Wichitan is this year’s Autumn and Art featured artist
In just her second time participating in Wichita Festival’s annual Autumn and Art, Sara Grant is the featured artist for this weekend’s juried outdoor fine-art show and sales event.
Not only is she a relative newcomer to the art scene, she’s also a local Wichitan.
Since Autumn and Art started in 2011, just a couple of local artists have gotten the coveted designation as featured artist for Wichita’s biggest fine arts event. Others have come from Kansas City, Tulsa and beyond.
Considering Grant just started exhibiting her art about three years ago — after a cousin showed the director of Wichita CityArts the works Grant had literally kept under her bed — she wasn’t even sure this year’s honor was meant for her.
“But I’m Sara Grant. Did you mean to call Sara Grant?” was her response when she got the call, she said in an interview just a few hours before she hit the road for an art fair in Omaha earlier this month.
As the featured artist, Grant has a colored-pencil piece on the official poster for Autumn and Art, plus she gets a prime, coveted booth with a large banner along the Bradley Fair Parkway, where the free event will be held Sept. 12-14. A ticketed patron party happens Friday night.
For Grant, who describes her work as being “hyper-realistic” and showing the vulnerability, complexity and surreal aspects of human identity, her second Autumn and Art show is like continuing a conversation with her hometown community.
“It was so incredibly cool (last year) to connect with so many people from my hometown, to see them face-to-face, to talk to them and see different reactions,” Grant said. “I loved it. And then, all the other artists there — there’s so much talent. It’s such a high caliber of art.”
Her featured piece, called “Air,” was inspired by “a time when I felt emotionally worn thin, when just existing felt like effort,” Grant said in a news release announcing the designation. “Slowly, the image began to take shape. The birds became symbols for small, steady comforts — the kind that don’t fix anything but help you keep going. … ‘Air’ isn’t about healing or breaking; it’s about the moment in between, where you finally let yourself feel everything and just breathe,” she said.
For more than 20 years, Grant had worked in education, first in special education and then for the Haysville school district’s GEAR UP program, which encourages kids to go to college. But she’d always been interested in art and started dabbling in different media about eight years ago. When she inherited her aunt’s colored pencils, “they worked with my life.”
With a lapboard borrowed from one of her three kids and by the light of her cell phone, “I would sit in bed, and I would draw at night when my kids went to sleep,” she said. She would stash in-progress and finished works under her bed.
“I was pretty sure everything I did sucked, so I wouldn’t show anybody anything,” Grant said. Well, except for a cousin who decided that she’d show images of Grant’s artwork that she had on her phone to the CityArts director while Grant stepped away to the bathroom.
CityArts was Grant’s first show, and she finally felt ready to call herself an artist and eventually made it her career. Since then, she’s had several exhibitions, and last year she started participating in art fairs and shows, including Autumn and Art.
In October, she’ll be in a show at Harvester Arts. For the past two years, she’s done a series of popular miniature artworks of eyes called “Lover’s Eyes” that are exhibited and sold around Valentine’s Day at Reuben Saunders Gallery.
Since Autumn and Art is a juried art show, participants are selected by a panel of artists.
This year, more than 85 local, regional and national artists who work in various media ranging from drawings, paintings and photographs to sculptures, textiles, jewelry and glasswork were selected by jurors. The jurors were Shannon Johnston, an assistant art professor and director of Newman University’s Steckline Gallery; Aimee Geist, who has more than 30 years’ experience in the arts and currently is with Wichita State University’s School of Art Design and Creative Industries; and Rebecca Rolph, an adjunct professor with Friends University.
Autumn and Art hours are 6-9 p.m. Friday, Sept. 12, 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 13, and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 14.
Besides checking out the art, here are some new things to enjoy at this year’s event:
A second live entertainment stage has been added, so there will be more music and dance performances. For a complete schedule, visit autumnandart.com/events.
Two food vendors are joining the beverage vendors normally found at the event. The popular build-your-own Bloody Mary stations will be available from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
Tanganyika Wildlife Park will have a booth featuring art created by some of its animals and will also do scheduled meet-and-greets with the animal artists.
Returning activities include an art “creation station” run by Mark Arts, oversized lawn games and two tented lounge areas where you can charge devices and catch college football on Saturday and NFL games on Sunday.
Autumn & Art
What: An outdoor, juried fine-art show and sale, with live music, artist demos and other activities produced by Wichita Festivals
When: Friday-Sunday, Sept. 12-14; hours are 6-9 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturday, and 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday
Where: Bradley Fair Parkway, just east of the Bradley Fair shopping center at Rock Road and 21st Street
Admission: Free to attend; information about the exclusive patron party tickets ($125 per person) on Friday night is available at autumnandart.com.
More information: (316) 267-2817 or autumnandart.com
This story was originally published September 9, 2025 at 11:12 AM.