The Deep Ellum Art Festival Is Resurrected After a Brief Death, and Deep Friday Is Back, Too

Fans and supporters of Deep Ellum music will come together on May 26 for an infamous event known as Deep Friday, which is making a long-awaited return. The live music series started in the 1990s as a monthly opportunity for music lovers to see all the bands they could in one night for a ticket price equivalent to a fancy beer. It was during this time that concertgoers packed out just about every music venue Deep Ellum could spare, seeing groups such as Blue October, Flyleaf and Flickerstick before major labels snatched them up.

Deep Friday's comeback is a small piece of a larger splash the new Deep Ellum Community Arts Fair intends to make on Memorial Day weekend, rolling out a new chapter for the historic neighborhood.

It all started in September 2022, when Stephen Millard, founder of the Deep Ellum Arts Festival, retired after running the festival for almost 30 years. Within days of Millard's announcement, community leaders and the Deep Ellum Association met to discuss the future of the event, or something like it. One person in attendance was longtime Deep Ellum cultural proponent Breonny Lee.

“There was a public announcement in September that the festival was closing and chatter on all corners about it," Lee says. "For our big-scale celebration of arts to be gone without anything? It was a big deal."

During the meeting, the community members discussed ideas to bring some form of the newly deceased festival back to life while also making a few improvements along the way. After careful deliberation it was decided that Lee would be named executive director of whatever the new project would become.

“For me, I feel like the festival was part of Deep Ellum’s identity," she says. "The arts festival brought life down here when there wasn’t a whole lot going on, so I partially credit it for the vibrancy that’s going on now.”

Lee had spent seven seasons as a staff member of the Deep Ellum Arts Festival and had been a volunteer before that.

“My main involvement with the Deep Ellum Arts Festival was putting the ‘Deep Ellum’ back into the festival”, Lee says.

Dallas residents and suburbanites made the annual trek to the Deep Ellum Arts Festival, but over the years many complained that the free music and art prices clashed with the high-priced carnival food, an experience generally saved for a trip to the State Fair of Texas. Others complained that the art selection suffered as more out-of-town artists worked the tents. Local artists started to shun the festival and poke fun at the so-called, “art for motels“ works being shown by traveling artists renting a booth. That matter was brought to Lee’s attention early on and was something the new Deep Ellum Community Arts Fair looked to correct immediately by shifting focus onto local artists and musicians.

“This is a Deep Ellum, community-focused art fair," Lee says. "We are prioritizing Deep Ellum artists first, Dallas artists second, North Texas artists third and regional artists last. We are also making it affordable for artists to rent booths and will be accepting applications late.” For young artists like James Maker, who work and often reside in the neighborhood, the prospect of a new and improved arts fair is something to be excited about, so much so he's even volunteered to help out.

“The way they are running it now with local businesses and artists in mind, it has more of an ‘it’s just us, for us, by us’ kind of feel now," Maker says. "It’s a curated event this time, with a more authentic vibe.”
As far as walking and snacking at the new fair goes, patrons will have to save the corn dogs and nachos for a September outing at the Texas State Fair.

The Deep Ellum Community Arts Fair will be booking Deep Ellum-based food truck vendors and funneling festivalgoers all throughout the neighborhood. The new location will also not restrict any local businesses' front doors, a longtime complaint from business owners of the previous arts festival. For musician Roland Rangel, now the Deep Ellum Community Arts Fair marketing director, being involved and helping shape this new project is about nothing more than cultural preservation.

“I feel like with all the changes happening in the area, we don’t want that loss of Deep Ellum identity to be part of that change,” Rangel says. “Deep Ellum has so much to offer now, this is a great opportunity to bring the arts back into the streets again.”

With all of its improvements, careful curation and community participation now in line, the Deep Ellum Community Arts Fair is scheduled to happen in just a couple of months, although the project is not 100% funded yet. Lee and Rangel are diligently spreading seeds around the community that will hopefully blossom into another 30-years-long-running arts festival.

When the neighborhood organization decided to bring back Deep Friday as part of the weekend festivities, clubs such as Club Dada, Reno’s and others took the news with enthusiasm and offered their participation. With so many corporate entities who now call Deep Ellum home — such as Support Ninja, Embark and Common Desk — one would think that the Deep Ellum Community Arts Fair would easily get the funding it needs to help preserve what made the neighborhood so special in the first place: culture. Maybe their accountants need to hear two truly magic words: "tax write-off."

According to Lee, it was a lack of funding that ultimately sank the Deep Ellum Arts Festival the first time around.

“In a nutshell, it was a lack of corporate sponsorships helping fund an essentially free-to-attend community event that killed it,” Lee says. “It’s expensive to run a three-day festival, but it’s an important part of the cultural fabric of this neighborhood.”

The new Deep Ellum Community Arts Fair is scheduled for May 27–29. The Deep Friday kick-off event starts at 8:30 p.m. on May 26. Each day of the festival will run from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., and attendance is free.