Backstage at The Utah Arts Festival 2018: Aasia Hamid’s self-taught bead artistry, Nathan Brimhall’s volumetric sculptures among Artist Marketplace highlights

Eye-popping art is the standard in this year’s Artist Marketplace at the Utah Arts Festival. Two examples are Aasia Hamid’s intricate jewelry pieces incorporating bead work with tiny seed beads woven together with needle and fishing line thread. Hamid (Booth 46) is making her second appearance at the festival, is from Gilbert Arizona. Nathan Brimhall … Read more

Backstage at The Utah Arts Festival 2018: Christopher Diaz at forefront of new literary voices as writer, performer, teacher

From Houston, Christopher Diaz (June 23, 8 p.m., The Big Mouth Stage) is among the exceptional lineup of writers and performers from a new literary generation that has become the foundation for the Literary Arts activities at the Utah Arts Festival, especially in the last four years. Diaz, who is Chamorro, fulfills many roles. In … Read more

Backstage at The Utah Arts Festival 2018: The radical vulnerability of Bassam’s poetry

In college, Bassam read many of the great poetic classics including William Blake and Lord Byron. They was a philosophy major, insistently searching for “metaphysical purpose,” as xe describes it in an interview with The Utah Review. Bassam will perform June 24 at 2 p.m. on The Big Mouth Stage at the Utah Arts Festival. … Read more

Backstage at The Utah Arts Festival 2018: Arts Amplified Concert Series features Ron Pope, Gomez, DJ A-Trak, People Under The Stairs, St. Paul and The Broken Bones

For this year’s Utah Arts Festival (June 21-24), the Amphitheatre Stage will be the site of the festival’s biggest experiment – the Arts Fest Amplified Concert Series. The nightly concerts cover a versatile and diverse palette of musical tastes and influences. Ticket price of $25 includes same-day festival admission. Children 5 and older must have … Read more

Backstage at The Utah Arts Festival 2018: Photographer Timm Chapman and the ‘fragile earth’

Born in the U.K. and raised in Canada, Timm Chapman (Booth 68) lives at the foot of the Superstition Mountains in Arizona and his photographic work is featured in many high-profile periodicals including National Geographic Traveler, Arizona Highways, United Airlines’ Hemispheres’ magazine, and Frommer’s Travel Guides. He also is one of the 175 artists who … Read more

Backstage at The Utah Arts Festival 2018: Saad Haddad, youngest recipient ever of Utah Arts Festival’s composer commission award, with forthcoming premiere of Azwaj

Saad Haddad’s story is quintessentially American. A first generation American, he was born in Georgia in 1992. His mother is Lebanese and his father is Jordanian. His parents met in the U.S. but they have never visited their respected homelands since their respective families came to the U.S. As a child growing up in southern … Read more

Backstage at The Utah Arts Festival 2018: Marc Santos’ The Spirit of Dance photographic exhibition among visual arts highlights presented at The City Library

Of all the performing arts genres, dance is the most intimidating when it comes to photographs that truly represent the individual’s artistic expression of skilled movement. Dance is an ethereal art, even in its growing story-telling power which has dominated 21st century works. Accomplished dancers create marvelous geometric spaces of lines, angles, dimensions and planes … Read more

Backstage at The Utah Arts Festival 2018: BANDALOOP raises vertical dance bar in artistic excellence

Since its last appearance in 2013 at the Utah Arts Festival, BANDALOOP has expanded its international portfolio of vertical dance works to breathtaking new levels of artistic altitude. Collaborating with GoPro, BANDALOOP has just released a new short film about its 2017 performance at the CAFe Budapest Contemporary Arts Festival (see below), which captures perfectly … Read more

Spy Hop Productions cultivates indispensable community roots as it launches campaign for new home

Indispensability can be a challenging concept to articulate, especially for nonprofit arts institutions in communities where the arts are seen as an amenity rather than as an absolute necessity. But then there are those institutions which build upon their most successful and visible programs to cultivate deeper roots in their communities by offering activities and … Read more

Regalia, Repertory Dance Theatre’s annual fundraiser, concert sets rigorous demands for choreographers with chance to win commission prize

The four choreographers who will participate in the competition part of Repertory Dance Theatre’s Regalia, the company’s largest annual fundraiser, will maximize the creative opportunity of every minute in the four and one-half hours they are allocated to compose and set a short dance work which audience members will see later that day. They may … Read more