Make a Weekend of It: Lafayette College’s Fall Arts Festival Returns to Easton

For four days this October, Lafayette College’s arts spaces will become one connected festival, inviting the Lehigh Valley to experience theater, film, music, visual art, hands-on making, conversation, and more.

The third annual Fall Arts Festival, October 1–4, 2026, kicks off Arts & Humanities Month at Lafayette with programming across the downtown Williams Arts Campus and other arts spaces at the college. Some events put audiences in seats, others send them outdoors, into galleries, or around activity tables. Together, they offer a window into the range of creative work happening at Lafayette and an invitation for the surrounding community to be a part of it. Most festival events are free and open to the public.

At the center of the weekend is the Community Arts Fair on Saturday, October 3, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Ahart Family Plaza. The free event brings Lafayette arts programs together with artists, cultural organizations, educators, community partners, and visitors from across the Lehigh Valley for an afternoon centered on participation.

Rather than simply walking through booths, visitors will be encouraged to make, experiment, watch, listen, and talk. Hands-on activities, demonstrations, performances, pop-up experiences, and opportunities to meet the people behind local arts organizations will turn the plaza into a shared creative space for all ages.

The festival was founded to deepen the connection between Lafayette College and the broader community.

For the second year, Lafayette has intentionally programmed the Fall Arts Festival alongside Easton Garlic Fest. After positive feedback from community members and participating organizations last year, the two events will once again share the weekend, giving visitors a reason to move between downtown Easton and Lafayette’s arts spaces throughout the day.

It is less about choosing one festival or the other and more about making a day of Easton: eat, explore, create, discover local organizations and businesses, see a performance, visit a gallery, and experience the city’s cultural community from different perspectives.

Thursday, October 1: Theater After Dark
The festival begins at dusk with Lafayette College Theater’s Nevermore, an immersive theatrical haunting that trades the traditional stage for an outdoor, moonlit campus adventure.

Audiences meet at Jenks Hall and become part of an experience that unfolds through the landscape rather than from a theater seat. The production runs from 7 to 9 p.m. and offers an appropriately unexpected opening to a weekend designed around encountering the arts in different ways.

Friday, October 2: Choose Your Own Night
Friday offers two very different destinations.

At 7 p.m. in Landis Cinema, Lafayette Cinematheque presents Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). The deliriously stylish dark comedy plunges into a rapidly escalating world of romantic betrayal, missed connections, eccentric characters, and emotional chaos, all unfolding against Almodóvar’s vividly imagined Madrid. Funny, frantic, and unmistakably his own, the film helped introduce Almodóvar’s distinctive cinematic voice to a broad international audience.

The screening is part of Lafayette Cinematheque, the College’s free public film series, which brings classic, cult, international, independent, restored, and rarely screened films to Landis Cinema throughout the semester.

At 8 p.m. at the Williams Center for the Arts, LADAMA introduces an entirely different energy to the evening. The ensemble draws from musical traditions across Latin America, combining rhythm, vocals, percussion, strings, and contemporary influences in a performance grounded in both cultural exchange and collaboration.

Film or live music? For festivalgoers, Friday is a chance to choose a path.

Saturday, October 3: Art Meets Community
Saturday is the festival’s fullest day, beginning with the Community Arts Fair from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Ahart Family Plaza.

Alongside the hands-on activities and community organizations at the fair, visual art extends throughout the Williams Arts Campus.

Visitors can see an Easton Public Schools pop-up exhibition featuring portraits of the Marquis de Lafayette created by local fourth-grade students after a campus visit and lesson about his life and legacy. The project brings the perspectives of some of Easton’s youngest artists directly into the festival.

At nearby Grossman Gallery, visitors can encounter Polymythic: The Multi-Dimensional Practice of Al Johnson, featuring work by Lehigh Valley-based artist Al Johnson, and explore his richly layered practice across media and visual storytelling. Johnson will be at the gallery from 4 to 6 p.m., giving festival visitors an opportunity to meet the artist and spend time with the exhibition.

At 3 p.m. in Landis Cinema, the festival also hosts a screening and Q&A for If Not You, Who?, a short documentary about the Earth Stewards of Palmer and their years of work removing litter from local waterways and trails while building a network of residents, conservation groups, and township partners. It is a particularly local example of how storytelling can connect art, environmental action, and community life.

Then, at 8 p.m., the day moves back to live performance as Pesky Artist-in-Residence Mahmoud Chouki joins Lafayette Music Department faculty and alumni for a free evening of jazz at the Williams Center for the Arts. Collaboration and improvisation are at the heart of the concert, making it a natural extension of a day built around people coming together through creative work.

Sunday, October 4: Look Closer
Sunday slows the pace and invites visitors to spend a little more time looking, listening, and talking.

From 2 to 4 p.m., visitors can explore Lafayette’s fall gallery exhibitions at the Williams Center Gallery and Kirby Art Study Center, with a student-curator walk-through at 2:30 p.m.

At the Kirby Art Study Center, Engineering Artifacts: Past, Present, & Future considers the tools engineers use to design, build, and connect the world, bringing objects and material culture into conversation with the College’s long history of engineering education. At Williams Center Gallery, The Spy Who Brought Surrender examines a pivotal Revolutionary War story through Lafayette College’s art collection, including the history of James Armistead Lafayette, an enslaved Black man whose intelligence work contributed to the British surrender at Yorktown.

The festival then turns again to cinema for a special screening and conversation with Elena Rossi-Snook, Director of Film and Video Collections at The New York Public Library. Rossi-Snook’s work in moving-image preservation and film collections opens a larger conversation about what it takes to preserve cinema, whose films survive, and how archives allow audiences to continue encountering work that might otherwise disappear.

It is a fitting way to end a festival built not around a single definition of “the arts,” but around discovery.

Come for an Event. Stay for the Experience.

The Fall Arts Festival is designed so there is no one right way to experience it.

Come for a film and discover a gallery. Bring the family to explore at the Community Arts Fair. Spend the afternoon at Garlic Fest and cross over to Lafayette for a concert. See a familiar art form, or try one you might never have sought out on your own.

For the Arts at Lafayette, openness is the point. The arts are not only something that happens behind gallery doors or after the theater lights dim. They are a way to gather people, exchange ideas, tell stories, experiment, and build connections between a campus and the community around it.

The Fall Arts Festival takes place October 1–4, 2026, at Lafayette College in Easton. The Community Arts Fair is Saturday, October 3, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Ahart Family Plaza and is free and open to all.

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