Normally for four days in June, Library Square and the surrounding civic campus in downtown Salt Lake City are transformed into a village of arts and culture for the Utah Arts Festival (UAF), the state’s largest multi-disciplinary gathering of its kind, drawing between 70,000 and 80,000 visitors annually. Despite the inevitable decision in March to … Read more
Before gates open on June 21 for the 42nd Utah Arts Festival, Karen Major, who worked as a paralegal for many years, already will have created a calendar of activities, performances, films and literary events that she and her husband, Steve Sayer, who retired after working as an executive with the Electrolux group, will hang … Read more
Every year’s Utah Arts Festival brings new stories. For the 41st annual festival, visitors will see Florida’s Bill Wharton The Sauce Boss prepare enough gumbo to feed the crowd while he sings in his distinct style of Florida-inspired funk and blues. The Pedrito Martinez Group consistently impresses crowds, including the recent Spoleto Festival, with its … Read more
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
Somehow managing always to remain calm, cool, good-humored and eternally organized, the staff and coordinators for the 39th Utah Arts Festival could run clinics for organizations on how to conduct effective, concise, fast-paced meetings where every participant can walk away at the end feeling something notable has been accomplished. In April, two months before the … Read more
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