FABRIC Arts Festival is a platform for contemporary art, music, performance, and community engagement rooted in Fall River, Massachusetts. Guided by the movements of people, traditions, and ideas across diasporas, and by the shared experience of gathering — often around food — FABRIC creates spaces for collaboration, exchange, and artistic experimentation. Through a multidisciplinary program, the festival connects local and transnational contexts, inviting artists and audiences to engage with places, histories, and one another in meaningful and unexpected ways.

Shaped by successive waves of migration, Fall River is a place where diasporic histories, aesthetics, and practices intersect and continue to evolve. FABRIC draws from this layered context, foregrounding Portuguese, Azorean, Cape Verdean, Latinx, and other diasporic communities not only as cultural foundations of the region, but as living networks that connect local experiences to broader transatlantic and postcolonial geographies. The festival understands these relationships as an active fabric of movement, memory, exchange, and transformation.
Each edition maps and activates local narratives, spaces, communities, and everyday rituals, while connecting them to broader global conversations. FABRIC positions Fall River not only as a city of makers and cultural producers, but also as a site of encounter within a wider geography of artistic and social exchange.

The festival presents communal meals, performances, concerts, talks, exhibitions, workshops, and site-specific projects developed through residencies and co-programmed with local artists, organizations, and partners. These processes unfold over time and across disciplines, fostering experimentation, dialogue, and collective participation. In recent editions, FABRIC has increasingly explored food-centered practices and conviviality as artistic methodologies, creating spaces where artistic production and social experience become inseparable.
Launched in 2019, FABRIC has evolved through continuous adaptation and collaboration. Following hybrid formats developed during the pandemic years, the festival expanded its presence across Fall River and the wider region, connecting New Bedford and Providence through a growing network of artists, institutions, and communities. Today, FABRIC operates as both a festival and an ongoing platform for artistic creation, cultural exchange, and transatlantic collaboration.

FABRIC is a platform for gathering, experimentation, and collective making — a space where artistic practices, communities, and territories come together to imagine new forms of relation.

The 7th edition of FABRIC Arts Festival takes place from October 8–11, 2026, across Fall River, New Bedford, and Providence. Through a multidisciplinary program of contemporary art, music, performance, food-based practices, and public gatherings, the festival brings together artists, communities, and institutions from the region.

Developed through artist residencies, commissions, and collaborations with local partners, FABRIC unfolds across a range of venues and public spaces. The 2026 edition departs from the understanding that cultures are shaped through movement — between geographies, memories, and everyday practices. Throughout the program, food and conviviality emerge as central elements, positioning gathering, storytelling, and collective participation as fundamental artistic and social practices.

FABRIC Arts Festival is a project organized by Casa dos Açores de Nova Inglaterra (CANI), a not-for-profit organization in Fall River, MA, established in 1982. CANI promotes educational, cultural and social opportunities as well as cultural and tourist exchange between the Azorean immigrant community in southwest New England and the Azores. It does so by promoting events, encounters and cultural manifestations that keep an active link between the local community and the islands, preserving traditions and creating new opportunities. The project was co-founded in 2019 by local business owner Michael Benevides, in collaboration with Portuguese curators and cultural mediators Jesse James, Sofia Carolina Botelho, and António Pedro Lopes.

Currently, FABRIC gathers a multidisciplinary team working from both sides of the Atlantic, with the support of a network of collaborators, partners, and friends.

TEAM 2026
Executive Direction | Michael Benevides
Executive Production | Alexandria Machado
Artistic Direction | Jesse James
Production Management | Linsey Wallace & Quinn Corey
Production | Gonçalo Preto & Marin Griffith
Comunication & Social Media | Sandy Dahari
Communication & Local Liaison | Patty Rego
Photography | Rafael Medina
Video | Lennox Orellana
Casa Dos Açores Nova Inglaterra | President - Francisco Viveiros

With the support of a network of collaborators, partners, and friends.

Once known as the Spindle City for its prominence in textile manufacturing, Fall River is an industrial mill city located in Southeastern Massachusetts; its an hour south of Boston, 30 minutes west of Providence, Rhode Island, and 20 minutes east of New Bedford. Fall River’s population of 90,000 is rooted in a large Portuguese community originating mostly from the Azores, but it is also home to diverse cultures such as the Irish, Cape Verdean, English, French Canadian, Puerto-Rican, Polish, Lebanese, Cambodian, and Italian, among others. The influx of these communities not only helped to fuel the booming cotton textile industry that made the City thrive; they also added to the rich cultural fabric of the City, bringing their traditions, their music, and their food to their new home.

