Fabric Arts Festival Connects Fall River to Providence
The festival was founded to unite the two cities through a series of music concerts, art exhibitions, dinners and workshops.
Artist Bhen Alan of the Sala Sala dinner performance.
Fall River is so close to Providence, yet the Portuguese-influenced city in Massachusetts feels a world away. Maybe it’s the two bridges you have to cross to get there, or maybe it’s because they are different states, and Rhode Islanders have a reputation of not wanting to drive more than twenty minutes without packing an overnight bag (and a snack!).
It’s time to combat that reputation and bridge the two cities together, and there’s an annual festival that aims to do just that. The Fabric Arts Festival was founded six years ago to help unite the cities through exhibitions, performances, talks, a guided walk and a series communal dinners that are also artistic performances. The festival is taking place from October 9-12 at various locations.
Fabric Arts Festival was co-founded by Portugalia Marketplace co-owner Michael Benevides and Portugal-based curator Jesse James, and it’s organized by Casa dos Açores de Nova Inglaterra (CANI), which is a Fall River-based nonprofit fostering cultural and educational exchange between the Azores and the Portuguese-American diaspora. Artists, chefs and performers are traveling here from Portugal and the Azores specifically for the event, bringing their unusual art and performance and innovative cuisine to the area.
“Our main goal has always been to bring people together through arts and culture. This year, food has taken center stage in the FABRIC Arts Festival,” says Fabric co-founder Jesse James. “While we’ve previously included dinners in our program, this time, the act of eating is fundamental to our approach. It creates a vibrant space for new artistic collaborations and serves as a medium to explore memories, emotions, and our diasporic experiences.”
Fall River Heritage State Park in Fall River, Massachusetts. Photo from Getty Images.
It’s a way to connect the two different cities and highlight what makes Fall River so unique. “FABRIC Arts Festival is a celebration of Fall River’s vibrant spirit as a crossroads of creativity and culture,” says Michael Benevides, co-founder of FABRIC. “We see the city as a dynamic space where diverse geographies and histories intersect, and our festival seeks to honor and amplify this rich tapestry through a multidisciplinary approach that connects local artistry with global dialogues.”
More details on the artists and locations can be found on the festival’s website, fabricfallriver.com. All event tickets can be purchased online at Fabric’s website.
2025 PROGRAM
Updates to be added to the festival’s website, FABRICfallriver.com
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9 – FALL RIVER
7 PM | SALO SALO – DINNER-PERFORMANCE
BHEN ALAN & COMPANY (HALIKA, UPO KA, TIKIM KA, SAMAHAN MO KAMI SA GUNITA)
Narrows Center for the Arts, 16 Anawan St., Fall River
This is a ticketed event with limited capacity. Follow the link on our website for tickets or click here.
Artist Bhen Alan invites guests into a unique dinner-performance blending food, movement, and ritual. Co-created with local immigrant mothers (including Bhen’s), Courtland Club’s bar team, and performers, the evening offers a sensorial experience that blurs the line between meal, performance, and gathering.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10 – FALL RIVER
5-8 PM | POST SCARCITY SCULPTURE OPENING RECEPTION – EXHIBITION
HANNA UMIN, ALEX TUM, SERENA CHANG, KARYN NAKAMURA, MATTHEW AZEVEDO
CURATED BY HARRY GOULD HARVEY VI
Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art (FR MoCA), 44 Troy St., Fall River
Free and open to the public.
Exhibit open October 10, 2025 – January 2026. Visit frmoca.org for gallery hours.
This exhibit gathers four artists and one sound artist whose practices operate as Futique Agents, working with material residue and technological detritus in a post-prophetic tense. Post scarcity names a politics that imagines an end to artificial scarcity enforced by capital, envisioning conditions where technology and collective organization free energies from deprivation. Here, sculpture emerges from soldered brass, plaster, resin, foam, circuits, video systems, and found refuse, forming a biomechanical site where future and past converge. These works, coded with fragments of war material, biological trace, and machinic residue, appear as future antiques—at once evidentiary and prophetic of social and aesthetic revolution.
7 PM | CALAFONES: BACK FOR A BEAT OF SAUDADES – DINNER-PERFORMANCE
PROJECT CALAFONAS & HUGO FERREIRA
The Cultural Center, 205 S. Main St., Fall River
This is a ticketed event with limited capacity. Follow the link on our website for tickets or click here.
