Kalamazoo’s free weekend had Geek Fest and Oddfest at the Expo Center and Community Day at the KIA

KALAMAZOO, Mich. — Visitors could fill most of the weekend of Oct. 9-11 in Kalamazoo without paying a cover charge. Three of the four events on the calendar were listed as free, and two of them landed on the same Saturday morning a couple of miles apart.

Start at the Kalamazoo County Expo Center, 2900 Lake St., where Geek Fest took over the Expo South building from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 10. The county’s events calendar billed it as a free comic con for the whole community, with robotics, games, art, comic books, cosplay and special guests. The listing named a Kalamazoo Public Library staffer as the contact.

Downtown, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts held a free Community Day the same day from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 314 S. Park St. The day centered on the special exhibition “Resilience—A Sansei Sense of Legacy,” which the museum describes as work by eight third-generation Japanese American artists looking at the lasting effects of Executive Order 9066, the 1942 order that led to the forced imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The KIA’s listing added a hands-on art activity from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and a storyboarding activity in the museum library, where visitors could tell stories of their own.

Sunday, Oct. 11, the Expo Center turned spooky. West Michigan Oddfest ran from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Expo South with free admission, according to the county calendar. Vendors brought handmade “strange and unusual” goods, from taxidermy, bones, bugs and wet specimens to cryptids, Halloween art, books and paintings, and there was a costume contest with prizes.

Collectors got a head start. The Fall Stamp & Cover Show ran at the Expo Center from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Oct. 9 and 10, NowKalamazoo’s events listing says, with dealers buying and selling stamps, covers, postcards and supplies, plus stamp exhibits and a youth booth.

Updated Oct. 12, 2026: These events took place Oct. 9-11. This guide was published before them, and its schedule language has been changed to the past tense.

Updated Oct. 13, 2026: The headline and summary were changed to the past tense for events that have already taken place.

Sources:
Kalamazoo County events calendar, “Geek Fest,” Oct. 10, 2026, https://www.kalcounty.gov/Calendar.aspx?EID=2189&calType=0&day=3&month=10&year=2026
Kalamazoo County events calendar, “West Michigan Oddfest,” Oct. 11, 2026, https://www.kalcounty.gov/Calendar.aspx?EID=2456&calType=0&day=3&month=10&year=2026
Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, “Community Day,” Oct. 10, 2026 (via Kalamazoo Arts listing), https://kalamazooarts.org/event/community-day-2/
NowKalamazoo, “Fall Stamp & Cover Show at Kalamazoo Expo Center,” Oct. 9, 2026, https://nowkalamazoo.org/event/fall-stamp-cover-show-at-kalamazoo-expo-center/2026-10-09/
Photo: 72elyod, “KIArts-Aug-2012,” 2012, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), cropped and color-corrected; derivative under the same ShareAlike license, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KIArts-Aug-2012.jpg

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Tags: Kalamazoo · Michigan Travel · Things To Do · Festivals · Arts and Culture · Halloween