The One Weekend Downtown Wausau Runs Two Festivals at Once
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Most Septembers, downtown Wausau asks you to pick a lane. You either spend Saturday wandering the outdoor arts festival on 3rd Street, or you spend it inside the Woodson looking at bird paintings. This year you don't have to choose. On Saturday, September 12, the Wausau Festival of Arts and the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum's Birds in Art both have their biggest day of the year happening downtown at the same time, and the two anchors sit close enough together that a resident who knows the layout can treat the weekend as one loop instead of two separate errands.
That's the part worth knowing before you plan your Saturday. Not which event is better. How close they actually are, and what order to hit them in.
The Wausau Festival of Arts has been running since 1965, and it's still Central Wisconsin's largest outdoor arts festival, with more than 100 juried fine artists setting up along 3rd Street. For the festival weekend, the street itself changes: 3rd transforms into a pedestrian-only shopping corridor from the 600 block to the 900 block, with the 400 Block hosting a main stage and live music running through the shopping area. Every food vendor at the festival donates its proceeds to local nonprofits, so the money you spend on a bratwurst or a lemonade stays in the community rather than going to a concessions company.
A few blocks away, the Woodson opens its 51st annual Birds in Art exhibition that same weekend, with all-new work by 120 artists filling the galleries. Members and exhibiting artists get a preview on Thursday and Friday, September 10 and 11, before the show opens to the public alongside the festival on Saturday. Last year's edition, the 50th anniversary show, was even bigger: more than 140 artists took part in that milestone year, drawing visitors from as far as Australia for opening weekend. This year's 120-artist lineup is smaller by comparison, which actually makes it easier to see in one visit rather than needing two trips to get through it.
Museum director Matt Foss has described what keeps the show fresh year after year. As he put it in a recent interview, "the artists push themselves each year to get into the show, resulting in competitive and strong work." That competitive pressure is part of why Birds in Art keeps drawing serious collectors and casual visitors alike, even in a city of roughly 40,000 people that most outsiders wouldn't peg as a destination for world-class wildlife art.
Here's the part that doesn't show up on either event's own promotional page: these two anchors are close enough that you don't need to drive between them. The festival occupies the 3rd Street corridor downtown. The Woodson sits an easy walk from that stretch, close enough that you can park once, hit both, and never move your car.
That changes how you should plan the day. A resident who's done this before doesn't drive in twice. The move looks something like this:
That last point matters more than it sounds like it should, because the restaurant scene downtown has actually shifted in the past year, and a lot of longtime residents haven't caught up.
If you haven't been downtown in a while, a few things have changed since last September.
Sourdough & Co. opened its doors on November 17, 2025, in the old Subway space at 601 Forest Street. It's a father-son operation, run by Kent and Aaron Olson of Olson Tire & Auto Service, who decided to fill their own vacant storefront rather than lease it out again after Subway's 23-year run there ended. The California-based sandwich chain has more than 80 locations nationwide, and the Wausau shop is its first location anywhere in the Midwest, and its only location east of the Mississippi. The draw isn't just novelty. The bread ships half-baked and gets finished in-house as orders come in, so nothing sits pre-baked in a warmer waiting for a customer.
A few doors down the entertainment map, Faraway Place has positioned itself as a downtown hub that works for more than one kind of night, whether that's unwinding after work with a drink in the lounge or catching an open mic set. And Nevermore On Third has built out an Edgar Allan Poe theme into its bar and dining space near downtown, with an outdoor seating option that fills up on festival weekends.
None of these are new-new in the sense of just opening this month. But all three landed within roughly the last year, which means if your mental map of downtown Wausau dining still runs through what was there in 2023 or 2024, you're missing a meaningful chunk of what's actually open right now.
The overlap between the festival and Birds in Art doesn't mean downtown goes quiet once the weekend ends. Wausau Events has already locked in Harvest Fest for October 3 on the 400 Block, continuing the fall run of programming that includes Concerts on the Square earlier in the summer and Wings Over Wausau at the downtown airport in June. Birds in Art itself stays up well past the opening weekend, running through January 3, 2027, so if you can't make the festival Saturday, the exhibition is still there to catch on a quieter weekday afternoon in October or November.
That's actually the more useful piece of planning information here. The festival is a two-day window. The exhibition is a four-month one. If your Saturday gets eaten by something else, you haven't missed your only shot at the Woodson this fall. You have missed the busiest, most social version of it, the one with the artist demonstrations and the crowd energy, but not the art itself.
None of this changes what either event is on its own. The festival is still an outdoor arts market with live music and a food-vendor lineup that gives back to local nonprofits. The Woodson is still hosting one of the most respected wildlife art exhibitions in the country, in a building that started as a private estate donated by the Yawkey and Woodson families back in the 1970s. What's different this year is the timing, and the fact that the walk between them is short enough to make "both" the obvious answer instead of "pick one."
If you've lived in Wausau long enough to have a fixed routine for festival weekend, this is the year to break it. Park once. Walk both directions. Eat somewhere that wasn't on your list twelve months ago. Downtown changed enough in the last year that the old routine undersells what's actually there now.
If you're weighing whether this stretch of Wausau, or another pocket of Central Wisconsin, fits where you want to put down roots, that's a longer conversation, and one Joleta Sells Homes has been having with buyers and sellers across this market for years. Guiding You Home starts with knowing the neighborhood as it actually is today, not as it was described somewhere online last year. Reach out for a free home valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
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