Taylorsville is throwing open Centennial Plaza for two full days of free arts programming next week, as Westside CultureFest returns to the Mid-Valley Performing Arts Center on August 14 and 15. The free festival runs from 4:30 pm to 10 pm on both days, and organizers say it will feature more than 25 performances staged both indoors and outdoors, alongside an artist market, food trucks, and art activities for kids.
The event, billed as a showcase of what organizers call the creative heartbeat of the westside, was announced by Taylorsville City Hall on Facebook. Full scheduling details, including performer lineups, are posted at westsideculturefest.org. The festival's Friday evening hours also overlap with Taylorsville's long-running Starry Nights @ the Plaza series, which takes place next door to the performing arts center and runs every Friday from May 15 through September 25, according to Taylorsville City, adding live entertainment and Food Truck League vendors to the mix.
Organizers are directing attendees to overflow parking at Valley Regional Park, with additional parking available on the north side of the Mid-Valley Performing Arts Center itself. Given the festival's growth in past years, arriving early may be wise for anyone hoping to catch a specific act or grab a spot at the artist market.
A Festival Built From the Ground Up on the Westside
Westside CultureFest didn't start under this name. The event launched in August 2023 as the Wild Wild Westside Arts Fest before being rebranded as Westside CultureFest in 2024, according to historical context compiled by Salt Lake County Arts & Culture. The festival was created as a partnership between Salt Lake County Arts & Culture and the nonprofit Utah Arts Alliance, which helped run the event during its first two years, giving dedicated arts programming to westside communities that previously lacked it.
That investment appears to have paid off in attendance. The inaugural 2023 gathering drew roughly 2,000 community members, and organizers estimated that number doubled by the second annual festival in August 2024, per the West Valley Utah News. Past festivals have leaned into showcasing emerging and historically underserved creators, including a concert by Lakota Nation hip-hop artist and Taylorsville High School graduate Stella Standingbear, plus a lowrider custom car exhibition complete with a Hop Off competition.
Inside the $39 Million Venue Hosting the Festival
The Mid-Valley Performing Arts Center itself carries its own backstory. Construction broke ground in December 2018 on the Taylorsville City Hall campus and wrapped in March 2021 at a total cost of $39 million, according to Reflexion Magazine. Designed by Method Studio, the 70,000-square-foot facility houses a 439-seat main-stage proscenium theater with a fly loft, a 211-seat black box studio theater called Studio 5400, and a rehearsal space known as the Centennial Room.
The building's lobby also doubles as an art destination in its own right, with two permanent installations funded through Salt Lake County's Percent-for-Art program: Adagio, a sculpture made of 1,343 polished stainless-steel spheres by artist Danielle Roney, and One Hundred Items by Tooza Design. Outside, Centennial Plaza hosts its own rotating outdoor sculpture display, Plaza +ART, which unveiled a 2025–2026 Art Walk featuring 22 public sculptures installed across the municipal campus, as reported by Artists of Utah 15 Bytes.
Part of a Broader Push for Westside Arts Access
The performing arts center was commissioned in part to close a regional gap in cultural infrastructure, expanding venue access beyond downtown Salt Lake City to serve central and west valley communities, according to research from Engineering News-Record. Salt Lake County operates four other major performing arts venues, all located downtown, making Mid-Valley the county's dedicated foothold in the west valley. Westside CultureFest, staged on the plaza right outside that venue's doors, has become one of the clearest expressions of that regional equity goal — two free days built specifically for a part of the county that spent years without a comparable stage of its own.
