In the fall of 1976, twenty-seven sculptors from six different countries arrived in Liberty Hill with no hotel to check into. There wasn't one. The artists slept in spare bedrooms up and down the town's streets, ate meals cooked by neighbors who'd never met them, and spent two months turning blocks of Texas limestone into the monuments that still stand at what's now called Lions Foundation Park. Liberty Hill won a Texas Arts Award for it the following year.
Fifty years later, the city is asking for the same favor. The 2026 Sculpture Festival marks the anniversary of that original International Sculpture Symposium, and the official announcement doesn't just list a schedule. It includes an email address, [email protected], for anyone willing to house or feed the visiting sculptors during their stay this October. The festival has grown in every visible way since 1976. The core arrangement, apparently, has not.
That's the detail worth sitting with before the schedule, because it explains why this event still feels like a town project rather than a ticketed arts festival fifty years on.
What's actually happening October 7 through 10
The public carving starts before the party does. Beginning Wednesday, October 7, visiting sculptors will work in the open at Lions Foundation Park each day through Saturday, October 10, shaping a new permanent piece for the park in full view of anyone who wants to stop by and watch. That four-day window of public carving is the part most people miss if they only mark the Saturday date on a calendar.
Saturday, October 10, is the main event, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Lions Foundation Park. All activities are free. Food, drinks, and vendor items are for purchase, and raffle tickets ($5 each, or five for $20) get you a shot at winning one of the custom sculptures made during the live demonstrations. A Sculpture Festival Fun Run kicks off the same morning at 8 a.m., starting from 355 Main Street.
Two things are new for the fiftieth anniversary specifically, and both are permanent additions to the town rather than one-day attractions.
Local stone sculptor Josh Slack is debuting a new piece at the festival, created in the same live-carving tradition as the works from 1976. A few blocks away, muralist David Neeld, who also painted at this year's Whimsy & Wonder festival, is completing a new downtown mural titled "Small Town, Big Heart" at Parkers Mercantile. Between the two, Liberty Hill is adding one new sculpture and one new mural to its public art inventory in the same week, timed deliberately to land on the anniversary rather than arriving separately.
The piece nobody's resolved in almost forty years
Not every work from that original symposium stayed quietly in the park. Ann Merck's sculpture "Western Vision" caught the attention of the Smithsonian back in 1987, when the museum reached out about acquiring it. According to Liberty Hill historian Gary Spivey, those discussions were revived in 2021 and are, as of this year's reporting, still ongoing.
Nearly forty years is a long time for a conversation to stay open, and it says something about what's sitting in that park that a casual walk-through wouldn't tell you. These aren't decorative lawn pieces installed by a parks department. They're works a national museum has wanted for decades and still hasn't closed the deal on.
The town keeps its own record of that history close by. A 1,500-square-foot center at 355 Main Street, maintained by the Liberty Hill Development Foundation, displays the 1977 Texas Arts Award alongside recordings by Mel Fowler, the local artist who organized the original 1976 symposium after a series of trips to Europe put him in contact with the international sculpting community he'd eventually invite to town.
"It is about celebrating that great time in our town." — Diane Williams, Liberty Hill City Council member, as quoted in Community Impact
Williams was describing the anniversary itself, but the phrase applies just as well to the festival's structure. The Development Foundation has contributed $25,000 annually to the event since 2022, and the city and foundation still run it together as a joint project rather than handing it off to an outside promoter.
The rest of the fall calendar, quietly
The festival isn't the only thing changing in Liberty Hill this October, and the other two items are the kind of ordinary civic news that shows up in a city newsletter rather than a features article.
Waste Connections becomes the city's solid waste provider starting October 1, 2026, following a competitive request-for-proposals process the city ran to evaluate service options. Every resident inside city limits transitions to the new provider on that date.
Separately, at its September 9 meeting, the Liberty Hill City Council voted unanimously, 7-0, to end the city's use of Flock Safety automated license plate recognition cameras, following public discussion at earlier council meetings about privacy and data collection.
Neither of those stories has anything to do with sculpture. Both landed in the same September and October window as the festival's fiftieth anniversary, which is a fair snapshot of what a season in a small, fast-growing city actually looks like: a trash contract, a camera vote, and a fifty-year-old arts festival that still runs partly out of people's guest rooms, all moving at once.
If you want to be part of any of it
Watching the carving is free and requires nothing more than showing up to Lions Foundation Park any day between October 7 and October 10. The Saturday festival, the fun run, and the museum at 355 Main Street are all open to anyone in town, longtime resident or not.
Housing or feeding a visiting sculptor is a smaller ask, and it's still an open one. The email is [email protected], the same kind of arrangement that got twenty-seven strangers through two months of carving in 1976 and, by the sound of it, is exactly how the city wants to keep doing this.
If you're the kind of person who wants to know what's actually happening around Liberty Hill before it shows up on a festival flyer, that's the kind of local detail Eduardo Duran tracks year-round for the neighborhoods he covers. Reach out if you'd like more of it.
