The Avenue Turns It Up

Twelve Years at the Heart of the Festival

For three decades and counting, one Saturday each year, Central Avenue remembers out loud. The Central Avenue Jazz Festival — Los Angeles’ longest-running free jazz festival — returns for its 31st edition on Saturday, September 19, 2026, filling the historic corridor with the sound that made it famous: the bebop, blues, and Latin jazz that once poured nightly from the Dunbar Hotel, the Downbeat, and the Club Alabam. From 11 AM to 7 PM, the Avenue belongs to the music, the vendors, the families, and the neighbors who never stopped calling this corridor home. Not even the pandemic — which silenced the festival for three years — could end the tradition; the Avenue simply waited, then turned the music back up. Admission, as always, is free.

And for the twelfth edition under its stewardship, dating back to 2014, La Mancha Gallery returns to curate the festival’s Arts Pavilion — the visual heartbeat of the day, housed in a 120-foot tent between Central Avenue and 41st Street, steps from the Dunbar itself.

The Arts Pavilion has grown into one of the festival’s essential destinations: a gallery without walls where the Avenue’s visual legacy stands shoulder to shoulder with its musical one. This year, La Mancha brings together approximately seventeen artists — painters, photographers, printmakers, and mixed-media artists — several of whom have exhibited in the Pavilion since its earliest years. Some are elders whose work documents the Avenue’s golden era firsthand; others are inheritors actively remaking its visual language today. Together they form a living portrait of a community that has always understood art and music as two verses of the same song.

Not an exhibition about the community, but an exhibition of it, by it, and for it.

Founded in 2006, La Mancha Gallery has spent two decades documenting, celebrating, and advancing the arts of Los Angeles — from Central Avenue jazz to AfroLatinx fine art. Curating the Arts Pavilion is among the gallery’s proudest annual traditions, and this year’s edition arrives with special significance for the corridor it calls home.