EDITOR’S NOTE: For preview coverage of the 50th Utah Arts Festival, which runs June 18-21, The Utah Review is presenting individual or group profiles of artists, performers, entertainers and some newcomers to the event. The curtain raiser highlights the history of the Festival which is marking its golden anniversary. BANDALOOP, among the most prominent pioneers of vertical dance, returns to UAF for the fourth time, having appeared in 2005, 2013 and 2018. Once again, the Oakland-based arts company will perform on the 240-foot-high curving glass façade of the City Library, as part of a June tour in four cities featuring a work with ecological roots that will resonate with collective concerns about the Great Salt Lake’s ecological crisis, as the dance artists perform FLOCK while integrating company repertoire pieces including Downstream and its new creation, life || lines, all with an original score featuring music by four composers. Salt Lake Acting Company will appear for the second time at the festival, offering a sample from its upcoming summer show, The Gaslight Zone. Make-and-take opportunities will be among the most extensive in history, with Make Salt Lake as well as Secondhand Salamander which is bringing back the classic Mad Hatter project, and, of course, the Kids’ Art Yard. Urban Arts is offering its largest live graffiti mural installation featuring eight artists in four Festival campus locations, while a row of several other artists will be demonstrating their creative process in real time. Holdman Studios, based in Lehi with an international portfolio of commissions to create stained glass in religious and civic buildings, including a recent update to the Utah State Capitol rotunda, is offering an unprecedented series of free workshops for participants to create their own stained glass artwork. The City Library auditorium will be the home to the 23rd edition of the international Fear No Film program, with 84 short films on a slate of 15 programs, the second largest in the event’s history. Of course, dance, who wears the empress jewels in performing arts, will be represented by Repertory Dance Theatre, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Sock Opera Dance, and, of course, the ever-popular 1520 Arts, which will feature Trash Panda Drum Group and competitions featuring Sol Tribe as part of the Salt Open Styles Battle along with the Red Bull Dance Your Style battle and a collaboration with Utah Valley University’s ESPRIT in Rep Your Set Choreo Competition, with choreographers who specialize variously in hip hop, contemporary, salsa, reggaeton, afro, popping. Headliners this year include Digable Planets, well known among jazz musicians as well as hip hop artists (June 18); Yola, six-time Grammy-nominated artist, songwriter, and actor (June 19); Austin-based musician Alejandro Rose-Garcia, better known as Shakey Graves, who has been cited for creating new musical experiences tailored to each fan, ranging from Bandcamp-exclusive releases to hosting interactive scavenger hunts while on tour (June 20) and Rubblebucket, a band well known for its hybrid genre blend of psychedelia and electronic dance music (June 21). For tickets and more information, see the Utah Arts Festival website.
THE ORIGINS OF THE UTAH ARTS FESTIVAL
It has always been 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 180 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 she drafted a bill to create the nation’s first state-sponsored arts agency. Maurice Abravanel, born during the final years of the Ottoman Empire in what is now known as Thessaloniki, Greece, turned down a contract with Radio City Music Hall and arrived in Salt Lake City in 1946. Abravanel transformed Utah’s largest community orchestra at the time into an internationally acclaimed symphonic orchestra. Visionaries such as Virginia Tanner, Joan Woodbury, Shirley Ririe and Linda Smith made Utah one of the nation’s preeminent centers for dance. Willam F. Christensen, Ballet West’s first artistic director, established the first ballet department in an American university at The University of Utah in 1951.
As noted in a recently published feature about the Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation’s 50th anniversary, there was a great flourishing in the arts scene of Utah during the 1960s and 1970s. In less than two decades, every major performing arts form experienced significant expansion. Ballet West, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Repertory Dance Theatre, Pioneer Theatre Company, Salt Lake Acting Company, Utah Shakespeare Festival, Utah All-State High School Art Show, NOVA Chamber Music Series and the Utah Opera were founded during the Great Flourishing.
As the Utah Arts Festival – also the nation’s first state-sponsored arts festival – marks its 50th anniversary this year, many of these legacies will be celebrated in grand fashion when the four-day festival opens June 18. But, as Aimée Dunsmore, UAF’s executive director, explains, this year’s anniversary milestone reflects how the festival has evolved as the ideals and perceptions of what defines art and how it is created.
