Creek Show 2026
It’s Alive!
Dates: November 13-21, 2026
Time: 6-10pm Nightly
Location: Waterloo Greenway · 4th St to Ladybird Lake
Main Entrance: 4th St & Sabine St
Admission: Tickets on sale soon!
Creek Show returns this November with a bold new chapter at the newly opened southern stretch of Waterloo Greenway along Waller Creek from 4th street to Lady Bird Lake. Over nine unforgettable nights, Austinites are invited to experience ten light-based installations created by local artists, transforming downtown into a vibrant celebration of creativity, connection, and community.
More than a beloved Austin tradition, Creek Show showcases the power of public space to inspire, engage, and bring people together. As Waterloo Greenway’s signature community event, Creek Show highlights the ongoing transformation of Waller Creek and invites the community to be part of a more connected, vibrant, and sustainable future for Austin.
Creek Show 2026 will be a ticketed event with all proceeds benefitting Waterloo Greenway Conservancy, supporting our mission to create and maintain a new 35-acre urban park system in partnership with the City of Austin.
Stay tuned for more event details coming soon and check out this year’s Artists & Installations below!
Interested in becoming a Sponsor of Creek Show 2026?
2026 Artists & Installations
CONTACT
BRR ARCHITECTURE
CONTACT reimagines Waller Creek as a place where history, community, and human connection come together, remembering those who were displaced from the creek they once called home. Illuminated sculptural hands, inspired by those who touched and shaped the creek, emerge throughout the landscape. Visitors are invited to interact with these hands and work together to discover the installation’s range of transformations. Through touch, each hand responds with new colors of light; further variations occur when different hands are touched simultaneously. Unlikely connections are made in the process, allowing would-be strangers to create contact with each other and the creek through the installation. Once deemed unlivable for its inhabitants, Waller Creek now invites the community back for gathering and discovery.
drip-drop
Lord Aeck Sargent
Light ripples from the underside of the bridge, condensing inwards to a stone, until a droplet falls. Below, another stone catches that droplet, the light fading back into the creek. As the light fades, the cycle begins anew above.
The gathering, movement, and dispersal of light evokes the cyclical movement of water through Austin. The illumination of the droplet immerses visitors in the cycle, the echoes of the drop reverberating around them.
By making each drop visible and intentional, drip-drop transforms into a contemplative exploration of water conservation. As visitors are immersed in drip-drop’s movement, the message becomes clear: we are a part of the cycles that surround us, and we have the chance to care for them.
Moon Tower 15.1
HKS Architects | DPR Construction
Less than a block from the proposed site, the original Moon Tower 15 stood for a hundred years. The tower was relocated once, promised restoration, and is still awaiting its reemergence. This sculpture reimagines that promise through a playful reinterpretation of the Moon Towers. Folded, layered panels filter light through varied openings, evoking the moon’s waxing and waning.
Much like the original Moon Towers, this sculpture anchors and illuminates the public realm. Visible from the bridges of Confluence Park and nearby hotel towers, the sculpture will cast dynamic shadows on the Waller Creek Boardwalk and animate the street below. Moon Tower 15.1 invites pause, curiosity, and engagement from pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike.
Nocturnal Garden
Yuliya Lanina
Nocturnal Garden transforms Waller Creek into a luminous, watchful landscape inspired by the flowers found along the Waller Creek corridor. Illuminated flower sculptures reimagine familiar blooms as hybrid beings that exist between the botanical and the imagined. Their human eyes quietly observe passersby, inviting moments of curiosity, reflection, and wonder. Rooted in the ecology of Waller Creek, the installation extends the presence of native plant life into the built environment, drawing attention to the interconnectedness of natural systems, urban infrastructure, and human experience. By inviting visitors to encounter the landscape as a living environment rather than a passive backdrop, Nocturnal Garden fosters a renewed sense of connection to the natural world.
