Green Street Festival, a cannabis-infused SXSW, kicks off in L.A. May 13-14

If you’re in the Los Angeles area, scrap your plans for next weekend. That is, unless you’re already planning on hitting up the Green Street Festival.

The inaugural event is going down on May 13 and 14 in iconic downtown L.A., with organizers aiming to make it “the largest gathering of the cannabis community on the planet, with a vision of eventually hosting hundreds of thousands of guests directly in the heart of the city.”

Think: a cannabis-infused South by Southwest.

Green Street Festival was announced in January, and is being put on by the entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk and Green Street, the cannabis business he acquired in 2017. It will “feature the city’s top restaurants, the state’s leading Cannabis brands, and the world’s top entertainers all brought together to celebrate the Cannabis community,” the announcement said.

“People want to either be educated or entertained. We are going to do both,” Vaynerchuk said in the announcement at the time.

Organizers said that the festival “will be anchored by the 8 story, 70,000 sqft, cannabis event and business epicenter located at 718 S. Hill Street featuring vendors, educational speakers, games, hotels & food activations from our awesome neighbors.”

The artist Cody Hudson was tasked with creating “the visual identity of Green Street Festival.”

“It’s been a wonderful project! Being able to have my vision for the festival’s graphics and aesthetics help to transform the space and everything inside of it, I’m just really looking forward to the ways we’ll be bringing cannabis, food and music together in one space and tying them all together visually,” Hudson said in January.