About Us:

The Anacortes Arts Foundation is a non-profit organization formed to serve the community by cultivating, promoting and sponsoring a variety of art forms.

The Anacortes Arts Foundation has had a long history with several changes of course along the way.  Many of its projects have spun off into still existent organizations of  their own.

The origins of the Anacortes Arts Foundation were in 1961.  The organization began as the Anacortes Arts and Crafts Festival.  The Festival quickly grew into one of the state's leading local arts organizations, serving thousands of people.  A permanent art collection, gathered via purchase awards selected from juried shows, was hailed as one of the best small collections in the State of Washington.  The collection was the beginning of the Festival's Anacortes Art Gallery in 1969.  The original Gallery was in the basement of the Anacortes Museum.  Later the Gallery and the Festival office were located on Commercial Avenue.

The success of the Festival's occasional performing arts events attested to community interest.  Support of such events led to the formation of the Pop'N'Arts performing arts series in 1974, which, with the Anacortes School Districts' Cultural Education Program, received a Governor's 1975 Arts Award for innovative joint programming.