Fractal Time Fish: Portals of the Confluence
WarrPaint
Fractal Time Fish: Portals of the Confluence reimagines the vibrant aquatic life of Waller Creek as a school of glowing geometric fish suspended above the restored waterway. Constructed from welded steel armatures wrapped in crinkled dichroic film, the sculptures transform sunlight into shifting rainbow refractions by day. At night, integrated LEDs and lasers create luminous portals of color that dance across the water and paths.
Designed as a non-invasive temporary installation, the fish attach only to existing structures and are fully removable with zero impact on the creek. Through light, geometry, and movement, the work invites visitors to experience the confluence as a living dimensional space—where past, present, and future of the creek converge in moments of shared wonder.
NOT IN MY RUNOFF!
UNS
Waller Creek is a unique moment within Austin’s array of water infrastructure where what is usually hidden becomes visible and tangible. Collected over the surfaces of the urban environment and through underground drainage conduits, stormwater makes its way here to this civic waterway, bringing with it an unfiltered stream of chemicals, debris, and micro-organisms. What if this vast network of artificial channels, pipes, and weirs—underground, imperceptible—was brought into the light?
What is that emerging out of those drainage pipes in the Confluence? Is it a branching, man-nature hybrid organism, shaped by the creek’s long history and influence on the urban environment? Or is it the pulsing system of the skyline beyond, connecting the current realities of urban life back to the water that moves through it? This pipe-specter uncovers the stormwater network running (water) underneath our feet.
Petri-chord
Creek Freaks
Music is Austin’s pulse. Often, the sounds of music in the city are amplified and bright, but if you sit and listen back, the sound of music is everywhere. The city’s pulse begins somewhere quieter—in the hush before a storm, in the soft percussion of water meeting ground, in the changing tempo of Waller Creek. 8 blooms hover gently, as if they arrived with the last rain and haven’t decided whether to stay. Their drift outward, soft and translucent, their edges beaded with suspended drums—droplets that never fall. Beneath, a slow turning begins. Spokes move like a memory of water churning downstream, meeting the droplets. A natural rhythm emerges, a scatter of tones, gentle and unrepeatable. Music is not always performed as a spectacle. Here it emerges briefly, the way the flower does—unannounced, ephemeral, a unique moment of time and space.
Sacred Datura
SOM/ Playhou.se
Sacred Datura is an immersive light and structural installation celebrating the dynamic life cycle of Datura, an iconic native plant of Texas and the Edwards Plateau. Deeply tied to Indigenous cultural traditions and local ecology, the project reveals the plant’s botanical beauty through a fusion of physical sculpture and digital media. Visitors move along Waller Creek beneath oversized illuminated seed pods and alongside dynamic, pneumatic fabric flowers that physically unfurl in real time. Framing this journey, fluid 3D animations projected onto the Red River Street bridge depict the abstracted annual life cycle, highlighting its sculptural stems, buds, and blooms. The installation delivers an unforgettable nighttime experience honoring native flora and transformative natural art.
Shadow Current
Charlie A (Che A)
Much of my drawing and painting begins with automatic drawing: letting go of conscious control and allowing images to grow from simple marks and gestures. These marks often develop into faces, plants, patterns, objects, and body parts. Shadow Current brings this process into public space, using moving shadows to build a layered picture of Austin’s history. Individual images overlap, connect, and break apart, forming larger clouds before separating again into recognizable parts. The figures represent the collectivist communities of washerwomen who lived and worked along Waller Creek from the years after the Civil War into the 1950s. They hold fabric screens as if airing laundry, while images of Austin shift and transform across them, like history flowing downstream.
Waller Wildings
Kick Punch Bite, LLC
The Waller Creek Monster has been reimagined over the years, with each rendition reflecting a different way of seeing the creek and its hidden mysteries. Continuing this tradition, this installation offers a contemporary interpretation, drawing inspiration from the Japanese designer toy culture to create three playful guardians of Waller Creek. Their illuminated forms respond to the presence of visitors, transforming the creek into a place of curiosity and connection. By giving personality to the unseen forces that shape this urban ecosystem, the installation invites viewers to look more closely at the natural world around them. When we see nature as something alive, magical, and worth knowing, we are more likely to value it, protect it, and imagine its future.
