Backstage at The Utah Arts Festival 2016: Diversity, originality, aesthetic enterprise hallmarks of Artist Marketplace

This year’s Artist Marketplace at the Utah Arts Festival continues a trend of the last seven years as being the strongest in terms of diversity, quality, use of media and originality in aesthetics and technique. The total of 167 includes seven returning awards winners. Of the 583 artists who applied to be in this year’s … Read more

Backstage at The Utah Arts Festival 2016: 40 in 117 exhibition celebrates Alice Merrill Horne’s legacy

Alice Merrill Horne, one of the greatest champions of local and public art in Utah’s history, had a passion especially for the output of artists who lived and worked in the state. As a feature by Laura Durham at the Utah Division of Arts and Museum notes: “In her book Devotees and Their Shrines, she … Read more

Backstage at The Utah Arts Festival 2016: City Library is hub of films, hands-on workshops, random performances

A tremendously diverse, logistically solid venue, the City Library will have perhaps its most extensive presence ever at this year’s Utah Arts Festival with the 40 in 117 exhibition featuring work from Utah artists representing the last 40 years from the state’s Alice collection established in 1899, numerous visual arts and musicians’ workshops, performances of … Read more

Backstage at The Utah Arts Festival 2016: 40 Years New

It becomes immediately evident that Utah’s history in arts and culture is as rich in pioneer spirit as when the settlers first descended into the Salt Lake valley nearly 170 years ago. In 1899, at the age of 30, Alice Merrill Horne was elected to the Utah Legislature (the third woman to do so) and … Read more

Plan-B Theatre’s 26th season features plenty of past, present enigmas and mysteries

NOTE: This is Part Two of a series about Plan-B Theatre, which offers a glimpse of the four new productions for the 26th season. For Part One, see here. Enigmas and mysteries – two wrapped with music and a third with the perplexing question of whether a murder actually did happen – will comprise a … Read more

‘Survival of the least fit’: Utah Film Center to screen Dogtown Redemption documentary

Many of the scenes in the documentary film Dogtown Redemption, representing the nickname for a western section of Oakland, California in the East Bay area, likely are familiar in many cities across the country, including Salt Lake City. Initially, Amir Soltani and Chihiro Wimbush, co-directors of the film, set out more than seven years ago … Read more

Outstanding Alice Walker, Chernobyl documentaries on tap for Utah Film Center

Two exceptional documentaries of magnificent story-telling by women directors – one about Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and the other about a small group of elderly women who have lived for 30 years within the forbidden zone surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster – will be screened in free, public presentations later this month … Read more

Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s Spring Season concert promises electrifying intimacy

For this week’s spring program, the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company will offer three dance compositions – including two world premieres with original soundscapes in music – that imbue the simple Black Box Theatre venue in the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts with fresh cultural and emotional energy. For both performers and audience members, the works … Read more

Plan-B Theatre set to premiere Kingdom of Heaven, its 1st original musical

The genre of musicals in the 21st century is getting a flattering facelift. Hamilton, for example, with its tantalizing alchemy of stimulating passion for history through ingeniously accessible rap and hip hop stands out for how racial barriers in the making of art and culture can be dismantled. Fun Home, staged as theater in the … Read more

Celebrated Mexican chef Carlos Gaytán on tap for Artes de Mexico en Utah scholarship fundraising event

Carlos Gaytán, a pioneering Mexican chef whose Chicago restaurant has attracted global attention and praise, will come to Salt Lake City later this week to help raise scholarship money for Artes de Mexico en Utah in an event sponsored by the Consulate of Mexico in Salt Lake City. Gaytán will be preparing meals for private … Read more