At 50, UAF is one of the nation’s longest running arts festivals of its kind. Fine Arts Fiesta in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, is marking 70 years, while the Allentown Art Festival, in Buffalo, New York, is 65 years. The Peoria Art Guild Fine Art Fair in central Illinois is nearing its 60th anniversary. Others marking their 50th anniversary this year are the spring edition of the Tempe Festival of the Arts in Arizona and Arts in the Park in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Many communities also have looked to UAF throughout its history for guidnce, including community arts leaders in Helper, Utah, who have cultivated one of the most comprehensive and compelling centers for arts and culture. As Lisa Sewell, the former executive director who was involved with the festival for half of its existence, said in a 2016 interview explained, effective planning requires “us to push back against resistance,” adding, “You always have to start by talking to the community.”
THE HISTORY
It was a community conversation that launched the festival five decades ago. In the mid-1970s as the country appeared to reaffirm its national character in the bicentennial celebrations, the time seemed right for Salt Lake City arts supporters and community leaders to put into bold practice the ideal of public access to the arts – a cornerstone of creative democracy where art is brought directly into the streets.
In 1976, public art still was a novel concept, even in New York City where nonprofit groups had started to revitalize the cultural scene in the SoHo district with magnificent super-sized murals on the walls of urban buildings.
Inspired by what he had seen in his travels, Skip Branch, a veteran public relations and marketing communications professional, worked with Ted Wilson, then mayor of Salt Lake City, as the newly formed Salt Lake Arts Council was taking shape. At the time, Branch, in an interview with The Utah Review, explained, the council had experimented with taking the arts to the parks including pocket park concerts.
At a gathering with the late Frank Sanguinetti, the founder of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Branch and others were discussing ways to bridge the intimidating barriers they believed prevented people from visiting art galleries.
“For many, it felt more like a school exercise than as a leisure time activity to be enjoyed at their own pace,” Branch recalled at the time. “After we all had a few glasses of wine, Frank [Sanguinetti] said something that if art is that intimidating, we ought to throw it into the street.”
Hearing Sanguinetti’s comment not as glib but as a worthy challenge, Branch said the arts council brainstormed ideas, quickly settling on that it would not just be the visual arts but also the performing arts, children’s activities, food and folk art crafts which could be brought into the streets.
“I called Wilson and said we have a crazy idea,” he said. “Wilson said he loved it and said let’s do it.” The group focused on holding the event on a long weekend in June with a venue on Main Street between 200 South and 300 South. While the event quickly took shape, more than a few downtown merchants had urged the local power brokers to halt further preparations because they believed the festival would disrupt their normal business operation.
Enter Jack Gallivan, then publisher of The Salt Lake Tribune. “He was a true visionary,” Branch recalled. He said, ‘we gotta do this; we have to do this.’ He told me that he would think about what he could do.”Branch says that five days later Wilson called him. “’I don’t know what happened,’ he said,” Branch adds, “’but the festival is on.’”
Yet, there was one more bump in the road, as fire department authorities could not agree that safety paths into festival grounds were sufficient to accommodate crews, should an emergency occur. “We asked the city, well, what do you do for the ‘Days of 47′ parade? We don’t even have horses,” Branch said. “The problem was solved and we were back on for good.”
Branch said they knew from the start the festival would be a success. The council had received funds from a National Endowment for the Arts’ Bicentennial Spirit Grant. Lake Churchill at Fort Douglas on the University of Utah campus arranged for U.S. Army assistance to set up the festival. The Utah Symphony, Repertory Dance Theatre, Mormon Tabernacle Choir members, local jazz groups and others were among the first performers. There were puppet shows for children and 38 artists graced the first Artists Marketplace. “It was unforgettable. No one said no. No one got paid. Everyone volunteered, including the performing artists.”
The second festival in 1978 was equally successful and with grants and state funds, the event expanded even more quickly, taking on its permanent name as the Utah Arts Festival. In 1979, the festival was held in an area marked off by West Temple and the Calvin L. Rampton Salt Palace Convention Center. In 1980, the event, which was held in September, was located entirely on the convention center grounds with some performances at the Capitol Theatre.
