The Arts and Culture division of the department runs visual and performance arts programmes in all their many forms, including music, dance, film, visual art, craft and poetry. It also hosts local community programmes for beginners, with the youth and young children as the main target groups.

The main event hosted by the city is the annual Arts Alive festival, held every September and featuring top local and international performers. Other annual events include Jazz on the Lake at Zoo Lake, and Dance Manyano at the Dance Factory, Newtown. It is also hoped that the Festival in the Park at Mofolo Park, Soweto will soon take off the ground.

The city has a number of arts venues, many situated around the Newtown Cultural Precinct, where the Market Theatre, MuseumAfrica, Bensusan Museum of Photography and Workers' Library, among other venues, can be found. The Johannesburg Art Gallery is located in Joubert Park.

Arts Alive
Held every September in Johannesburg, the Arts Alive International Festival is a cultural celebration of spring. A premier entertainment event, the festival showcases a mix of activity: music concerts, dance, carnival exhibitions and theatre. The City of Johannesburg is the host, main sponsor and key stakeholder of the event, which has been running for the past 13 years.
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Museums
For those who want to learn about South African history and culture, Johannesburg and Pretoria feature many superb museums that will both educate and entertain. There are museums devoted to military and Boer history, transport, money, zoology, cultural history, medicine, anthropology, art, beer and other subjects diverse enough to capture the imagination of every visitor.
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Art galleries
Cosmopolitan Johannesburg has a thriving art scene with a number of its top artists making names for themselves at international biennial exhibitions. There are numerous galleries and dealers trading in extremely varied work, from cutting-edge contemporary to naïve "township art" and more traditional South African landscapes and wildlife paintings.
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