.

Same Bloodline, Different Rules

The two festivals that split apart a couple of seasons later still run on the rules each side chose in the divorce, and the differences are not cosmetic.

• Sawdust is non-juried and artist-led, and every one of its more than 180 exhibitors this year is a Laguna Beach resident. It is, by design, a closed shop for local makers.
• Art-A-Fair dropped the residency requirement entirely. Its 2026 roster mixes roughly 70 returning artists with 40 new exhibitors from outside Laguna Beach, part of a group of more than 115 award-winning artists working across two- and three-dimensional media, drawing in the international entrants that Sawdust's rules exclude.

That single decision, whether to require residency, is the fault line from the original split still running through the canyon sixty years later. Sawdust protects its own. Art-A-Fair went the other direction and opened the gates to the world. Neither festival advertises this as the reason they feel different when you walk from one to the other, but it is.

The Sibling That Never Left the Jury System

Down the road, the Festival of Arts kept the rules the original fence-show rebels walked away from. It is still juried. It still runs Pageant of the Masters, the nighttime tableaux vivants production that has been staged every summer since 1933, which makes 2026 its 93rd consecutive season. This year's production, titled The Greatest of All Time, recreates works from Michelangelo, Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Kahlo, and Rockwell inside the Irvine Bowl.

The Festival of Arts also added something new for 2026: three named weekend live music series running through the closing weeks, Flashback Friday, Showstopper Saturday, and Southern Songbook Sundays, layered on top of the daytime gallery of roughly 120 juried local artists. It is the same organizational lineage the sawdust-and-fence rebels broke from in the 1960s, still selecting its exhibitors the way it always has, still charging a premium ticket price for the privilege of the jury's taste.

Sixty Years Shows Up at the Gate This Week

What makes this particular closing week worth paying attention to, even if you have walked all three festivals every summer since you moved here, is that the anniversary programming makes the shared history physically visible in a way it normally is not.

Sawdust recreated one of its most recognizable early installations for the 60th season: artist Tracey Moscaritolo's original Windmill Booth, rebuilt life-size at the festival entrance. Nearby, a dedicated History Booth displays work from some of the festival's founding artists, the same generation that spread the sawdust in the first place. Longtime Sawdust artist Jay Grant, who runs a booth with his wife Nikki, described this year's approach as putting "art everywhere, including special pieces created just for the anniversary," a level of retrospective staging the festival has not done in prior years and has no stated plans to repeat next summer.

Once the gates close on September 6, that specific installation goes away. The regular booths return next June. The 60th anniversary artifacts do not.

Four Closing Nights, Not One

If you are planning a last visit before the canyon empties out, the logistics are worth writing down rather than assuming.

The Festival of Arts closes September 3. Pageant of the Masters runs its final nightly performance, at the usual 8:30 p.m. curtain, on September 4. Sawdust and Art-A-Fair both stay open through September 6, though Art-A-Fair shortens its hours that final day to 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

If you have not yet bought tickets to all three daytime festivals, the $29 Passport to the Arts still covers one entry each to Festival of Arts, Sawdust, and Art-A-Fair, plus a one-time parking pass at the Act V lot, and is the more economical route if you are trying to close out all three before they shut for the season. Sawdust also offers free admission every Thursday to Laguna Beach residents with valid ID, which makes this final Thursday before the close the last chance to use that benefit until next summer.

On the food side, a few additions are worth a last visit specifically because they debuted this year and there is no guarantee they return in the same form. The Cove by Starfish has been serving a churro bao bun that became one of the festival's more talked-about items this season. AhbA made its debut as a new concession this year with elevated American fare. And Taco Loco, run by chef Gonzalo Rebollar, a familiar name from his years on Pacific Coast Highway, has been serving tacos out of the Sawdust grounds all summer.

What the Closing Actually Marks

None of this changes what the festivals are on any given Tuesday in July. Sawdust will still feel like the artist-run, sawdust-covered version, Art-A-Fair will still draw the wider, less local mix of exhibitors, and the Festival of Arts will still be the juried show that started the whole disagreement. But this closing week is the one time of year the town's art scene shows its own history out loud, in a form that will not be staged again in quite the same way once the anniversary year ends.

Living somewhere that treats a 1960s argument about jury selection as worth restaging every summer says something about the place, beyond the festival calendar itself. If you are curious what year-round life in Laguna Beach looks like once the canyon quiets down and the sawdust settles, Nick Hooper can talk you through the neighborhoods, the seasons, and what the town feels like in the months the festivals are not running.