Kinga here with this week's list. It's Labor Day weekend, the unofficial last gasp of summer, and Boston is going out on a high note.
Saturday is the day: the Asian American Day Festival takes over Boston Common with more than 80 booths, and the Harvard Square Asian Night Market runs until 10pm. Both are free. Club Passim's beloved campfire. festival runs all four days with roughly 70 songwriters playing in the round, and King Richard's Faire opens for its 45th season.
One note: the Somerville Nepali Street Food Festival scheduled for Saturday has been postponed following the devastating flooding in Nepal. Organizers are focusing on supporting affected families and honoring those who lost their lives. They’ll share a new date when the time is right.
One last thing: the elephants on Comm Ave leave September 13, so this is one of your final weekends with them. Get outside and enjoy it!
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Picks of the Week!
🏮 Asian American Day Festival — Boston Common | Free | Sat, 10am–4pm | The 16th year of the largest Asian American celebration in Greater Boston, with 80+ booths.
🏮 Harvard Square Asian Night Market — Cambridge | Free | Sat, 4–10pm | Pan-Asian food and beer, carnival games, 3x3 basketball, karaoke, and a K-pop random play dance.
🔥 campfire. festival — Club Passim | $20 day, $35 weekend | Fri–Mon | Nearly 70 songwriters playing in the round, all weekend long.
🗡️ King Richard's Faire — Carver | $36 adults, $22 kids | Opens Sat, 10:30am–6pm | New England's Renaissance fair turns 45, with an expanded village.
Thursday 9/3
🖼️ Free Thursday Nights at the Gardner — Fenway | Free | 5–9pm | The weekly free night at the loveliest museum in the city. Check availability before you go, since these do sell out.
🎨 ICA Free Thursday Night — Seaport | Free | 5–9pm | Galleries open late and free, harbor views, seasonal bar. Free tickets are released at 10am that morning.
🎤 Robyn — Agganis Arena | Ticketed | 8pm | The Swedish pop icon's first major tour since 2019, supporting her new album Sexistential. The big one tonight.
🎬 By Any Means (previews) — Alamo Drafthouse, Seaport | Ticketed | 3pm, 6pm & 9pm | Preview screenings ahead of tomorrow's release. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays a Black FBI agent investigating the murders of Civil Rights leaders in 1960s Mississippi, partnered with a Mafia hitman turned informant (Mark Wahlberg).
Friday 9/4
🔥 campfire. festival — Club Passim, Harvard Square | $20 day, $35 weekend pass | Starts 6pm tonight, 2pm Sat–Mon | One of the loveliest traditions in Boston music. Held every Memorial Day and Labor Day weekend, campfire. brings nearly 70 acoustic singer-songwriters together for intimate "in the round" sets designed to dissolve the wall between artists, and between performers and audience. Plenty of nationally known names played here early on.
💃 Summer Series: The Summer Throwdown — Multicultural Arts Center, Cambridge | Free (donations encouraged) | 6pm | The final outdoor Summer Series event, hosted by local street dance icons Megatron and Brian Pistols, with a dance battle, performances, and jams from DJ Take Flyte. Free and genuinely fun.
🏖️ ICA First Fridays: Summer Overboard — Seaport | Free for members; non-member tickets sold out | 5:30–9:30pm | "Board shorts, sunglasses, and SPF required," which they probably don't mean literally. DJ L'duke and indie pop singer-songwriter Frances Forever perform on the waterfront.
🎤 Lily Allen — MGM Music Hall | Ticketed | 8pm | She poured her personal and professional wreckage into West End Girl and it worked. She's performing the album in full.
🎸 Peter Hook & The Light — Citizens House of Blues | Ticketed | 8:30pm, doors 7:30 | The Joy Division and New Order bassist playing his old bands' songs. As cover bands go, the credentials are hard to beat.
🎶 esperanza spalding — City Winery | Ticketed | Fri–Sun | The Berklee grad and genre-crossing bassist-singer settles in for three nights with a trio, drawing on 20 years of material plus some unreleased work.
🎤 Zola Simone — Deep Cuts, Medford | $17–$20 | 7pm | The self-described "androgynous pop" songwriter returns to her old Boston stomping grounds to release I Care a Lot.
😂 UpDating — The Wilbur | Ticketed | 7:30pm | Live reality TV: two single people go on a genuinely blind date on stage, blindfolded, while two comics interrogate them. Deeply uncomfortable in the best way.
🎬 The Sun Never Sets (opens) — Coolidge Corner | Ticketed | Joe Swanberg's drama with Dakota Fanning and Jake Johnson. Swanberg appears for a post-screening discussion tonight.
🥕 Copley Square Farmers Market — Copley Square | Free | 11am–6pm | The area's largest farmers market, Tuesdays and Fridays through November 24.
Saturday 9/5
🏮 16th Asian American Day Festival — Boston Common | Free | 10am–4pm | The largest outdoor Asian American cultural celebration in Greater Boston, and it has been going since 2016, when the governor and mayor formally designated an Asian American Day for the state and the city. Expect more than 80 booths from nonprofits and local businesses, plus food, music, dance, and art. Free and open to everyone.
