Ask a Barrington resident what's happening downtown the last weekend of September and most will mention nothing at all. Thursday Night Out wrapped in August. The farmers market is winding toward its final Thursdays. By most residents' internal calendar, the town's event season is closing up for the year.
They're not wrong about downtown. They're wrong about the town.
On September 26 and 27, Barrington will host its largest annual gathering, and it won't happen on Cook Street or Park Avenue. It will happen on the front lawn of a hospital, in barns, in tents, and in farm buildings that exist there for exactly one purpose: to hold as many as 180 artists once a year. This is Art in the Barn, and 2026 is its 51st year. Elsewhere in town, a second Barrington institution is running its own quiet countdown, one that has nothing to do with a calendar year and everything to do with a birthday still a year off. Both stories say something specific about how this town keeps its oldest things running, and neither one is being told loudly.
The Fair That's Older Than Most of Barrington's Restaurants
Art in the Barn started in 1974, when ten women and a handful of local artists put together a show for thirty exhibitors and about 1,500 visitors. More than fifty years later, it's grown into one of the more established juried fine art festivals in the Chicago suburbs, drawing up to 180 selected artists working in every medium, on the grounds of Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital at 450 W. Highway 22.
The location isn't incidental. The show runs literally in and around barns and farm buildings on the hospital's property, supplemented by artist tents when the buildings fill up. That's a detail worth sitting with: a fair this size, with this many juried participants, still uses agricultural structures instead of a rented convention hall or a closed-off Main Street, the way most towns' signature art fairs do.
Here's what a visitor gets for the weekend:
| Detail | Art in the Barn, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Dates | Saturday, Sept. 26 and Sunday, Sept. 27 |
| Hours | 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days |
| Location | Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital grounds, 450 W. Highway 22 |
| Admission | $5, children under 12 free |
| Artists | Roughly 150 to 180, juried |
| Extras | Live music, a Smart Farm stand, children's art activities, food vendors including a longstanding brat tent |
If you're planning to go, a few practical notes worth knowing before you show up: pets aren't allowed on the grounds, setup for the show runs Friday morning with all vehicles cleared by 9 a.m. Saturday, and the full artist and entertainment schedule is posted at artinthebarn-barrington.com closer to the date.
Why a Hospital Runs the Town's Largest Art Show
The fair is sponsored by the Auxiliary of Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital, and it operates as one of that Auxiliary's major fundraisers. Money raised at the gate and through vendor participation has, over the decades, added up to millions donated back to the hospital. There's no corporate sponsor logo dominating the entrance, no municipal parks department running the show. It's a volunteer effort that has outlasted most retail tenants Barrington has ever had, and it's funded almost entirely by the people who show up to look at paintings.
That structure explains something residents sometimes miss when they think of Art in the Barn as just another craft fair. It isn't primarily a commerce event for the artists, though many do sell work directly. It's a fundraising instrument that happens to be dressed as an art show, run by the same all-volunteer hospital auxiliary that started it back in 1974.
Across Town, a Different Countdown Is Running
While the Auxiliary is finishing its 51st year of programming, a smaller group of residents downtown is racing toward a different number: 100.
The Catlow Theater opened on Main Street in May 1927, designed by the architectural firm Betts & Holcomb with interior work by Alfonso Iannelli, a Prairie School sculptor and designer who also collaborated with Frank Lloyd Wright. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places, and its ceiling stenciling and sculpted truss details are part of why. It's also, more simply, the single-screen movie house Barrington residents have been walking past, and into, for nearly a century.
The theater closed at the end of 2019, reopened briefly in January 2020, then went dark again as the pandemic took hold and stayed that way for years. Longtime Barrington residents Brian and Julianne Long purchased the Catlow in the fall of 2022. Since then, the nonprofit Catlow 1927 Foundation has been running a capital campaign aimed at one specific target: having the building restored and reopened in time for its 100th anniversary in 2027.
Here's how that restoration is unfolding, based on what the Foundation has laid out publicly:
- New ownership took over in October 2022, ending years of uncertain, week-to-week operation.
- The Catlow 1927 Foundation formed as a 501(c)(3) to lead fundraising and restoration.
- Plans call for preserving the original marquee and Iannelli's architectural details while upgrading the building's technology.
- The renovation also adds a new lounge, bar, and catering kitchen, positioning the Catlow as a venue for weddings and private events alongside films.
- The stated goal is to have the building fully restored in time for its 100-year mark in 2027.
None of this is being marketed as an anniversary campaign in the way a company might promote a milestone birthday. It's being framed as restoration work, quietly, by residents who bought a building they didn't want to see close for good.
What Both Stories Are Actually Saying
Put the fair and the theater side by side and a pattern shows up that's easy to miss if you only ever hear about one of them. Barrington's two most historically significant recurring cultural institutions, one 51 years old, one approaching 100, are both run by residents rather than by any village department, chain operator, or corporate sponsor. The art fair funds a hospital through volunteer labor. The theater is being rebuilt by two people who live in town and decided a piece of Main Street history was worth saving on their own initiative.
That's a different texture than the downtown calendar most people already know, the Thursday Night Out crowds, the seasonal streetscape work on Park Avenue, the retail turnover at Ice House Mall. Those are visible, promoted, and easy to track. Art in the Barn and the Catlow's restoration are the parts of Barrington's cultural life that run on longer timelines and quieter funding, and they tend to stay under the radar of residents who moved here more recently, or who simply haven't had a reason to look past the farmers market yet.
If you've lived in Barrington for a while and have never actually walked the barns at Good Shepherd Hospital on that last September weekend, or watched the Catlow's slow, deliberate progress toward its own centennial, this is the year both of those things are easy to catch. The fair only happens once, on a fixed weekend. The theater's countdown has a defined finish line just twelve months out.
Barrington keeps a lot of its institutions running this way, through people rather than budgets. It's part of what makes the town feel less like a suburb executing a civic calendar and more like a place where the biggest events are still, genuinely, built by neighbors.
For more on what makes Barrington's community feel the way it does day to day, take a look at Ashlee Fox's guide to the Barrington neighborhood, or read our earlier look at how downtown Barrington's late-August calendar is quietly rebuilding itself alongside events like these. If you're already thinking about what living here full time could look like, from schools to parks to the pace of a weekend like this one, request a free market consultation and we'll walk you through it, no obligation attached.
