The Academy Center will hang hundreds of studio works during Brigham City’s Art on Main.

When David Walker and his wife first imagined Art on Main, they were thinking about a street, not just a show. The two had run Brigham City’s Main Street Program for years and watched what the annual St. George Art Festival had done for that community—how the arts could quietly reshape a downtown, pulling visitors in, giving local businesses a reason to stay open, giving a city a reason to care about how it looked. They wanted to try the same thing up north.

Eleven years later, Art on Main has grown from a mostly local affair into a regional draw pulling artists from neighboring states, its jury process helping sustain what Walker describes simply as “a high quality show.” The event distributes across six venues, each led by an accomplished artist working in that genre—a structure that gives it less the feel of a single fair than of a distributed exhibition spread through downtown.

The plein air component, added in the festival’s third year, was a deliberate market move. While studio work in the main venues can reach into the mid-four figures, the outdoor paintings tend to be more accessible—and Brigham City in spring offers painters something genuinely hard to resist: orchards in bloom, working farmland, and one of northern Utah’s higher concentrations of historic structures. The festival’s geographic bounds stretch to all of Box Elder County (which is on everyone’s minds these days), though organizers typically lean toward a historic theme in choosing painting sites.

The flagship venue is the Academy Center, a building on the National Register of Historic Places that once housed the Box Elder Academy of Music and Dance. It hangs 125 to 150 pieces of studio work beneath massive windows that flood the gallery with natural light—a feature artists notice. The plein air competition, staged separately, adds another 20 to 30 works from painters who have been working outdoors all weekend.

The festival draws from a mix of public funding sources—the Utah Division of Arts and Museums, Box Elder County tourism dollars, and Brigham City economic development funds—along with a stable list of recurring corporate sponsors. Walker is aiming for 10,000 visitors this year, served by an all-volunteer staff. Some downtown retailers report their strongest sales days of the year during the festival weekend. Three murals are either installed or underway as part of the event’s longer-term footprint.

This year adds something beyond the usual programming. On Saturday at noon, Art on Main will unveil artwork created for a Box Elder County Gold Star Memorial, developed in partnership with the Major Brent Taylor Foundation. The memorial honors military families who have lost a child in service—and Box Elder County carries particular weight in that history: the Borgstrom brothers, whose story inspired the central premise of Saving Private Ryan, were a Box Elder County family. Community-submitted artwork for the memorial, Walker says, has been remarkable.

Booths at Brigham City’s 2025 Art on Main

Brigham City’s Art on Main takes place May 22-23.

15 Bytes

UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.