Three years ago, the Landfall Foundation's annual Art Show and Sale was, by its own organizers' description, a show built around roughly 100 North Carolina artists. That was the count in 2023, and it had been close to that number for most of the prior decade. This year the Foundation is fielding more than 225 artists for the 27th Annual Art Show, opening with a Preview Party on Monday, August 24, and running to the public August 25 through 27 at the Nicklaus Clubhouse.
That is not a modest bump. It is a doubling, inside a gate that outsiders tend to picture as finished, static, essentially unchanging since the bulldozers left in the 1980s. The art show's growth is one data point. The shopping center just outside the gates on Eastwood Road tells a nearly identical story of a place quietly remaking itself in real time. If you live here, both are worth understanding, because they say something about what your neighborhood actually is right now, not what it was when it was built.
What the Numbers on the Art Show Actually Show
Landfall's development began in 1985, and the Foundation's flagship fundraiser has been running since 1995. For most of that run, the show settled into a rhythm: around 100 artists, a judged competition, a preview event for sponsors, three or four days open to the public at the Country Club of Landfall. In 2021, the show sold $91,000 worth of art, a snapshot of a well-established but not explosively growing event.
Then the scale shifted. By 2026, the Foundation's ticketing page for the Preview Party puts the artist count at more than 225, better than double where it sat just a few years earlier. Tickets for that Preview Party went on sale July 13 this year, and the event itself runs 5 to 8 p.m. on August 24, with the juried show open to ticket holders and the public across the following three days. Attendees get first look at abstract collaborative canvases alongside 2D and 3D work spanning a wide range of mediums and price points, with wine, appetizers, and a raffle built around dining and entertainment prizes.
The Art Show is one of three fundraisers the Foundation runs each year, alongside a spring Gala and a December Holiday Marketplace. This year's Gala, themed around Cinco de Mayo and held May 1, raised more than $460,000 in a single evening. Across all three events, the Foundation has raised and distributed over $8.6 million to nonprofits and schools serving New Hanover, Brunswick, and Pender counties since it began. That is not a philanthropic footnote. It is the financial engine funding local health, welfare, education, and arts grants, and its growth mirrors something bigger happening around it.
The Shopping Center Is Having the Same Kind of Year
Walk or drive to Landfall Shopping Center, the retail strip sitting at Military Cutoff and Eastwood, and you're looking at a nearly identical growth story, just with storefronts instead of easels. The center has been there since the 1980s, built decades before Mayfaire Town Center's first store opened. In 2022, an investor partnership of Cameron Management, Trask Land Co., SHP Acquisitions, and Charlotte-based Collett Capital bought the property for more than $30 million, and the new ownership group has been reworking the tenant mix ever since.
The center runs just over 133,000 square feet and holds more than 30 tenants. The ownership group's stated goals after the acquisition were straightforward: cut vacancy, invest in long-term upgrades, and raise the caliber of tenants to better match what the surrounding community actually wants. One visible result has been the arrival of Wild Birds Unlimited, a specialty retailer that would not have fit the center's older, more utilitarian tenant roster.
Walk the current directory and you can see the mix that has emerged from that reshuffling. It is neither a strip mall clinging to its 1980s bones nor a wholesale teardown. It is a working balance of legacy anchors and newer specialty shops:
- Havertys Furniture and Food Lion, the center's longtime anchors
- Big Thai, a longstanding tenant in the food lineup
- Calico Coffee, part of the newer specialty wave
- Lovey's Organic Market & Cafe, occupying several bays in the center
- Hope Consignment and The Bra Shoppe, filling specialty retail niches
- Mark Johnson Custom Homes, a builder with a storefront presence rather than a warehouse office
That list is not static. It is a center actively turning over space to fit who is actually shopping there now, the same way the Art Show has actively expanded to fit a larger pool of artists wanting in.
Two Different Institutions, One Underlying Pattern
It would be easy to treat the art show and the shopping center as unrelated updates: one is a nonprofit event, the other is commercial real estate. But look at the timing. The shopping center's ownership change and tenant push started in 2022. The Art Show's jump from around 100 artists to more than 225 happened within roughly the same window, between the 24th annual show in 2023 and the 27th this year. Neither of these are coincidences born of one good year. They are both signs of active reinvestment happening on a community that a lot of outside observers assume reached its final form decades ago.
That reinvestment shows up in the amenities residents actually use day to day, too. The Country Club of Landfall's Cliff Drysdale Sports Center runs 13 tennis courts alongside a fitness complex and Olympic-size pool, feeding into a Cape Fear-area tennis and pickleball scene that keeps the club's leagues active through the mildest winters on the East Coast. The club's 45 holes of golf, designed by Pete Dye and Jack Nicklaus across the 2,200-acre community, remain the anchor amenity, but the club structures membership in a way that does not require homeownership within Landfall's gates, drawing players from well beyond the neighborhood itself. Add in more than 10 miles of walking and biking trails threading past the lakes and along Howe Creek, and you get a picture of a community whose civic, athletic, and retail infrastructure keeps expanding rather than sitting still.
What to Actually Do Before the Show Closes
If you live in Landfall or nearby and want to see the Art Show for yourself, here is what the calendar looks like. The Preview Party runs Monday, August 24, from 5 to 8 p.m., with tickets covering early access to the collection before the public showing opens. The juried exhibition and sale then runs Tuesday through Thursday, August 25 to 27, at the Nicklaus Clubhouse, 800 Sun Runner Place. All work is for sale, spanning oil, watercolor, photography, sculpture, and ceramics from artists across North Carolina, and proceeds support the Foundation's ongoing grant program.
Pair a visit with a stop at the shopping center on the way in or out. Grab coffee at Calico Coffee, browse Lovey's, or just notice how different the tenant lineup looks compared to five years ago. Small changes like these rarely make headlines on their own, but together they are the clearest evidence that Landfall is not a museum piece. It is a neighborhood still actively building its own social and commercial life, one art show and one storefront at a time.
If you are watching this kind of steady reinvestment and wondering what it means for property values inside the gates, or you are simply curious what your own home in Landfall might be worth in a market that keeps evolving around it, the Chris Luther Team knows this neighborhood block by block. Request Your Free Coastal Home Valuation and get a clear, no-pressure read on where your Landfall home stands today.
