The Coast's Biggest Arts Festival Shuts an Entire Downtown

The Peter Anderson Arts and Crafts Festival is published for 7 and 8 November 2026 in downtown Ocean Springs, fifteen minutes east of Biloxi over the bay bridge. It is the largest arts festival on the Mississippi coast, it has run since the late 1970s, and for one weekend it takes over the town's streets with artists, makers and food vendors from across the country.

It is named for Peter Anderson, the potter who founded Shearwater Pottery in Ocean Springs and whose brother Walter Inglis Anderson is the artist the town's museum is built around. That family is the reason Ocean Springs is an arts town at all.

Getting there is the whole problem

Ocean Springs is a small town with a compact walkable centre, which is exactly what makes the festival good and exactly why parking is the challenge. Streets in the festival footprint close, and the residential grid around it fills.

Three approaches that work. Park well out and walk in, accepting fifteen or twenty minutes on foot. Take a rideshare and let somebody else deal with it. Or, if you are staying on the Biloxi side and the weather is decent, cycle or walk the shared-use path on the Gulf side of the Biloxi Bay Bridge, which is about a mile and a half of separated path over open water and lands you on the Ocean Springs shore.

While you are there

The Walter Anderson Museum of Art is a few minutes from the festival footprint and is worth an hour whether or not the streets are full. The town's ordinary galleries and restaurants are open, busy, and generally the reason people come back on a normal weekend.

Confirm the current year's dates, the footprint and the programme with the organisers before you travel. This is an annual early-November event and the details are published fresh each year.