The festival’s greatest vulnerability was the lack of a permanent home. Over the next two decades, it was located in various downtown corridors and at the Utah State Fairpark, a location Branch said many thought meant the festival “would fold up its tents permanently.” When the new City Library opened in downtown in 2003, the festival gained a stable home and since then the programming has expanded greatly.
After 40 years, Branch said, in 2016, the memories of the first festival remain clear. “I still remember standing on the stage at Third South introducing one of the performing groups and looking north out onto a sea of people,” he recalled. “I choked up for a moment, thinking to myself, ‘we did it.’ I think we made the best of Frank’s [Sanguinetti] research.”
THE PAST TEN YEARS
Utah’s Arts Festival’s fifth decade has been two stories. From 2016 to 2019, festival crowds continued to grow along with the event’s multidisciplinary programs which set new benchmarks in scale and breadth of offerings. But with the COViD-19 pandemic, as with so many arts organizations, the strong momentum which UAF had enjoyed in the 2010s became more difficult to find.
The Festival reflects the fact Utah consistently leads the nation, as approximately 85% of its residents participate in various arts and cultural events that include attending a live music, theater, or dance performance; attending a live book reading, poetry, or storytelling event; going to see an art exhibit; going to a movie; and touring/visiting buildings, neighborhoods, parks, or monuments for their historical, architectural, or design value. Utah’s numbers have been significantly above the national average, which was 66.2%.
One of the main drivers of Utah’s healthy participation in the arts is not just an exposure to world-class artists, musicians, filmmakers, literary figures and other performers but also the access to be a maker – to create something. And, the Festival has historically demonstrated that by offering workshops at every major venue, which in various years, have included visual arts activities that include sculpture and kite making, performing arts clinics with entities such as the Intermountain Acoustic Music Association, a 24-hour literary competition, and onsite activities to help visitors make and take home hundreds upon hundreds of items of their own creation along with a demonstration of everything from a simple homemade pinball machine to an artificially intelligent painter and the creative tools of 3-D digital art.
The Arts and Technology venue ran continuously on a full head of STEAM — that is, Art into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). Volunteers spent months preparing activities which allowed participants to make one of 5,400 items — 1,300 Brush Bots; 1,100 light sabers; 600 Atari punk synth consoles; 2,400 cyanotype prints — all of which they took home. In addition, they planned enough supplies for making thousands of customized art tiles. In 2015, festival visitors made more than 2,200 art tiles. The make-and-take objects were ingenious in their elegant application of simple yet significant technology. And, the material cost per object ranges from 50 cents to less than $3 (at no additional cost to participants). In subsequent years, Make Salt Lake provided materials for between 9,000 and 10,000 projects to be made onsite during the Festival.
Cimarrón, a Grammy-nominated ensemble from Colombia which since then returned to perform as part of a UtahPresents concert, introduced festival audiences to Joropo and Llanera music and Zapateado (Stomp Llanero dance), made possible through Southern Exposure: Performing Arts of Latin America, a program of the Mid-Atlantic Foundation in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Arts. The cathedral-like atrium in the City Library’s Urban Room, just one of the many high-traffic areas of the Utah Arts Festival, became the ideal slot for Utah Opera Random Acts of Opera.
Likewise, the Literary Arts venue was the largest ever since its inception at the festival in 1995. One of the performance poets who came to UAF in 2016, Matt Hart, recalled as a Ball State University student in Muncie, who was the frontman for a punk band, when he decided to take a poetry workshop, as he describes it, “on a lark.” The experience changed his life. “Up until then, my only experience with poetry was negative. I always had thought of poetry with its gaudy, flowery language as being irrelevant,” Hart said in an interview with The Utah Review at the time, “and then when I heard the works of Etheridge Knight at a reading of The Smaller Midwestern Poets and it just blew my mind. This is poetry? Really? If this is poetry, I get this. And, it was then that I realized poetry could be a battle cry, a prayer, a song – all at once. It was something so simple, so human, so powerful and so voluminous.” Indeed, those words – human, powerful, voluminous, relevant – perfectly encapsulated the Literary Arts venue.
