Autumn Lights Festival

This is an amazing once a year event at our favorite Gardens of Lake Merritt. All tickets proceeds go towards the maintenance of this beautiful and magical place. We enjoy the festival with art and light installations and kids have a blast. There is lovely food and drinks for adults as well.If you have never been to the gardens try going during the day in the weekend and enjoy its beauty,serenity and peace This will be our 3rd year and I look forward to it.Parents with small kids plan to get a stroller along when they get tired since it's an evening event. We have had kids getting lost so running isn't encouraged and kids should stay together with the group. It gets fairly crowded so easy to get lost.If you haven't attended an event, please do this year and enjoy it

Way better than I expected! Loved checking out the colorfully illuminated art displays this past Saturday, and endless pathways weaving through the beautiful gardens filled with gorgeous flowers and greenery, along with ponds, small waterfalls, adorable bridges, and even bee hotels (or airbeeNbees). My favorite features include the neon bonsai exhibit (which even had koi fish made out of lights), the luminescent grand piano with ambient melodies entertaining visitors, and the trail of quirky and assorted gourds (especially the bunny themed!). Great for couples, but also family-friendly, with several kids' activities on site. A food court included about 6-8 food trucks and a small seating area (we enjoyed some yummy empanadas from Javi's Cooking). The decor for the event was not cheap-looking, and the setup was unique and charming, with various art forms uniquely demonstrated. It was definitely great value for a pleasant evening in an enchanting atmosphere. Yes there was a long line for entry, but it was totally worth it, and I recommend dedicating at least one and a half hours to get the most out of your experience.

Our family has been coming every year since 2014. We've been sad to miss the last few years and it was great to be back out again.I've been a solid 5-star fan since the beginning, but I'm easy to win over. Oakland is one of my true loves, and one of my other loves is colorful glowing light-up art - especially the high-tech variety.What to Expect:The Autumn Lights festival has gotten bigger every year. (And more crowded, and also better organized.)Tickets do sell out.The entrance lines get long, but only because guests are slow to get wanded and bag-checked and pull up their e-tickets. The food-trucks seemed able to keep up with demand, and the options we tried were tasty.I was pleased to see how well they used every inch of the available space to accommodate the crowds. I don't remember ever seeing this many people there. This year they even opened up what used to be the VIP area to make a nice quiet relaxing outdoor space (with wine and beer!) open to all, with artists on-site to talk about their work.The live fire dancers were the thing our daughter remembered from the last time we came, pre-pandemic. We didn't come across any this year, but I'm sure it's because we simply weren't in the right place at the right time. It's fun to come dressed in any light-up clothes or accessories you might own.Bring your best night-camera, there's lots to take pictures of, and with.Expect to find lots of kids here. Most of them are gone by 9:00 or 9:30. We've never come on Thursday, but I imagine there are less kids on a school-night.Very memorable, lots to see, highly recommended, you'll find people of all ages, including the very young and the very old, enjoying the lights. Dress warmly.Help bring back the fire-breathing snail! He was one of the best parts of the show.

I was born and raised in Oakland and worked a few blocks away for more than 20 years and I never heard about the Gardens of Lake Merritt nor the Autumn Light Festival. It took a friend looking for volunteers to put out the thousands of luminarias to give me the opportunity to see this wonderful exhibit. It is the main fundraiser for the Gardens. This year there were 70 exhibitors and the capacity was 3000 tickets/night instead of the usual 4500 pre-pandemic. What a wonderful way to get the community out to support a worthwhile cause and also see works of a huge variety of artists who have lit up the gardens. It is sold out for this year (it is only a 3 day event). There is also plants for sale and wine to drink as you are walking through. The exhibits were amazing as they light up the garden. My favorites were the Glass Garden, Blooms of Light, Fish, The Space Garden, Keeper of the Gourds and the Bonsai Garden Illuminated. https://gardensatlakemerritt.org/artists/Keep your eyes open for it next year if you didn't get tickets for this year!

