A record year for artists, a permanent piece of art going up downtown, and the story of how a fine arts festival took root.

Every October, something happens downtown that did not used to happen here. The courthouse lawn fills up, artists unload their vans, and for two days, a few thousand people wander downtown Decatur with no agenda beyond looking at beautiful things and talking to the people who made them. Most of them go home carrying something they had no intention of buying when they woke up that morning.



In 2026, 167 artists applied to River Clay from 25 states, the largest applicant pool in the festival's history. That is a wonderful problem to have and a genuinely difficult one to solve, because it meant turning away a great deal of good work. What survived the cut is a roster of more than 70 juried artists: painters, potters, jewelers, woodworkers, glass artists, printmakers, fiber artists, sculptors, and a handful whose work doesn't fit neatly into any of those boxes.

It’s worth sitting with what those numbers mean from the other side of the table. Somewhere right now, an artist is planning to load a van and drive several hundred miles to set up in a small Southern city because they’ve heard that Decatur shows up, buys work, and treats artists like the trip was worth making. Reputation is the only thing that gets a van on the road. River Clay has spent eleven years earning it.

Most Festivals Leave Nothing Behind. This One Will.

The usual festival arithmetic is simple. It arrives, it happens, it packs up Sunday night, and by Monday morning, the street looks like nothing occurred there at all. River Clay breaks that pattern.

On September 24, Athens Forge will unveil a permanent public sculpture at Walden Oaks Park. Commissioned in 2025 to mark a decade of River Clay, the piece features ten cattails, one for every year of the festival, alongside three sandhill cranes standing in for the community that built it.

Six members built the sculpture: Dustin Patterson, Travis Fleming, Ashton Reynolds, Al Stevens, and Nolan Brewer, a seventeen-year-old bladesmith. Because everyone involved volunteers and has a job elsewhere, they worked on weekends. Design and drawing took roughly two months. Fabrication took at least eight weeks after that, in Friday-to-Saturday sessions that ran eight to ten hours at a stretch, spent forging a single bird or chiseling in one set of features.

“Without organizations like River Clay, nonprofits like mine would never get an opportunity like this,” Patterson said. “This is my first major installation. It is a huge deal for me personally. I’m proud of the work we’ve done, and I’m proud that River Clay gave us the chance to do it." That’s the part of River Clay that’s easy to miss while you’re busy enjoying the weekend. The festival lasts two days, but what it leaves behind endures.

More than just an art festival, River Clay has invested $65,000 in arts education in this community since its inception, funding numerous classroom projects and teacher mini-grants across four school districts. This has fuelled supplies and materials for projects that might not have happened otherwise, in schools where the art budget is usually the first thing to get trimmed. Every ticket purchased, and every sponsor who stepped up to support the festival, has fueled that; this weekend gives back year after year.

Most of the weekend roster will be showing you finished work to take home. Two artists will be making it in

front of you. Jamey Grimes demonstrates on Saturday, and Chandler Hayes on Sunday, and both are the kind of thing you plan a morning around rather than stumble onto at four in the afternoon.

Jamey came out of Birmingham-Southern with a painting degree in one hand and a biology degree in the other, and his work has never let go of either one. He's a Tuscaloosa artist who builds large suspended pieces out of melted and formed plastic, and they read like moving water: currents, eddies, the way a river cuts through stone a moment at a time. That's the thinking behind Confluence, the piece he installed at the LSU Museum of Art as a response to the Mississippi River, and the piece that inspired this year's festival T-shirt. It's the first time River Clay has built a shirt around an artist's work, and we're hoping it's the start of a long tradition. Melting plastic isn't exactly a sidewalk-friendly process, so his Saturday setup is less about watching the material move and more about standing next to the work while he walks you through how it comes together, with samples and footage from the studio.

Chandler has been part of River Clay since before there was a River Clay. He sat on the planning committee for the very first one, back when he was living and working out of a warehouse in downtown Decatur, and he's the reason spray paint was in the mix from year one: he pulled in artists from Birmingham and Atlanta and put them to work on panels along a construction fence right next to the festival. Since then, he's put more than 100,000 square feet of murals on buildings across north Alabama, including the Miss Baker piece in Huntsville's Five Points, and he's back in school now at the Alabama Center for the Arts in Decatur working on his master's. Stop and ask him something. That's the whole point for him. He'll tell you he figured out what murals were really for while painting a wall in Five Points after the tornadoes, with the power out and half the neighborhood coming by to watch.

Eleven years in, River Clay is not something Decatur is trying to start. It is something Decatur already does, the way other towns do a homecoming or a county fair, and it has quietly become one of the reasons people plan a fall trip here at all.

The fourth weekend of October is already spoken for. Come find out why.