Dance has always had a major presence at the Festival. BANDALOOP, the vertical dance company from Oakland, California, returns to the festival for the fourth time, following appearances in 2005, 2013 and 2018 (The Utah Review has an upcoming feature preview about the company’s 2026 show).
Save for less than a handful of instances. Repertory Dance Theatre (RDT) and the Festival have among the longest continuous collaborative relationships of any arts organization in the community. Linda Smith, one of RDT’s co-founders, original performers and now director emerita, said she still remembered “how much we burned the soles of our feet” on the Main Street stage at the first Utah Arts Festival. In 2016, Smith was thrilled to have RDT’s 50th anniversary season formally close with its annual Festival Stage performance, on the occasion of UAF’s 40th anniversary. It is appropriate that RDT caps its epic 60th anniversary season this year with a performance as part of UAF’s 50th anniversary.
Groups such as Samba Fogo and 1520 Arts, which were or continue to be festival mainstays, now thrive independently and stage their own productions throughout the year have deepened the already numerous and strong roots of Salt Lake City’s dance culture.
Other familiar mainstays during the 2010s included Intermountain Acoustic Music Association’s Susanne Millsap Songwriters Showcase and the Salt Lake Community Writing Center. Another mainstay has been the Utah All-State High School Art Show, clearly among the largest of its kind in the U.S. The traveling exhibition represents versions of the all-state art show, which is coordinated by the Springville Museum of Art in conjunction with the Utah Division of Arts and Museums.
The 2010s also proved dynamic for the Festival’s commissions program which thrived up until the pandemic disrupted the opportunities for live programming. This included commissions in chamber music and jazz Established in 2011, the Festival’s dance commission program brought forward a tremendous partnership with Ballet West performers and adventurous original choreographed compositions.
In 2016, for example, the 14th edition of Fear No Film came into its own as an international event, attracting a record of more than 500 submissions from around the world. “Fear No Film is such a joy to present. No other film festival is quite like this, with a staggeringly courageous range of filmmaker visions presented in a fashion comparable to the way every other medium is offered in the massive Utah Arts Festival. There is truly something for everyone, as evidenced by the sometimes even splits in audience voting,” the late Topher Horman, coordinator, said at the time.“Top to bottom, every film triggered passionate reactions and often lengthy dialogue between Utah Arts Festival patrons. Watching complete strangers debate the merits of a short film for several minutes makes me absolutely giddy. Our audiences are told in advance the reactions we feel each program of shorts might elicit, and watching that play out with such passion is a great reward after the hundreds of hours invested to bring this program to life each year.”
As with every other arts organization, the Festival’s decision to cancel live events in 2020 was painful. And, as with many arts and cultural organizations, UAF deciated every Friday in June 2020 to put a generous sampling of its cultural village online, a convenient way to enjoy some of the signature events from various venues on a virtual platform, free and open to the public. As Lisa Sewell, executive director, explained at the time. “The artistic coordinators have worked tirelessly since last October to develop their programs, artists were selected and contracts sent out when we had to make the decision not to hold the Festival this June. We were determined to find a way to honor the work of our coordinators and support the artists.”
Virtual alternatives were critical and essential for the large corps of festival artists and performers who normally spend the summers and falls annually being at events such as UAF, which were canceled or postponed across the country. Of course, festivals are the quintessential non-social distancing events but many event organizers also realized that sustaining the community visibility for arts and culture was worth finding innovative alternatives to suit the demands of the moment. UAF joined other high-profile events that decided to make the transition online during this period, including Frieze New York; the Fusebox Festival in Austin, Texas and comparable festivals in cities across the country including Omaha, Pittsburgh and Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Indeed, the coordinators for various UAF venues sorted out the logistics to ensure that many artists representing the broad, deep range of creative paths who were selected to participate in the 2020 festival, became available online. The Artist Marketplace, coordinated by Matt Jacobson and Sarah Baker Taylor, facilitates access to artist websites and social media for online shopping and UAF provided a searchable database covering artists who were selected to participate in the last three festivals.
