Fabric Arts Festival is a celebration of art, music, community, and the city of Fall River, Massachusetts. It aims to be a platform for artistic creation through a multidisciplinary program that seeks to create a cultural and communal experience. Fabric understands the city of Fall River as a territory of arrivals and intersections where different geographies converge, creating a space of diversity and opportunity for an evolving dialogue. It seeks to showcase the city and the region as it has always been: a place of creation and production – a city of makers in the expanded fields of art and design.

The Festival aims to show, map and build on the narratives of the city - its spaces and traditions - in order to celebrate its communities and diversity. Each edition focuses on new dynamics that morph into artistic projects, exploring visual arts, music, performance and commensality, produced in the region, in relation to Portugal and its diasporas and attuned to global conversations and relationships. Fabric’s first edition took place in 2019, and its second in two moments between 2020 and 2021, reconfigured in the physical and online spheres by the limitations of the pandemic. The third edition occurred in May 2022, assuming the Festival as a generator of meeting spaces throughout the city. In 2023, Fabric returned to its Fall schedule and proposed a regional program that moved between Fall River, New Bedford, and Providence.

Organized by Casa dos Açores in New England, the project is mentored and directed by Portuguese-American entrepreneur Michael Benevides, with artistic direction by Jesse James, and curated and organized by and with multiple entities and partners.

OCT 10 - 13
Fall River & Providence

In 2024, Fabric proposes a program with projects in visual arts, music, dinners and conversations, developed by contemporary artists working from multiple geographies and diasporas. The program extends across the city and occupies multiple spaces, including factories, schools, and artists’ ateliers, all with an offering of new visions and perspectives on ways to occupy them.

In the expanse of the festival’s reach, Fabric will continue its regional approach, aiming to strengthen and grow Fall River’s artistic audience and community. This edition, the program will take place between Fall River and Providence, with a first incursion in the Copicut Woods.

The festival is a process of mapping the territory and its recognized and forgotten history, heritage and future placement. This is a joint exercise to celebrate what is already in Fall River and how that relates to Portugal and its diasporas, the Azores, and the world. The Festival is preceded by a period of work (between February and September) for the conceptual development of projects, research and production. These processes will be accompanied by a knowledge program that articulates with schools and local entities, including conversations, masterclasses and workshops.

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 2024

Executive Direction | Michael Benevides
Artistic Direction | Jesse James
Project Management | Alexandria Machado
Assistant & Online Communication | Marin Griffith
Comunicação & Press | Patti Rego
Production | Linsey Wallace & Quinn
Curatorial Assistance | Gonçalo Preto
Photografy | Rafael Medina
Video | Lennox Orellana
Open Studios Fall River | Ashley Occhino
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!