This diversity manifests itself in how the city is organized and in the richness of the many cultural activities that have become synonymous with Fall River: a city of many bands, of large pagan-religious celebrations; a city for the Portuguese but also for the whole world.

Easily accessible by Interstate 195 – which displaced and all but eradicated a waterfall that gave name to the city - and the scenic Braga Bridge, the city of a million spindles is abundant in mills, mostly textile, some of which are active, while others are being restored and reused as housing units or co-working studios. Though modest in comparison to the once gargantuan industrial output, Fall River is still an important center in the luxury soft goods industry. For example, the city is home to Vanson Leathers, which produces unique leather jackets and accessories for Hollywood productions and brands like Suzuki and fashion-leading Comme des Garçons, and Matouk Linens, which produces high-quality linens, towels, and sheets for discerning consumers and celebrities; Additionally, a diverse group of artists, designers, and furniture makers are finding a place here to develop their own work, like Smokestack Studios, a collective studio of artists housed in Fall River's historic Metacomet Mill.

The creation of the interstate also split the city’s downtown in two, with a new, Brutalist-style government center replacing the historic Old City Hall; as such, Fall River is the only city in the United States to have its city hall located over an interstate highway. Bisected or not, Fall River’s downtown increasingly displays potential to reestablish itself as a culture and arts district. There are several music venues such as The Eagle Event Center and the Narrows Center for the Arts, and as well as diverse restaurants, speciality shops, salons, and an artist collective/workshop, Craftyish. Just around the corner, Portugalia Marketplace has become an important venue for community meetings and a true haven for the celebration of Portuguese culture, both old and new.

Fall River is experiencing a renaissance of sorts, and the Fabric Arts Festival is an integral part of helping Fall River reshape a narrative that celebrates the city’s vibrant and diverse community of creatives, makers, entrepreneurs, artists, and residents. Come celebrate with us!

Viva Fall River will give you all the insights and local tips on where to stay, eat and shop in Fall River. The platform is community-based commerce, culture, and creative economy initiative that draws on the City’s unique and diverse assets to foster economic revitalization, support active community engagement, inspire a vibrant arts scene, and elevate the profile of the City as a premiere South Coast destination.

To get you started we've organized a list of places to stay in and around Fall River. 


WHERE TO STAY

TownePlace Suites by Marriott Westport
41 Old Bedford Rd, Westport, MA
(774) 520-1700

Taylor's Pharmacy Guesthouse
203 Linden St, Fall River, MA 02720
Contact: borges_debora@hotmail.com

Lizzie Borden House (A Bed and Breakfast & Museum)
230 2nd St, Fall River, MA 02721
508-675-7333

Holiday Inn Express Fall River North
360 Airport Road, Fall River
(508) 672-0011

Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott Somerset
602 GAR Highway, Somerset, MA
(774) 322-2370

Riverview Inn & Suites Somerset
1878 Wilbur Ave, Somerset, MA
(508) 678-4545230 2nd St. Fall River, MA
(508) 675-7333

Bally’s Tiverton @ Twin River Tiverton
777 Tiverton Casino Blvd Tiverton, RI
(401) 816-6000

Best Western Dartmouth-New Bedford
737 State Rd North, Dartmouth, MA 02747
(508) 717-0424

The Paquachuck Inn
2056 Main Rd, Westport Point, MA 02791
Phone: (508) 636-4398

The Whalehouse
100 Madison Street, New Bedford, MA 02740
Phone: 339-832-3123

New Bedford Harbor Hotel
222 Union St, New Bedford, MA 02740
Phone: (508) 999-1292

Hampton Inn Fall River/Westport
53 Old Bedford Rd, Westport, MA 02790
Phone: (508) 675-8500

Residence Inn by Marriott New Bedford Dartmouth
181 Faunce Corner Rd, North Dartmouth, MA 02747
Phone: (508) 984-5858

Neptune, an Ash Hotel
122 Fountain St, Providence, RI 02903
Phone: (401) 455-3326

Hotel Providence
139 Mathewson St, Providence, RI 02903
Phone: (401) 861-8000

Graduate Providence
11 Dorrance St, Providence, RI 02903
Phone: (401) 421-070