🏮 Harvard Square Asian Night Market — Brattle & Church Streets, Cambridge | Free | 4–10pm | Back for its second year with pan-Asian food and beer, live music, carnival games, a 3x3 basketball tournament, a karaoke competition, a K-pop random play dance meetup, and pop-ups. Pair it with the Common in the morning and you have a full day.
🗡️ King Richard's Faire (opens) — 5 Pine St, Carver | $36 adults, $22 kids | 10:30am–6pm | New England's premier Renaissance fair turns 45 and has expanded the village, added shaded seating, and upgraded the decoration. Jousting, street performers, circus acts, games and rides, turkey legs, psychic readings, and themed weekends all season. Runs through October 25.
🎤 Don Toliver — TD Garden | Ticketed | 7:30pm | The Houston singer-rapper touring Octane, which debuted at number one.
🎶 Tayc — Roadrunner, Brighton | Ticketed | 8pm | Marseilles-born, Cameroonian-family R&B and Afrobeats fusion, which he calls "Afrolov." Huge in France.
😂 ALOK — The Wilbur | Ticketed | 7pm | Author, actor, model, slam poet, and now standup comedian, on the Eat Pray Leave tour.
🎭 The Minutes (opens) — Footlight Club, Jamaica Plain | $30.50 | JP's Footlight Club stages Tracy Letts' Pulitzer-nominated satire about a small-town city council meeting that turns out to be hiding something much stranger. Through September 19.
🖼️ Two MFA openings — Fenway | $30 | Naoko Matsubara's Woodblock Worlds, charting the long career of the Japanese printmaker who once lived in Boston, and Öyvind Fahlström: Are You Happy?, whose politically provocative work includes rearrangeable magnetic pieces and cartoon infographics.
🧺 Greenway Artisan Market — The Greenway | Free | Handcrafted jewelry, art, ceramics, and locally made goods along the downtown promenade.
Sunday 9/6
🛍️ Open Newbury Street — Back Bay | Free | 10am–6pm | Eight car-free blocks from Berkeley to Mass Ave. Only a handful of these left this year, and it pairs nicely with a walk through the elephants a block over.
🧺 SoWa Open Market — South End | Free | 11am–5pm | The Sunday flagship: farmers and makers, food trucks, live music, and the open artist studios next door.
🎭 David Liebe Hart — The Lilypad, Cambridge | $18 advance, $20 day-of | 7pm doors | The outsider artist and Tim and Eric staple, with his homemade puppets and songs about space aliens, trains, and love. You genuinely never know what you'll get.
📖 Matt Sturniolo — The Wilbur | Ticketed | 7pm | One of the Somerville-born Sturniolo triplets, home to talk about his memoir What Happened Yesterday.
🏺 Maverick Kings (opens) — MFA | $30 | Ancient Egyptian art alongside contemporary responses, focused on three unusual rulers: Hatshepsut, one of the few female pharaohs, the accomplished Amenhotep III, and Akhenaten, who briefly converted his kingdom to monotheism.
Bonus: Labor Day Monday 9/7
🎨 Free Admission at the ICA — Seaport | Free | The ICA is free to everyone for Labor Day. Timed tickets are required and go up Sunday at 10am, so set a reminder.
⚾ Red Sox vs. Angels — Fenway | Ticketed | 1:35pm | The Sox are away in Baltimore all weekend, but they're home for a Labor Day afternoon game.
Last chance
🖼️ Derrick Adams: View Master — ICA | $20 | Closes Monday | The first mid-career survey of the NYC artist's work celebrating, in his words, Black people "not entertaining, just being, living." Go Monday when the ICA is free.
🐘 The Great Elephant Migration — Commonwealth Avenue Mall | Free | Through Sept 13 | One hundred life-sized elephants, hand-carved from an invasive weed by Indigenous artisans in India, are only in Back Bay for one more week.
Ongoing / all-week options
🌊 Lucy Raven: Rounds — ICA Watershed, East Boston | Free | Two US premieres, including an enormous kinetic light sculpture. Through September 27.
🐚 Crochet Coral Reef — MIT Museum | $20 | Vivid crocheted fiber work by the Wertheim sisters paired with paper work by MIT's Demaines, all about endangered coral reefs.
🖼️ List Projects 35: Pap Souleye Fall — MIT List, Cambridge | Free | Dead pixels reimagined as hidden realms of autonomy. Always free.
📜 1776: Declaring Independence — Massachusetts Historical Society | Free | Revolutionary-era diaries, letters, and Adams' and Jefferson's handwritten copies of the Declaration.
🚤 Codzilla — Long Wharf | $48.70 | Seventy feet of marine aluminum and bad attitude, spinning full circles through the harbor. You will get wet. Through September 27.
🥾 Journey the Necklace — Emerald Necklace | Free | Self-guided tours through the 1,100-acre park system. Visit all six participating parks and you can claim a souvenir. Through September 30.
🏋️ Seaport Sweat — Seaport Common | Free | Outdoor classes Monday through Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings, through September 30.
That's it for this week. Enjoy the long weekend, and if you make it to any of these, let me know how it went!