BY KEELIN EVERLY-LANG for WEEKLY VOLCANO | 9/25/2026
Tacoma Arts Month is back for its twenty-fifth year this October with the goal of amplifying and celebrating local artists.
“It’s an opportunity to find ways for artists to get their work out … for the city to say that we recognize this as something vital and important to our infrastructure, to our economy, and also to our spirit as a city,” Daniel Garcia told Weekly Volcano. Garcia is a community programs specialist and currently oversees programming for Tacoma Arts Month in the Arts and Cultural Vitality Division of the City of Tacoma.
The month will kick off with an opening party called Kaleidoscope from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, October 3, at the Tacoma Public Library Main Branch. The free, family-friendly, and fully accessible event will feature art displays, interactive art-making, and cultural programming for all ages throughout the library.
Live music, DJ sets, dance, and other performances will take place throughout the afternoon at three locations in the library: The Living Room, Community Hub, and Handforth Gallery. Visual art experiences will include The Hair Story Project by Cennady Coleman and the opening of a new gallery show titled The 253.
This show will be displayed in the Handforth Gallery at the library and will feature twenty-nine local artists exploring their connections to Tacoma. If you can’t make it to Kaleidoscope on October 3, The 253 will run through late December.
Looking back, Funding and Cultural Programs Manager Naomi Strom-Avila said this celebration has grown every year. She oversaw Tacoma Arts Month for over a decade and said that Garcia has now “taken it to some extreme levels this year. … It’s awesome.”
Two weeks later, the entire community is invited to take part in the much-anticipated studio tours, which will take place from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, October 17, and Sunday, October 18.
The artist studio tours are one aspect of Tacoma Arts Month that has been present from the very beginning. This year, over 100 artists are participating, and each one is offering some type of interactive activity, whether it’s the opportunity to witness and ask questions about a particularly interesting technique or to get the chance to try something for yourself.
Since it is probably physically impossible to visit every studio within the two days, some planning may be advised to get the most out of your studio tour adventure.
One option could be to look for artists who work in a certain medium, like pottery, painting, or glass. Those with kids could look at particularly kid-friendly workshop activities. Another option is to look for studios closest to your home and get to know the artists right in your neighborhood.
A Twenty-Five-Year Tradition
Amy McBride led the launch of the first-ever Tacoma Arts Month in 2002 under the name Art at Work. That first year, thirteen artists participated in the studio tours. In 2006, Strom-Avila took the reins and ran it until 2018. Throughout those years, she led a variety of events and activities.
“We kept the studio tour, but we added on some new programming. … There’s things that we tried over the years that worked for a while, and then our needs or use of them kind of shifted,” Strom-Avila said.
One of these events was an art symposium that offered a weekend-long series of free workshops for artists, including presentations by a variety of organizations and nonprofits in the community.
Art Slam was another free community event that took place for several years. Rather than focusing on practical skills for working artists, it was designed to be a creative way to share local work with the community. This one featured visual art displayed in a slideshow at the Rialto and was often accompanied by spoken word, poetry, music, or other audio art.
As the programming has evolved over time, Strom-Avila said, they’ve ultimately narrowed in on what matters most to artists, in order to decide what to let go of and what to grow.
Garcia took over management of Tacoma Arts Month about three years ago, and Strom-Avila said he’s “really grown the program and just brought a whole new level of ideation and creativity and organization. … Really building those connections with artists and organizations and community, he’s taking it to a whole other level.”
Garcia had actually participated in Tacoma Arts Month as an artist in the past and said he now appreciates the opportunity to pay that forward in his current role.
Tacoma Arts Month “was built on the shoulders of really great women before me,” Garcia said, expressing how Strom-Avila has helped him continue that legacy.
“She’s someone who has refined and created elements of this program, someone who’s worked really tirelessly to create a structure that supports this … undertaking, this service back to the community that is Tacoma Arts Month,” Garcia said.
While the planning is a huge undertaking on a limited budget with “lots of planning, organizing, spreadsheets, permits, conversations,” Garcia said that conversations are the most rewarding part of the job.
“It’s so nice to have that level of insight into the community through other people, because it just adds to everyone’s collective strength,” Garcia said.
This connection and conversation is something Garcia also values about the Tacoma art community in general. “I feel like Tacoma is very organic. … It relies on conversation, relies on you knowing people, on talking to people,” he said.
Looking to the Future
Along with an expansion of Kaleidoscope and the new gallery show The 253, another change this year has been to make the Tacoma Arts Month event calendar year-round.
The goal is to “keep that momentum going and collect arts and culture events that are happening around the city. It provides a free platform to list digitally,” Garcia said.
He noted that these types of community calendars, like the one hosted by Weekly Volcano, are important tools for the community to get the word out.
Along with the event calendar, Tacoma Arts Month programming also doesn’t stop at the end of October. Arts at the Armory will take place this year from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, November 14 and 15, at the Tacoma Armory, 1001 South Yakima Avenue.
The event will feature 120 artists this year, many offering their works for sale. It’s the only event of its kind in the city that focuses specifically on locally based artists and doesn’t charge any market fees.
Studio tours provide the opportunity for artists to invite the community into their process and for visitors to see behind the scenes. While Arts at the Armory also offers the opportunity for connection and networking, a big goal is also to provide a way for the community to contribute financial support (and receive some incredible art!) for their trouble.
In addition to the requirement that artists be local, this year’s event also features a more recently introduced rule that artists must be human. This means that “art” generated by prompts to AI chatbots or other image-generation tools is not invited.
“We essentially ask that everything be human-made, you know, because we feel like that’s such an important part of creativity. It’s such a human experience,” Garcia said.
At the core, each aspect of Tacoma Arts Month focuses on how to amplify artists in Tacoma and to provide a platform for the community to build off of.
“Tacoma Arts Month is mainly a community-produced event, right? Our role as a city is to amplify what other organizations, people, businesses have going on related to arts and culture,” Strom-Avila said.
This means that everyone is invited to participate in whatever way they see fit, from hosting a pop-up show at a small business down the street to programming at the Tacoma Art Museum or Museum of Glass.
“It’s a platform to raise visibility for the entire ecosystem,” Strom-Avila said.
More information about all of the Tacoma Arts Month programming can be found at tacomaartsmonth.org.
