Big: Culture and Arts Festival will pack downtown Gainesville this weekend with 130 artists across eight stages and around 5,000 participants.
It’s the fourth consecutive festival, and co-producers Laila Fakhoury and Jahi Khalfani said they’re moving into the core downtown area to take advantage of the Streatery and local businesses.
Fakhoury also emphasized that it’s more than just musical artists. More than 100 visual artists, 50 filmmakers and 100 photographers will be represented or present at the festival, and the festival includes fashion shows and a car show along with circus performances.
“We never wanted it to just be a music festival,” Fakhoury told Mainstreet. “We wanted it to expand further than that and bring people in from every different area of the community and give people different opportunities to enjoy the experience by finding something that they feel comfortable within, for example, film. But then they’re exposed to something new, like the music or the automotive or the skate.”
But on the music side, the 2026 festival will draw some top names in alternative hip-hop, headlined by Grammy-nominated Earl Sweatshirt and The Alchemist. Besides these national names, Big also highlights local talent, like Florida-based 00JORDIE, Machina Records and The Nancys.
The Bull, The Atlantic, The Loft, Signal and How Bazar will each serve as one of the musical stages.
Khalfani said there’s so many moving parts to the festival that he’s excited to sit back and reflect once the busyness fades. One of his favorite bands, TAGABOW, will perform pop-up style in front of Loosey’s, and he’s excited to see how people react to that.
“I think that’s going to be a very cool highlight moment, and then just capturing it as well with downtown as backdrop and environment, holding it,” Khalfani said. “It’s going to be a beautiful, beautiful moment to capture, photo, and video as well.”
Khalfani and Fakhoury said they hope the festival also changes the Florida landscape when it comes to sustaining creatives. The Sunshine State is disconnected from the national music and creative industry, they said.
They said Big: Culture and Arts Festival is also a learning curve for artists who sometimes only know about Miami and Tampa, with the rest of the state a haze of Florida man stories.
“Because of our mission and what we’re really about, it’s opening people up to a different side of Florida and just more of what’s happening here, which is good,” Khalfani said.
