GAINESVILLE, Fla. – For many, Gainesville is known as a college town as it’s home to the University of Florida and Santa Fe College. But an upcoming festival is helping change the city’s narrative.
Big: Culture & Arts Festival takes place in Downtown Gainesville from Friday, April 10, through Sunday, April 12.
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The festival is headlined by Grammy-nominated artists Earl Sweatshirt and the Alchemist. Other artists include Zack Fox & UWAY, Navy Blue, MAVI, redveil, and more than 100 other artists ranging from rap, R&B, indie rock, house and more.
The festival also features multiple artists from Jacksonville, including Nikayla + The phuNK, JahMeal, Keia, SAINT SOL, WineDown Cypher, and Lunaxcel.
This is the fourth year of the festival, but this is the first year the festival is taking place in Downtown Gainesville.
Besides music, Big features art installations, fashion shows, circus performers, and so much more.
Ahead of Big, I spoke with one of the co-creators and co-producer of the festival: Laila Fakhoury.
This interview has been edited and condensed for brevity.
RT: First things first. How are you?
LF: I’m good. I’m excited. We are [less than a month] away. When you put it into perspective like that, it’s a little terrifying, but also looking forward to the day when everything comes together.
RT: How long have you been preparing for this? When did you start the process from last year to this year?
LF: I feel like we’ve been thinking about the festival, since the day it ended last year, that Sunday. I think we started talking about what would make next year better and what we wanted to see. And it was a little up in the air before the 2025 festival last year because we didn’t really know if we were going to do [a festival in] 2026. We thought maybe that would be the last one. But on that Sunday, we decided to try it again, see what happens. So, we’ve been thinking about it since then, but I would say [we’ve been] heavily working on it since November of 2025 and that’s when we booked Earl Sweatshirt. So, after that, it was kind of just, you know, on and off until January; it’s been nonstop.
RT: When you said that was it; was that going to be it or was it going to be like a break? A lot of festivals have been taking like a year off and coming back. What was the mindset going into that decision?
LF: For us, it was kind of like, this is it. We thought that 2025 was just going to be our last try with the festival just because it’s such a scary process working on it and it’s a lot of pressure. So, we didn’t know that it was necessarily something we wanted to continue doing. But once we saw how special 2025 was and it was a completely different direction than what we had been going in, we were like, okay, let’s explore this direction a little bit more.
RT: Let’s back it up to the beginning. What made you want to do a music festival?
LF: I think, it’s important to note that a festival was kind of always the epitome of what we were creating with our independent record label, [Dion Dia Records]. So, we started that in 2019 with our first event, which was a silent disco, but it was a mix of a lot of different things, so it kind of felt festival-ish. We had silent disco in one room, live music in another room, outside was open mic, food trucks, vendors, live jazz band, random things like that. And when we did that first event, we just recognized how beautiful it was to see people come together. And it was a lot of people who don’t go outside, so that was also very meaningful. It was our friends who didn’t necessarily feel like they had space in town and we felt the same way before we did that event. And so, when we saw how special and important that was, that’s when we kind of started to think about what a festival would look like because it’s that largest platform of community building around culture, arts, and music. And we decided to call it a culture and arts festival because we didn’t want to pigeonhole it into just being a music festival. We wanted to express a lot of different types of art. But yeah, we just kind of always had it as a vision, but we didn’t actually jump into the journey until Zack Fox wanted to come to Gainesville in 2023 to perform with us. We’re like, okay, let’s just kick-start this festival now. This is enough motivation to do that.
RT: There are some artists who have performed here again and again. How is it seeing the elevation and evolution of not only the festival, but the festival with these artists?
LF: That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about and just feeling that it’s a really cool privilege to get to work with people who believed in the vision since the beginning and then continue to believe in it just enough to keep coming back, even though it might look crazy and chaotic. They just are willing to continue to collaborate with us. And I think that it’s cool seeing the trajectory of the festival along with a lot of these artists that we’re working with that are also continuing to grow and expand. And now we’re kind of just like on the journey together, you know, like from the beginning, which is really cool. And it’s always fun getting to talk to artists that have seen the whole project from fruition and just kind of like get their opinions on it, talk about like where we all came from and what we all did from the very beginning. So, it’s really cool. I like it a lot.
RT: It’s a Florida festival. There’s of course a lot of artists are from Florida, but it’s not just Gainesville, not just Jacksonville. I’ve seen people from Tampa on the lineup, Orlando, Miami. How is it building such a community-focused festival for these Florida artists?
LF: I mean, I wish we could even have more Florida artists from even more cities and smaller cities and different areas that we haven’t necessarily explored yet. This year, we’re really getting into inviting artists from Ft. Myers for the first time and we want to continue doing that just spreading around the state, inviting people that can represent different parts of Florida because Florida is just so unique in all the different scenes. It feels amazing. It feels like Gainesville is a retreat. city. Like people will come here and it’s kind of feels like you go camping or you’re just like somewhere way more relaxed than where a lot of people are coming from that are performing. I think that it’s really cool seeing all of these different Florida artists just connect with one another because really that’s the goal: for the state to be more connected and people keep collaborating throughout the year across cities after [the festival], which is really fulfilling and cool to see, and that’s what we want to keep encouraging.
RT: What is the future for this festival?
LF: I feel that the future is we get our own festival grounds. That’s the ideal situation, so that we have a property that we can completely nurture and be extremely creative and free inside of. We’re inspired by an art amusement park in California called Luna Luna. It’s just basically an amusement park that was made by artists. So, Keith Haring and [Jean-Michel Basquiat] and they had just made all of these cool rides, but they were all very artistic. And so ideally, we want to have our own little amusement park here where it’s a space for all different types of art and it can be used by different community members.
If you would like to experience Big for yourself, tickets are still available on the festival’s website. VIP is sold out but limited general admission tickets are still available.