Did you know that Swallowtail Butterflies wait inside their chrysalis up to seven years before emerging? Don't lie, I know you didn't. But it's a pretty cool fact and like, I TOTALLY get where they're coming from. If I could stay inside my chrysalis for up to 7 years (or even just the last 7) I'd probably be a much happier person. Which is irrelevant beyond the point that I learned that shit here. Fun and educational. Basically, I came, I got an alcoholic beverage, and I walked around for 5 hours with my headphones in listening to music with no words - which I normally don't consider music but I was having a real moment and enjoyed feeling like I was in, 'Lost In Translation'. Sofia Coppola willed me there. I'll 100% be coming back every year to do the same. I had a better time tonight than I have in a long time. I got lost in the fun kind of way and made my rounds through the garden about 75 times over several hours. Tickets weren't exactly cheap at around $23 with service charge but remember that at the end of the day this is a fundraiser for the gardens, which are completely free to enjoy during regular hours for the entire rest of the year. The event runs from a Thursday through Sunday and you purchase tickets for one chosen day, though they did sell out for all three days. I bought my ticket a few days before and was fine but I feel like next year it may sell out sooner. The festival also runs for a long time each day - 6pm-11pm so the number of people there fluctuate depending on when you show up. The later it got, the less people were there but it was never crazily crowded. There's lots of cool lights made by local artists and some themed around that section of the garden. It's very Children's Fairyland meets Burning Man (neither of which I've actually been to but from an outsiders perspective, this I'd imagine is a good middle).There were giant blow up colorful dragons in the air, cool as Fraggle Rock formation, fuzzy rocks, giant spinning lanterns, stuff that might as well be a real life substitute for hallucinogenic drugs, projections on to trees, a massive fire shooting snail, and this robo car thing that kids could ride around on that was a horseshoe crab. I wish I couldn't gotten a pic but it almost ran me over and safety first, you know. I barely saw it coming and was like, 'oh fuck I gotta move NOW'. And then I moved but I didn't account for the stinger and ended up having to double dutch that shit. That crab was driving like a maniac but the kids on it were LIVING. Oh and there was a TON of actually incredible food trucks there, in addition to a bar serving beer, wine, and cider. I tried Gorgeous Gorilla and the vegan Filipino food truck that I've wanted to try for literally 3 years. Both were sooo good. Again, so glad I rallied by ass out of my apartment to take myself on what ended up being a really nice date and I'll be doing the same every year.

An absolute must in my opinion. I have been the last four years and we just love it. A great price and a worthy cause. The light exhibits are great and they have live fire dancers and shows. The garden is turned into a magical wonderland for adults and kids. So many unique and varying installations. Still the bonsai garden is the highlight for me. We have brought dozens of people to this event and none have been disappointed. It can sellout so get your tickets early. Take Uber or Lyft cus parking is minimal. They have food trucks and beer and wine for sale. It's a party...with very cool lights and fire....need I say more?

Definitely Autumn Lights Festival was for kids, not for grownups, unless you bring kids. I wish there were more lights and better light designs to look. Overall I enjoyed it and my nieces had lots of fun. I hope next year it will be better.

What a great fundraising opportunity for the gardens and a way to showcase unique art pieces. It's improved with more new pieces every year but of course the same crowdpleasers. More food trucks have only made it better.I used to love this festival. I came every year. And then, Autumn Lights Festival 2019. What happened?! When did this festival become overrun? I thought that the event had limited tickets, but given how completely crowded it was even a few hours into the evening, I find that hard to believe. Standing in the bathroom line becomes half of the evening. It's hard to enjoy the art when you are constantly being pushed and pulled out of the way.And when did this festival become a kid's event? If I wanted to go to Chuck E. Cheese, I would. Suddenly, we're tripping over children every which way. They are running amock through the garden. They're knocking over the art and screaming through the paths. Teenagers taking selfies hog the exhibitions. Where is the security? Where are the parents???Autumn Lights Peeps, do us loyal festival-goers a favor and make some changes to recapture the magic and spirit of this event. Limit your ticket sales some more. (If it's a money issue, have the festival for more nights or two different weekends.) Limit kids' admission to earlier hours or have an adults-only night for those of us who would prefer an 18+ night out. P.S. It would help if your website had a comments / contacts section so that one doesn't have to resort to Yelp. Hopefully you all read this...

For $20, this is pretty fun for the whole family. As other reviews have said, there's a lot of Christmas lights being used here, and in some ways, more creatively used than others. You really can't expect super dazzling for $20, especially when this is a fundraiser for the gardens, and all the artist volunteer their art for this (we all have a budget). There were some great light art installations, and some were just average, but it was all fun. You can touch a lot of the art. There are only a few that say no touching (bonsai trees in the japanese garden). I got a few good videos of some of the installations. They have several food trucks for you to eat at, with some tables to slowly eat and enjoy your food. There are two wine and beer booths that the lines aren't too long. We ate else where, so we didn't try anything here. The bathroom line is very long though. I didn't have to go that bad. This event gets sold out, and it gets very crowded. One gripe that i have is about the crowds.People don't move along to let you look at the art either. You're likely to walk into someone's shot, and vice versa. And you'll walk into people too. I would come back again just to see the new art that they have every year, and I want to come back to the gardens during the day to see what they have in the gardens. And would it be bad if I hope that they raise the prices a little just to thin the crowds out a little bit?

This festival and location was a cherry on top to our mini vacay to SF! The autumn light festival was beautiful, community oriented, and so fun to be apart of. I loved the ambiance, food, and art!!! So many locals displaying their artwork and there are activities for children. We thought it was going to be similar to RISE festival, but it had its own special vibe. Family friendly although having a stroller is a bit difficult (major props to you caregivers!!). There's were a lot of children and families. Would definitely go again :)