Last September, artist Sharon Eisley spent the days before the show rearranging her garage. Not for a yard sale. Her nephew, Bug Thompson, helped her hang paintings along the walls where a car usually sits, prepping the space to receive strangers off the street for a two-weekend show. Eisley isn't in a gallery district. She isn't within walking distance of South A Street. Her studio is wherever her garage happens to be, and that's exactly the point of the event she was preparing for.
For years, if you wanted to see where Santa Rosa's artists actually worked, you went to one place: the SOFA district, the cluster of converted industrial buildings just east of Highway 101 known officially as the South A Street Art District. That's still true, and it's still worth your Friday evening. But the newest tradition on the local arts calendar is built on the opposite idea, that the city's best studios might be sitting behind an ordinary garage door in a neighborhood that's never had a gallery walk of its own.
Three different doors, three different scales
Santa Rosa doesn't have one open-studios event. It has three, and they aren't redundant. Each one opens a different door into the same scene, at a different scale.
| Event | When | Where | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| First Friday Open Studios | Monthly, first Friday evening | SOFA district, South A Street | A short, walkable evening with music and open galleries |
| SOFA's catalog-guided tour | Each August | SOFA district only | A deeper, guided look at the district's regulars |
| Santa Rosa Open Studios | Two weekends, September 12-13 and 19-20, 2026, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. | Citywide, including neighborhoods outside downtown | A self-guided drive or bike ride through studios you'd otherwise never find |
The first two live entirely inside SOFA's block. The third one doesn't, and that's what makes it worth circling on the calendar this year.
The event that skipped the gallery district on purpose
Santa Rosa Open Studios is young. It launched in 2024, the brainchild of artist Suzanne Edminster, who maintains a studio on A Street but wanted something bigger than any single block could hold. Organizers hoped for 40 participants in year one. They got more than 70.
The nonprofit behind it, Santa Rosa Urban Arts Partnership, also produces the SOFA district's annual Winterblast parade, so this isn't a rival operation trying to draw attention away from downtown. It's the same organizers deliberately building a second, wider net. Spring Maxfield, the partnership's founder and executive director, has described the open studios weekends as a way to launch the season rather than compete with what SOFA already does well, calling it a kickoff to the arts season.
That distinction mattered from the start. When the tour launched in 2024, one of its first-time participants, an artist working out of Northwest Santa Rosa, said the appeal was exactly that her area had never had this kind of visibility before, and that the weekends let neighbors meet the artists working a few blocks from their own front doors. Eisley and Thompson's garage setup the following year was a small example of the same shift continuing: studios opening in residential pockets that a downtown gallery walk would never touch.
This year is the third annual run, September 12-13 and 19-20, 2026, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both weekends. It's free, self-guided, and the full map of participating studios goes live on the event's website closer to the date.
Twenty years of history behind one city block
None of this diminishes what's happening on South A Street itself. SOFA has close to 40 working artist studios packed into a few blocks, which local tourism materials describe as the highest concentration of studio space anywhere in Sonoma County. The district's anchor, the Santa Rosa Arts Center, has held that role since 2017, hosting exhibitions, concerts, and classes inside what used to be ordinary commercial space.
The district's origin is scrappier than its current reputation suggests. Artist Christie Marks keeps her studio in a former auto transmission shop at 312 South A Street, one of several artists who converted old industrial buildings into workspace when the block was still overlooked rather than fashionable. Marks describes the result plainly: there's always something going on at SOFA. Fellow original artist Max Dubois, who also works out of the old transmission shop, has talked about how the collaboration grew organically, with artists getting to know each other before any of the current events existed.
That coalition started coming together close to 20 years ago. The name SOFA itself is just a nickname, a play on "South of A," not an acronym for anything official, and it stuck the way informal neighborhood names tend to.
What's actually on the calendar right now
If you live near downtown Santa Rosa and want to build a fall routine around this, here's how the pieces fit together between now and the end of the year:
- First Fridays, monthly: SOFA's studios and galleries open their doors for an evening walk, with music and light refreshments. Café Frida and The Imaginists theater both stay open along the same stretch, so it doubles as a short dinner-and-a-show loop if you time it right.
- September 12-13 and 19-20, 2026: Santa Rosa Open Studios runs citywide, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both weekends. This is the one to use if you want to see studios you've never had a reason to visit before, garages included.
- November: SOFA's Winterblast closes out the year, a community party built around a parade of decorated, wheeled sofas through the district. It's been a fixture for close to two decades and marks the unofficial start of the holiday season on South A Street.
If you're building a weekend around any of these, the district sits close enough to Juilliard Park that a stroll through the park's lawns and sculptures pairs easily with a studio walk, and the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens is a short walk beyond that if you want to extend the afternoon. Santa Rosa's Railroad Square, with its own mix of restaurants and shops, is a few blocks north if you'd rather end the day somewhere else entirely.
Why this is worth knowing if you already live here
The easy version of this story is "Santa Rosa has an arts district, go visit it." That's true, but it undersells what's actually changed. The city's art scene isn't contracting into one polished block. It's spreading into ordinary residential streets that never had this kind of foot traffic before, through an event young enough that most longtime residents haven't built it into their routines yet.
That's the kind of local shift that's easy to miss if you only pay attention to the neighborhood you already know well. Santa Rosa keeps adding these layers, in its parks, its restaurants, and now its studios, and the residents who track them tend to get more out of living here than the ones who don't.
If you're curious what else has been changing in Santa Rosa's neighborhoods this year, from park access to the restaurant scene, John Hendricks keeps a running local read on the city through the Santa Rosa neighborhood guide, including how the outdoor spaces around downtown, like the parks and trails that anchor daily life here, fit into the bigger picture. If you ever want to talk through what's happening in the local market alongside everything else that makes this city worth paying attention to, reach out to schedule a local market consultation.
