2026 Festival T-Shirt

This year, you can wear the art.

The 2026 River Clay festival T-shirt is inspired by Confluence, a work by Alabama artist Jamey Grimes. It is the first time an artist has shaped the shirt, and it is the start of a tradition we plan to keep.

Get yours before October

Limited run. When they are gone, they are gone.

Front and back of the olive green River Clay 2026 long-sleeve festival shirt

Front and back of the blue River Clay 2026 long-sleeve festival shirt

The Shirt

Eleven years in, a first.

Every October, downtown Decatur fills up with 70+ juried artists and the people who come to find them. This year we wanted the shirt to come from that same place, so we asked an artist.

Jamey Grimes said yes. The design draws from Confluence, a large-scale sculptural work of his, and it is going to look like nothing else in your closet. Wear it to the festival, wear it in November, wear it out.

About Confluence

Where the water comes together.

Grimes built Confluence as a response to the Mississippi River. Not a picture of it. A reaction to it.

He was thinking about everything the river pulls together at once: the animals that live in it, the jobs that depend on it, the freshwater meeting the ocean, the saltwater pushing back upstream, the centuries of history layered into it. As he puts it, the Mississippi is almost mythical and completely tangible at the same time.

The work has been formally installed exactly once, at the LSU Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, in a gallery that looks out over the water. One of the days that shaped it was a day he could not see the river at all. Fog had swallowed it. But the fog was moving, and you could see where barges had cut through and left swirling eddies trailing behind them. Turbulent water flow, without the water. That crossover is the whole idea.

Abstract work leaves room, and he likes that. Look at the design and you might see the broken surface of a river. You might see light bending through water while you are snorkeling. You might see a thunderhead. All of it counts.

About Jamey Grimes

An Alabama artist, working in an unlikely material.

Grimes was born in Montgomery, grew up in Tuscaloosa, spent a stretch in the Florida Keys, and still lives and works in Tuscaloosa today. He studied at Birmingham-Southern College, where he earned a painting degree and a biology degree at the same time, doing marine biology fieldwork on the coast while building sculpture in the studio.

His large-scale work is made from melted plastic. Sheets of it, worked with heat until they hold the movement of water. The pieces hang overhead and take up whole rooms. His installations have appeared in museums across the region, and this fall he is putting a major piece into the Wiregrass Museum of Art in Dothan.

Last year, his work was part of River Clay for the first time, as an element of the Rendezvous preview party. He never got to see the festival itself. He was in Louisiana that weekend. This year he will be here in person.

Art and Science

He spent years thinking he had to choose.

Biology or art. Scientist or painter. For a long time Grimes was certain he was supposed to pick a lane, and the pull in both directions felt like a problem to solve.

It is not a problem anymore. It is the thing that makes the work possible. He now works with groups built specifically around collaboration between art and science, and he is direct about what makes that collaboration real: everybody brings their own strength to the table, and nobody knows what the outcome is when they start. An artist showing up to illustrate a scientist's findings is useful, he says, but it is not the same thing as meeting in the middle and making something new.

One of his early successes was Flow Tuscaloosa, a community project built around lanterns celebrating local waterways. It pulled in ecology, then science, then the university history department, then hands-on workshops where people built a lantern based on something they had just learned and carried it back to a community event. It grew bigger than any one field.

Water is the through line in all of it. Even when there is no water in the room. He spends time in the Utah desert studying erosion in sandstone and finds the same marks he finds in limestone in the Sipsey Wilderness, cut a moment at a time. He has made work about the way rain accumulates on leaves in a rainforest and falls heavier for it. Different scales, same forces.

The Creative Process

From sculpture to a shirt that belongs to Decatur.

Four stages trace the design from Jamey Grimes’s original work to the finished River Clay 2026 festival shirt.

Where It Started

For the first time in River Clay history, the festival shirt was designed with an artist’s influence behind it.

This year’s design draws from Confluence, a sculptural work by Alabama artist Jamey Grimes. Jamey takes melted plastic, the stuff most of us throw away, and shapes it into large-scale pieces you’ll stand in front of a while trying to figure out. Confluence was his abstract response to the Mississippi River: the water, the ecology, the history, and the people who depend on it.

Jamey is a Tuscaloosa artist who studied both painting and marine biology, and water runs through nearly everything he makes. He returns to River Clay this year as a demonstrating artist, working live on site both days.

Hand-drawn River Clay design inspired by Confluence

From Sculpture to Sketch

We handed the idea to a Huntsville-based designer and asked for something harder than a logo drop. Study Jamey’s work. Understand what it’s doing. Then make something that belongs to Decatur.

The designer, Allison Richter, spent time with his catalog before ever picking up a pen, tracing how the layers fold and catch light, and how the movement never quite repeats. Then she drew it by hand. Not traced, not filtered. Drawn, so the line quality carries the same restlessness his sculptures do.

From there she folded in Decatur. The river that shaped the city, the shapes and landmarks locals recognize without being told, the details that make this one place and not just any place.

Front of the olive River Clay 2026 festival shirt

The Palette

The colors came last and were chosen deliberately: rusty orange and white on green and gray. Warm, grounded, a little weathered. It’s what October in downtown Decatur actually looks and feels like, and it’s the palette River Clay has carried all year.

Back of the slate River Clay 2026 festival shirt

The Finished Shirt

The hand-drawn work was refined into the final mark you see here, printed on site by hand during festival weekend. Green and gray, short sleeve and long sleeve.

It’s a limited run. No restock, no second printing, and no next-year version of this design.

Reserve Your Shirt

October 24 and 25, downtown Decatur. riverclay.org

Beyond the Shirt

One idea, carried through the festival.

The design is also carried throughout festival collateral, tying the branding for the event together.

River Clay 2026 billboard featuring the October festival message

River Clay 2026 billboard in blue featuring the October festival message

River Clay Fine Arts Festival digital display advertisement for October 24 and 25

Musicians performing beneath a Jamey Grimes installation at River Clay Fine Arts Festival

Limited 2026 Festival Release

Don’t be the one to miss out!

The shirt is a limited run, and River Clay is a nonprofit. Every dollar goes back to the work, including the $65,000 this festival has now invested in arts education. Buy the shirt, wear the art, fund the next kid who finds out they are an artist.

River Clay Fine Arts Festival, downtown Decatur, Alabama. Friday, October 23: Rendezvous preview party, $60 per ticket with a weekend pass. Saturday and Sunday, October 24 and 25: the festival.

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