Project Calafonas invites guests into a dinner-performance exploring the Portuguese-Azorean diaspora through food and sound. DJ Milhafre (Henrique Ferreira) will guide a listening party blending archival tracks with contemporary interpretations. The menu, created by Azorean chef Hugo Ferreira, will be executed in collaboration with Mitch Mauricio, a local chef and recurrent partner of the festival. Together, they create a festive and reflective evening where food, music, and heritage converge.
FABRIC 2025 includes a collaboration between Portuguese artist Hugo Brazão and Providence’s Dirt Palace.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 11 – PROVIDENCE
2-5 PM | LOAFHEAD – EXHIBITION
HUGO BRAZÃO & DIRT PALACE
ODD-KIN, 134 Matthewson St., East Providence
Free and open to the public.
ODD-KIN is an artist-run space in Providence that supports experimental, queer, and transdisciplinary practices through exhibitions, residencies, and public programming. For FABRIC 2025, it presents a collaboration between Portuguese artist Hugo Brazão and Dirt Palace, a Providence-based publishing and programming platform dedicated to queer publishing as resistance. Brazão debuts LoafHead—a hybrid figure of body and bread—exploring themes of sustenance, scarcity, and renewal through drawing, sculpture, and storytelling. In dialogue with Dirt Palace’s zines and printed ephemera, the exhibition highlights queer imagination and resistance, with food by the artist adding a shared layer of hospitality.
6-8 PM | CROSSCURRENTS/CONTRACORRENTES – SOUND INSTALLATION, NEW COMMISSION
DANIEL WYCHE & MATTHEW AZEVEDO
AS220, 95 Empire St., Providence
Free admission.
Daniel Wyche & Matthew Azevedo present a durational sound piece developed during a FABRIC residency, using field recordings from the Azores and New England to explore memory, migration, and the Atlantic as a living connector between communities. With shifting fabrics and haptic hammocks, the installation creates an immersive sonic and visual environment where audiences may arrive and depart freely throughout the session.
Headliner BRANKO—one of Portugal’s most influential producers and founder of Enchufada.
10 PM | LATCHKEY – PARTY/DJ SETS
BRANKO with Mango & Ginger, Slick Vick and Where’s Nasty
CRIB, 108 Hayward St., Providence
This is a ticketed event. Follow the link on our website for tickets or click here.
Doors open at 9:30 PM.
Stay Silent and FABRIC Arts Festival present LATCHKEY at CRIB, a night of music, dance, and global sounds. Headliner BRANKO—one of Portugal’s most influential producers and founder of Enchufada—brings DJ sets that fuse electronic music with rhythms from across the Portuguese-speaking world. Joining him are LA-based duo Mango & Ginger, Boston’s Slick Vick, and Providence’s own Where’s Nasty. This transatlantic gathering connects Lisbon’s club scene with diasporic sounds and audiences in Providence and beyond.
Mango & Ginger.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 12 – FALL RIVER
11 AM – 1 PM | GATHERING GROUND: A WALK THROUGH COPICUT WOODS – WALK
This is a free admission event with limited capacity. Follow the link on our website for registration or click here.
Alicia “Truthseeker” Mitchell will lead a reflective walk through Copicut Woods—a place shaped by memory, care, and ancestral presence. The walk invites participants into gestures of grounding, listening, and quiet relation with the land and one another. It offers a space to pause, reconnect, and carry forward what has been shared.
Please wear comfortable clothing and shoes suitable for walking outdoors. We also recommend bringing water, sun protection, and anything else you may need to feel grounded and at ease.
2 PM | COMIDA CASERA – LUNCH/WORKSHOP
Evelyn Rydz
Portugalia Marketplace, 489 Bedford St., Fall River
This is a free admission event with limited capacity. More information to be announced on the website.
Comida Casera is Evelyn Rydz’s ongoing participatory project that gathers people around the table to share food and stories of home. For FABRIC, the artist invites local communities to bring dishes connected to memory and heritage, creating a space of care, listening, and dialogue. Blending recipes, storytelling, and collective presence, Comida Casera transforms the act of eating together into an artistic practice of connection and belonging.
