Labor Day Weekend in Lake Forest: The Art Fair, the Parish Festival, and the Sunday You Can Do Both

Walk through Market Square on the Sunday before Labor Day and you'll hear a string of car doors, easels being unfolded, and the low hum of a crowd examining ceramics under white tents. Drive a few minutes west that same afternoon and you'll find a different kind of gathering entirely: kolo dancers moving in a circle to tambura music, a spit turning slowly, a church bell marking the hour. Both are Lake Forest. Both happen the same weekend. Most people who live here only ever find one of them.

That's the thing about Labor Day weekend in this town. It isn't one event with a name everybody knows. It's two, run by entirely different organizations, serving entirely different communities, that happen to land on the same three days almost every year. If you've lived here a while, you've probably pieced together which is which by accident, maybe a neighbor mentioned the Serbian festival, maybe you stumbled onto the art fair on a walk. This is the year to do both on purpose.

Two very different flags, one weekend

The Deer Path Art League has run its Art Fair on the Square in downtown Lake Forest since 1954. In 2026 it returns for its 71st year, a two-day juried show with more than 120 exhibitors working in ceramics, glass, jewelry, painting, photography, sculpture, and more, set up across historic Market Square. Admission is free.

A few miles away, on North Bradley Road at the edge of Lake Forest and Mettawa, St. Basil of Ostrog Serbian Orthodox Church hosts Taste of Serbia, a festival of Serbian food, music, and culture that the church has built into one of the larger ethnic festivals in Lake County. Admission runs five dollars a car, and the draw is spit-roasted meats, folk dance lessons, and live tambura music rather than gallery walls.

Here's the calendar mechanic that makes this weekend worth planning around: Taste of Serbia runs Saturday, September 5 and Sunday, September 6, from noon to 10:30 p.m., according to the Lake County Convention and Visitors Bureau. The Art Fair on the Square runs Sunday, September 6 and Monday, September 7, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. That means Sunday is the only day both are open. Saturday belongs to the parish. Monday, Labor Day itself, belongs to Market Square. Sunday is the hinge.

Saturday on Bradley Road

If you only go one place this weekend, Saturday is when Taste of Serbia has the floor to itself. The festival's own schedule for 2026 lists Saturday afternoon opening with tambura music from Prazna Flaša, folk dance lessons open to anyone willing to learn the steps, and a presentation on Orthodox tradition inside the church itself. There's a kiddie area with inflatables, a bookstore selling icons and music, and a raffle that carries into Sunday evening with a $1,000 top prize.

None of this shows up on a downtown events calendar, and there's a reason for that. The festival serves its own parish community first and the wider public second, which is exactly why longtime residents tend to know about it through word of mouth rather than a city newsletter. If you've never been, Saturday is the day with the least competition for parking and the most room to actually watch the folk dancing without craning around a crowd.

Sunday, if you want to do both

Sunday is the only day you can walk Market Square in the morning and still make it to the festival grounds for the afternoon folk dance lesson. The art fair opens at 10, and with roughly 120 exhibitors spread across the square, two hours is enough to see the work without rushing. Past editions of the fair have drawn crowds estimated near 20,000 visitors over the full weekend, so arriving close to opening is the difference between browsing and shuffling.

By early afternoon, Taste of Serbia is in full swing on Bradley Road, and Sunday's slate includes another round of folk dance lessons alongside live music that runs into the evening. It's a strange, good kind of afternoon: a morning spent looking at watercolors under a clock tower built in 1916, an evening spent learning a Balkan folk step you'll never quite master. Few towns this size ask that of you on the same day.

Monday, without the Saturday crowd

Once Labor Day itself arrives, Taste of Serbia has wrapped and Market Square belongs entirely to the art fair for its second and final day. With Sunday's combined crowd already through, Monday morning is a reasonable bet for anyone who prefers browsing artist booths without a lot of shoulder traffic. Market Square itself is worth lingering in regardless of the art. Real estate developer Arthur Aldis and architect Howard Van Doren Shaw built it in 1916 as one of the country's first shopping centers designed around automobile parking rather than a downtown grid, a detail that still shapes how the square feels to walk through, according to a recent feature on the square's history.

When the fair returned in 2021 after a pandemic pause, Deer Path Art League executive director Cecilia Lanyon described it simply, calling it a great outing for families looking to get outdoors and walk through historic Market Square, a line that still captures what Monday at the fair feels like more than any attendance figure does.

The corner that hasn't changed since 1963

Whichever day you go, the square rewards sticking around for lunch. The Left Bank, a hot dog stand tucked on Bank Lane just south of the square, was founded in 1963 by Bob and Gert Pasquesi and stayed in the family for 52 years before changing hands, according to Patch. It's still known for Chicago-style hot dogs and what regulars call the "not-so-sloppy joes," the kind of institution that survives in a town where the storefront next to it might be selling cashmere.

That contrast is the square's whole personality. Lake Forest Shop, a family-owned clothing store, has operated in the same square since 1922. A few doors down, Le Colonial occupies a two-story building with an outdoor garden and a private dining room, serving French-Vietnamese food in a space built for lingering rather than grabbing lunch between art booths. Fine art, hot dogs, century-old boutiques, and an upscale dinner spot all sit within a hundred yards of each other, which is a fair summary of how this town holds old and new side by side without much friction.

If Forest Square is more your speed

Not everyone wants two festivals in one weekend, and Lake Forest doesn't require it. Forest Square, on the west side of town along Waukegan Road, offers a quieter alternative built around Starbucks, Lou Malnati's, Jimmy John's, and two newer additions, The Station and Everett Farm, which joined the retail mix in 2021, according to the city's own business resource page. Nearby Sunset Corners rounds things out with Sunset Foods and Sushi Kushi Toyo. It's a fine place to spend Labor Day if crowds and parking lots aren't your idea of a holiday, and it says something about the town that this quieter option exists just a short drive from all the noise.

What this weekend actually demonstrates is that Lake Forest isn't one community wearing a single identity. It's a downtown built by a real estate developer and an architect in 1916, a parish that has spent decades building its own separate tradition a few miles away, and a retail corridor that never had to choose between the two. Most towns pick a personality for their biggest weekend of the year. Lake Forest just runs two, and leaves it to residents to figure out the overlap.

If you're the kind of person who notices details like these about a place, that's exactly the instinct that matters when it comes time to buy or sell a home here. The The GGL Group has been paying attention to Lake Forest and Lake Bluff for five generations, long before either festival had a name. If you're thinking about your next move in this market, we'd welcome the chance to talk it through. Schedule A Call whenever you're ready.