On historic Main Street, a group of local artists gathered for an open-air arts festival. What started as a neighborly act of community grew to become an event that drew 30,000 visitors within a few short years. Years before there was a Kimball Art Center, there was a town devoted to nurturing creativity, connection, and art.

On November 20, Bill Kimball opened the Kimball Art Center in Park City. Finding the perfect location for KAC started as something of a misadventure (involving a vacant garage on Main Street, Bill breaking in through a hole in the roof, and a none- too-pleased police officer with a pistol!) and ended up breaking ground on the region’s cultural future.

Six years in, Kimball joined forces with the University of Utah’s continuing education program to launch the Park City Summer Arts Institute: a series of credit-bearing workshops taught by university faculty. Over more than two decades and 100+ classes, it seeded a culture of serious arts education led by Kimball Art Center in the Mountain West.

By the mid-nineties, the Arts Festival had become something remarkable: 1,200 artists submitted color slides with five original works just for the chance to show. That summer, the Friday night music stage debuted, a tradition that continues today with Friday night Local’s Night and a partnership with Mountain Town Music.

With the world’s eyes on Utah for the Winter Olympics, Kimball closed its doors for a transformation. On April 19, the community gathered to celebrate a renewed space, and fittingly, the first exhibition to open in it was the Wasatch Back Student Art Show, a celebration of young local voices that remains a celebrated annual tradition at the Art Center.

Kimball Art Center launched the Young Artists Academy, a jury-selected program for teen artists built on the conviction that young people deserve the same mentorship, space, and professional development offered to working artists. To date, more than 141 teens have taken part in the program. Today, the Young Artists are given tools to showcase their work at a Main Street booth during the annual Arts Festival.

Kimball moved from its longtime Main Street home to a temporary location in Bonanza Park, and with the move came a new chapter for the exhibition program, one that would bring world-class voices in contemporary art from around the globe to Park City for the first time.

After five and a half years in Bonanza Park, Kimball reimagined a warehouse space at The YARD into a home for museum- quality programming and studio spaces for learning artists. Despite existing as an interim solution, the museum has served as a powerful canvas, celebrating art and the artistic process through classes, events, community programming, and memorable exhibitions.

Years of planning, advocacy, and community vision later, Kimball Art Center signed a Letter of Intent for a 1.62-acre site at Kimball Junction–a land donation and reduced-rate sale that brought a permanent, purpose- built cultural home closer to reality than ever before.  Learn more about our new home…

Fifty years in, Kimball Art Center delivers more than 70,000 art experiences a year. Hosting international- quality exhibitions and bringing professional arts education to 15,000 students annually in local classrooms, KAC is proving that a cultural center grows through the people who shape it, just as much the building that houses it.