This year’s Arts Week Evanston – a weeklong celebration of music, dance, theatre and visual arts in the community – will be the largest in recent history and the most extensive event of its kind in Illinois, said Harmon Greenblatt, director of the Evanston Arts Council and the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes St.

The festival, which kicked off Saturday and will last through Oct. 14, was organized by the Evanston Arts Council and coincides with the statewide initiative Illinois Arts Week. Events are being held at venues all over the city.

There are more than 50 workshops, performances, lectures and exhibits offered this week. Residents can try their hand at sculpting or drawing with a local artist, attend an array of concerts and open music rehearsals, join a dance class for a day, or even observe flying circus performers rehearsing their acts.

Festival organizer Angela Allen said that according to an Illinois Arts Alliance & Foundation study, Evanston has the third-most dense population of artists in the state after Chicago and Oak Park. But according to Greenblatt, who moved to Evanston and took over as head of the Arts Council less than a year ago, there has been a lack of publicity about Evanston’s artistic richness.

“The only events that were regularly advertised when I first got here were for Pick-Staiger (Concert Hall),” he said. “So (Arts Week) is essentially a PR event.”

Greenblatt said the festival also aims to get residents involved in the community’s artistic and cultural activities.

“The focus is not only on the finished works and concerts,” Greenblatt said. “The focus is on the process.”

For that reason, many of the events offered during Arts Week are hands-on.

“The hope is that someone will take a dance class or sit in on a rehearsal during Arts Week and then want to continue doing that in the future,” he said.

The festival’s opening weekend included a “Resident Artists’ Open House,” during which visitors to the Noyes Cultural Arts Center talked with local artists in their studios, observed an open class of the Piven Theatre Workshop’s Young People’s Company and sat in on an open rehearsal of the Flying Griffin Circus, part of the Actors Gymnasium’s Gulliver’s Circus.

The week ahead will feature events for both adults and families. Upcoming events include a free experimental/fusion jazz concert Tuesday at Nevin’s Live and the creation of a community Rangoli — a traditional Indian painting made with natural materials designed to bring peace and harmony to the home — on Oct. 14.

A full listing of the week’s events is posted on Evanston’s Web site (www.cityofevanston.org) and on fliers around town.

Evanston Arts Week is sponsored in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, as well as several local businesses.