Overview The Pecan Street Festival is a free two-day arts, crafts and music festival held twice a year, in May and September, and it is named for Pecan Street, what Sixth Street was called when Edwin Waller laid out Austin with its east-west streets named for trees. It started there in 1975 and ran on Sixth Street for nearly five decades; its 50th anniversary, in 2025, was held at the Hill Country Galleria in Bee Cave, and the fall 2026 edition returned there. Each edition brings 200-plus vendors, 35-plus music acts and 20-plus food vendors. The nonprofit Pecan Street Association presents it and puts its proceeds back into Austin through grants, with historic Sixth Street at the center of that work, and Special Events Live took over production in 2006. On site The festival is juried, and the artisans work in metal, wood, fiber, clay, leather, glass, stone and repurposed materials. Live music runs from the afternoon into the evening, food vendors line up beside the booths, and the family side has kids' rides, a petting zoo, face painting, workshops and street performers. Admission and parking are both free, and free water is handed out on site. The Hill Country Galleria is a 152-acre shopping, dining and office center in Bee Cave, west of downtown Austin, and the booths and stages set up across it. Track record By 2026 the festival had picked up more than 20 Best of Austin nominations. Its fall 2023 campaign, which ran in Spanish as well as English and reached into San Antonio, counted about 4 million media impressions across TV, radio, print and digital, and its IH-35 billboard added more than 2 million impressions a festival in 2025. Brand presence Sponsors buy in at four levels, and every level rides the festival's bilingual media buy: a full-page Austin Chronicle ad, TV spots on Spectrum and Fox 7, and social posts. A booth sponsor gets a 10-by-10 footprint. An event partner adds a larger footprint, a street team, radio spots and an Austin360 page takeover. A stage sponsor names a stage, dresses it in branded scrims, gets emcee shout-outs and stage recordings under its name, and goes on the IH-35 billboard and the festival map. The title sponsor's name goes into the festival's own, with logos on the pedestrian barricades and activations at the entrances. Spring and fall can be bought together.