Backstage at Utah Arts Festival 2014: Artists Marketplace represents tremendous passion, ingenuity in countless forms, art media

This year’s Utah Arts Festival’s Artist Marketplace provides a great overview of how 21st century artists have come into their own careers. While many whose creative passion was evident from their childhood years fortified it with formal training and university art programs, others capitalized on their intensely personal motivations by teaching and training themselves, unfazed by … Read more

Backstage at Utah Arts Festival 2014: A grand preview to show why this is not your grandparents’ art festival

When the gates open on June 26 to Utah’s largest arts and cultural gathering in its central downtown location, festival visitors will see as many new faces as familiar ones in every single venue and event. There are familiar and new faces everywhere. For example, the artist marketplace will have 163 artists including 56 from … Read more

Backstage at Utah Arts Festival 2014: IAMA brings songwriter academy, songwriting competition to festival

Songwriters of every skill level, from beginner to professional, will have plenty of activities along with networking opportunities during the Intermountain Acoustic Music Association (IAMA) Day on June 28 at the 38th Utah Arts Festival. For the first time, IAMA’s songwriter academy, now in its 7th year, and the finals of the nationally juried Susanne … Read more

Backstage at Utah Arts Festival 2014: IAMA’s acoustic music events make grand entrance in festival collaboration

For this year’s Utah Arts Festival, The Intermountain Acoustic Music Association (IAMA) is bringing a large contingent of folk, bluegrass, Irish, Celtic and acoustic musicians along with a nationally juried songwriting competition and a two-day songwriter’s academy open to musicians from beginning to advanced. Many of the events will culminate on IAMA Day, scheduled for … Read more

Backstage at Utah Arts Festival 2014: EnjiGo’s makerspace for art, technology as equal partners

Not just a re-engineered concept of a traditional do-it-yourself culture of arts and craft, the ‘maker’ movement has catapulted to new ways of seeing how art equals technology, even in lifting mundane consumer products to aesthetically mesmerizing possibilities. Thanks to members of Salt Lake City’s EnjiGo Makerspace Foundation, this year’s Utah Arts Festival’s patrons will … Read more

Backstage at Utah Arts Festival 2014: The Leonardo venue’s ‘R&D’ art lab highlights workshops, CollaborART

After a rousing success last year at its first turn as a Utah Arts Festival venue, The Leonardo museum returns with a new series of workshops at the Art Lab; free, public interactive in which participants can build simple musculoskeletal systems and observe digital painting and sculpting in animation, and five pairs of artists – … Read more

Backstage at Utah Arts Festival 2014: Making the best community space so art fans can unite at the 38th Utah Arts Festival

In explaining how the staff, board, venue coordinators, volunteers, sponsors, and, most certainly, the participating performers and artists of the 38th annual Utah Arts Festival (UAF) design the spaces of Library Square and Washington Square so that art fans can unite, the metaphors of magnets and oysters, as Doug Borwick, a long-time arts administrator explains … Read more

Utah libraries: Summer reading programs and more

Note: This post is by Mark Alvarez, a Salt Lake City lawyer, immigration specialist for Telemundo Utah and host of the ‘Sin Rodeos’ radio show. He also was a member of the Salt Lake City Public Library board from 2009 to 2012. “Fizz! Boom! Read!” is the summer reading program for children in libraries across … Read more

Celebrity Guests Announced as Tickets Go on Sale for “Salt Lake Comic Con 3.0”

The crowd gathered outside The Leonardo shivered with anticipation as they punctuated the agonizing seconds with uncontrolled, random screams. “This is the best day of my life!” shouted one, just after another pointed towards the door and shrieked, “Batman!” Batman’s exit from the building sent the crowd, who had already been wowed by an array … Read more

Ballet West’s The Sleeping Beauty: Last-minute Deal

Ballet West is celebrating it’s 50th anniversary this year with a favorite classic during the month of February—The Sleeping Beauty. Ballet West typically stages a romantic-leaning performance in it’s first ballet of the calendar year and the timeless tale of The Sleeping Beauty is always a hit with audiences young and old. The ballet is … Read more