In the summer of 2021, Utah’s arts organizations emerged cautiously yet steadily after a shutdown of more than one year. The pandemic certainly tested the resilience of the arts and cultural institutions in the state, which prior to 2020 collectively had punched well above their weight class when it comes to arts participation. In statistics compiled before the pandemic, the Utah Cultural Alliance (UCA) reported that the arts industry in the state employs 155,551 people, generating $4.8 billion in earnings, $264.3 million in nonprofit revenue and $15.2 billion in gross sales. Utah represents the third fastest growing state in the country in numbers of jobs connected to the arts and cultural industry, at an annual rate of 4%. Post-pandemic, the numbers have recovered, but it was evident how the pandemic inflicted a sharp economic hit on the state’s arts and cultural industry. A UCA report estimated that $76.6 million was lost in terms of economic impact. But, the report also indicated encouraging numbers for Utah residents desiring to return to arts activities. The spring 2021 report showed that 53% of the respondents surveyed would be very open to attending a major outdoor event such as an arts festival within six months.
Thus, in 2021, the Festival’s administrative decision to move this year’s event, normally held in June, to the last weekend in August was a prudent one. And, as the pace of vaccinations regained most of its earlier momentum in the midst of a recent spike in cases which occurred that summer, festival organizers continued to follow effective protocols to reassure patrons that their experience was as safe and comfortable as possible. Festival organizers also collaborated with the Salt Lake Regional Medical Center on producing short videos about enjoying the festival in healthful ways.
The 2021 festival dates were not the annual calendar’s latest in UAF history dating to its founding in 1976. There were many years when the festival was held in September and the June dates became regular only when the new Library Square campus was completed in 2003. The Festival was shorter and smaller than in previous years but at least two program venues also had among the largest offerings in their history at the event: the Literary Arts program and Fear No Film. The festival used about 30% less space. More than 90% of the performers were from Utah in 2021, matching figures from the earliest years of the festival’s history.
The Festival returned in 2022 at full scale, which included some new wrinkles. For this first time, the Urban Arts venue had its own dedicated performance space, with two dozen DJs and musicians. It also launched its Emerging Artists program with individuals from the visual, literary and performing arts. Dunsmore said at the time that UAF decided to open up the jury process and invited members of the community to help select artists and performers to appear in the Festival this year. Indeed, the lineups at all venues includes not only some familiar performers and artists but plenty of new faces.
In 2023, the festival experimented with a three-day schedule, as it has done two years earlier, but then returned to a slightly modified four-day arrangement in 2025. Also. several years previously, UAF had tested a mobile app for the festival but as Third Sun’s Jocelyn Kearl explained, it was ahead of its time, as festival patrons still preferred a printed program. But, in the aftermath of the pandemic, as QR codes, digital apps and other remote mobile options became widespread for users, UAF decided that the time was ideal to launch an accessible, comprehensive app with clear navigational logistics. The app has been updated every year since then. It also was the first year where the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) allowed festivalgoers to use their UAF tickets as their transit fare. In 2024, street theater returned, which always has been popular with crowds. Before the pandemic, street theater, roaming stiltwalkers, and aerial artists were part of the festival experience and audiences scrambled whenever there was a performance either along the south-facing glass wall of the City Library or along the crescent arch. Voodoo Productions coordinated the return to street theater on a significant scale in both 2024 and 2025, featuring aerialists, sway pole artists and stilt walkers along with ballerinas, a floating violinist and ballerinas, revolving wheel performance and performance poetry.
Longevity is a strategically important adjective to describe the Utah Arts Festival. It is an asset that also primes an organization to be flexible enough to change, adapt and incorporate new ideas and fresh perspectives. Institutional memory is key.
The festival has been fortunate to have many staff, volunteers, partners and sponsors who have committed many years to seeing the nation’s first state-sponsored arts festival grow and thrive for more than four decades. There have been numerous stalwart partners, including Pratt Sound and Oasis Stage Werks for the festival’s expansive needs in sound engineering, who epitomize the festival’s theme this year: United In Art.
Among the coordinators, many have served for 20 years or longer. Those still active include Geoff Partain, 45 years; Ted Madsen, 41 years; Matt Jacobson, 39 years and Rich Knickerbocker, 29 years. Chad King, who manages the box office, has been with the Festival for 36 years. Other active members are Amanda Neff, assistant director, with 25 years, as well as Dayna McKee, Maggie Willis, Mary Ward, Aimee Horman and Mason Fetzer, who have served at least 20 years.