It Started as a Joke About a Tomato. Next Weekend It Shuts Down Five Points, and It Is Still Free.
There is a reasonable argument that the single most Nashville thing that happens in Nashville each year is not on Broadway, does not involve a stadium, and costs nothing to attend. It happens in Five Points, it lasts two days, and its central organizing principle is a fruit that most people insist is a vegetable.
Tomato Art Fest returns to historic East Nashville on Friday, August 7 from 5 to 10 p.m. and Saturday, August 8 from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., centered at 1024 Woodland Street. It is free to attend all weekend. Costumes are, as ever, encouraged — and by mid-morning Saturday you will be the odd one out if you skipped them.
How a gallery show got out of hand
The origin story is smaller than the festival it produced. In 2004, Meg and Bret MacFadyen — who ran the Art and Invention Gallery in East Nashville — put together an art show celebrating the tomato and its fellow fruits and vegetables. It was meant to be a one-off, and a modest one. It went over well enough that they did it again in 2005, and then it kept happening, and by 2010 it had outgrown a gallery entirely and the MacFadyens brought in Good Neighbor Festivals to help run it.
The scale it reached is genuinely hard to square with that beginning. In 2022 the crowd came in somewhere around 65,000 people. It has been voted the city's best festival in local reader polls year after year — a streak running from 2007 into the 2020s — and has been written up nationally in the kind of magazines that usually reserve their Tennessee coverage for barbecue and Broadway.
Somewhere in the middle of that run, in 2017, the festival gathered enough people in fruit and vegetable costumes at once to set a world record for it. Which tells you most of what you need to know about the tone.
What is on this year
The 37206 Main Stage carries the music both days. Friday's lineup runs Tobacco Road, Jarren Blair, Girl Tones and The Foxies. Saturday's is longer: Threegon, Massie99, Wild Bill & The Bruisers, Raygun, JT Loux and Waxed.
Around the stage is the rest of it — art, food, the wacky contests the festival is known for, shopping, and a substantial kids' contingent. Two events do carry tickets: the Pre View Party and the Bloody Mary Garden Party. Everything else is walk-up and free.
Why the free part matters
It is worth pausing on that, because it is increasingly rare. Nashville's festival calendar has, over the last fifteen years, largely reorganized itself around ticketed multi-day events with wristbands and tiered access. That is not a complaint — those events built a lot of what this city now is. But a neighborhood festival in its twenty-third year that still lets you walk in off Woodland Street with nothing in your pocket is doing something structurally different. It is a block party that got famous and declined to become a product.
That is also why the costumes work. Nobody is performing for a paid audience. The guy in the full tomato suit at ten in the morning is your neighbor, and he does this every August.
Going
Friday evening is the softer entry — smaller crowd, music from five, easier parking. Saturday is the full experience and the full density; go early or go late, and walk in from a few blocks out rather than circling Five Points hoping for a space.
If you are making a day of the east side, our Nashville neighborhood guide covers where to eat and what else is worth a stop in East Nashville, and the vintage-shopping stretch of Gallatin Avenue nearby is about to get another anchor tenant.
Wear red. Bring water. August in Nashville has no mercy and never has.
