Thirteen awards were announced today in the 17th annual Fear No Film portion of the Utah Arts Festival, including a Grand Jury Prize, two Utah Short Film of The Year honors, Fear No Filmmaker Award, three honorable mentions and six audience awards. The Grand Jury Prize for Best of Show went to El Desierto (Carly … Read more
The 43rd Utah Arts Festival has announced various awards for visual arts and the Wordfest literary arts programs. Nine awards were presented for the Artists Marketplace. All of the visual artist award winners are eligible for invitation to the Utah Arts Festival in 2020. Best of Show and People’s Choice Award winners also will have their booth … Read more
JONI BALLIF, BOHO CHIC SKULLS The great artist Georgia O’Keeffe never completed a trip in the New Mexico desert without collecting the skulls of animals – horse, mule, deer and steer – that had been bleached by the sun and forgotten. She used skulls to depict in her paintings, such as Summer Days (1936), showing … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: Links embedded in this Utah Arts Festival preview direct readers to the various festival features that have been published in The Utah Review since June 6. Pleasant temperatures and sunny days will mark the 43rd Utah Arts Festival, when it opens tomorrow (June 20) and runs daily through Sunday (June 23), noon to … Read more
In recent years at the Utah Arts Festival, the Urban Arts venue has been growing not just in breadth and depth of artistic experiences but also in its audience draw. Venue coordinators Pablo Pinet and Derek Wheeler have again added features to showcase urban, street, graffiti and calligraphic art in its various codes of communication … Read more
Dance is the empress jewel in the crown of Utah’s performing arts history. Accordingly, dance is represented in numerous ways at this year’s Utah Arts Festival. There are two world premiere dance commissions by Ballet West artists Katlyn Addison and Joshua Whitehead being performed by the RUUDDANCES company (June 21, 5:45 p.m., Festival Stage) and … Read more
Upcycling continues to deepen its impact in the visual arts. In late 2018, artist and educator Kyle Browne recalled how living and working in a remote New Zealand town changed his perspective: “Art supplies could not easily be purchased and I quickly realized that working within the limitations of what I had was the only … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: To read more about some highlights of this year’s Wordfest literary arts program, see the feature about Darius Atefat-Peckham here, Thatcher Elmer here and poetry slams here. For the 25th year of the Utah Arts Festival’s literary arts program, there is a new coordinator – poet Trish Hopkinson – and a new name … Read more
The state of poetry as an oral art form in Utah is thriving. Last year, at national competition, the Salt Lake City Unified team, which took first prize at the Utah Arts Festival’s slam contest, finished in fourth place among 72 teams, the best performance ever for a Utah-based team. And, the prospects for the … Read more
When he was 12, Darius Atefat-Peckham started writing poetry. “I grew up in poetry and it felt like it had to happen, whether I liked it or not,” he says in an interview with The Utah Review. Through a crack in the bathroom door, he read his first poem to his dad who was taking … Read more