Editor’s Note: The Selective Echo will present 12 days of in-depth coverage of the 35th annual Utah Arts Festival, beginning today (including wall-to-wall daily previews and coverage June 18-26). Previews of various events and activities will be followed by frequent updates and spotlight features during the festival. There will be more than 40 feature articles and nearly 200 images.

Unquestionably, the Utah Arts Festival is the state’s largest and most significant event of culture in virtually every realm of the visual, creative, and performing arts. Twitter and Facebook updates also will be provided. And, Max Dahl, a talented senior journalism student from Utah State University, will be assistant editor.

Now an indispensable powerhouse of artistic and creative expression, The Utah Arts Festival (UAF) prepares to mark its 35th anniversary as the state’s most important gateway to art attendance for virtually every imaginable style and form – whether it’s classical, avant-garde, experimental, commercial, high art, pop culture, folk, or any conceivable creative permutation, mash-up, and hybrid.

In 2011, the UAF is stronger than ever. It ranks 14th among the top 100 fine arts fairs, according to the Art Fair SourceBook. In fact, the festival’s rank jumped 25 places in just one year based on average art sales and attendance figures, which also set records in 2010. More than 82,000 attended in 2010, up more than 6,000 from 2009.

Last fall, the festival, which runs four days annually, received a highly competitive $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support performances and commissions. And, the organization under Lisa Sewell’s executive leadership – which has focused on raising the festival’s artistic caliber of quality while exercising the most rigorous fiscal discipline – enters its anniversary year clear of past debts. It is poised to stage the largest assemblage ever of artists and creative producers – 159 visual artists, more than 100 performers, 60-plus short-films, and interactive programs and workshops in every venue – with a budget of slightly more than $1.6 million.

While the first festival in 1977 was significantly more modest with 55 visual artists and a budget of just $38,000, its goal was just as evident as it is today: provide a creative placemaker for the public to experience new styles of art, especially those that they might not seek out independently. Furthermore, the festival would be versatile enough so that visitors could choose from a broadly diverse sample of artistic expressions and event formats without necessarily committing to one aspect or without limiting their options.

A 1970s survey by the Utah Museum of Fine Arts showed that a significant sample of respondents felt intimidated by art and museums so four members of the Salt Lake Arts Council – including Skip Branch – decided to bring it to the streets. Branch and his colleagues successfully lobbied the Utah Legislature in 1975 for funding to establish the nation’s first statewide festival for the arts. Two years later, the event – the Salt Lake Festival of the Arts – was premiered on Main Street.

In correspondence with Sewell, Branch writes, ‘We got carried away with the idea of pulling it off. That was first and foremost. The idea that it would continue didn’t necessarily occur to us.’ However, he quickly corrects himself. ‘Well, that’s not totally true. When we moved it to West Temple [in 1980] as the Utah Arts Festival, with support from the state, we couldn’t help but dream that if people continued to love and nurture it, it might go on and on.’

Happily, the festival’s popular appeal became resilient enough to survive several major changes in venue, especially during the first three-quarters of its history. The festival, which was held on Main Street and on West Temple, also enjoyed a relatively long tenure at the downtown Triad Center. However, development of the TRAX light-rail lines forced a move to the state fairgrounds which proved to be a major logistical challenge and which dampened attendance significantly. After two years, the festival returned downtown to a venue that became too densely packed to accommodate large crowds. But once the magnificent architectural gem of the City Library opened in 2003 – along with the Library Square being a key anchor to an expanding civic campus – the festival found its perfect home.

Since then, festival activities have expanded rapidly in many disciplines. In recent years, the festival has grown by offering a full four-day schedule of literary arts activities as well as the Fear No Film festival which, in its nine years, is cultivating a national reputation for curating slates of short films produced not only in Utah but also throughout the world. This year, ballet and contemporary dance performances will be featured each day during the festival. Commissioned musical works – for orchestra, chamber ensemble, and jazz – also have become an integral part of the festival since 1991 when University of Utah music faculty member Henry Wolking received it for ‘Forests.’

And, mindful of cultivating future generations for the festival experience and consolidating, in effect, a lifelong relationship with locally accessible arts programming, festival organizers have expanded offerings for children and youth. These include an Urban Arts venue geared toward teenagers – with DJ parties, graffiti, and screen printing – and an Art Yard for younger children that includes hands-on art workshops, a locally organized instrument petting zoo, and, this year for the first time, a children’s version of the Fear No Film festival.

Superbly timed for this anniversary is a new visual identity that already has become a familiar sight to many Salt Lake City residents. The process for designing the most effectively durable identity began last year and included an extensive protocol of focus groups, surveys, and study panels that sought to fine tune and expand the knowledge base for festival organizers. ‘It was not a matter of rebranding,’ Sewell explained in an earlier Selective Echo interview, ‘but rather embracing what has made the festival so popular and how we can improve our outreach to potential festival visitors and artists.’

True to the festival’s mission, giving artists a platform to create their own versions of the UAF visual mark was a major consideration, according to Kevin Perry, graphic designer and president of the Salt Lake City chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). ‘The design, which is intended to be used year-round, captures the festival’s diversity,’ he explained in an interview earlier this year, ‘and, it reiterates how art is the primary backbone of the festival.’

In general, the Utah Arts Festival has been around longer than many other similar outdoor gatherings. A little more than one-half of the 1,400 festivals that the NEA recently surveyed have been around for more than 10 years.

Sewell leads a year-round staff of four, 45 seasonal program coordinators, and a technical staff of 30 but festival organizers, most importantly, have cultivated an experienced corps of nearly 1,200 volunteers, some of whom have served easily more than 15 years. Each year, they have brought talents and skills of significant value that are essentially in-kind contributions going well beyond what would be available given actual budgetary resources.

Sewell, who is leading her 15th festival, says many artists and invited performers consistently voice their appreciation for UAF volunteers who distinguish themselves by doing as much as possible to be frequently visible and available throughout the festival’s duration. “It gets pretty hot being out here for four days straight,” Sewell explains, “and we want to make sure everybody is happy, safe, and as comfortable as they can be.”

Indeed, more than 600 artists applied to be in this year’s festival, which translates to an acceptance rate of a little more than 25 percent. Fifty-five of the 159 artists are appearing for the first time and 110 come from locations outside of Utah.

UAF AND UNIVERSITY OF UTAH MARRIOTT LIBRARY COLLABORATION

Along with the development of a new visual identity, festival organizers have moved to preserve the enormous volumes of photos and documents they have created and collected during the event’s 35-year history. All records are now archived in the special collections department of The University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library.

The text documents represent 78.5 linear feet of material and the visual collection comprises more than 31,000 slides, photographs, negatives, and digital images from the festival’s first 34 years, according to Kristin Giacoletto of the Marriott Library. Also, duplicate items (e.g., non-photo) such as shirts, mugs, buttons, and other ephemera have been transferred to the University’s Katherine W. Dumke Fine Arts and Architecture Library. These items comprise the Utah Arts Festival Exhibit Collection. Erika Church and Carrie McDade also have worked extensively on processing the collection.

Moving the collection to expertly managed archives that are climate controlled and securely maintained means that the festival’s historical artifacts will be preserved for countless generations and will be protected from the risks of unexpected loss due to fire, natural disaster, or theft.

Some of the items as well as more than 80 photographs will be featured in the ‘1 Through 34: Revisiting the Utah Arts Festival History’ exhibition, which will be housed on the fourth floor gallery of the City Library on Library Square. The exhibition, which opens June 23 and will be available through Aug. 5, comprises seven panels, each representing a five-year period of the festival’s history as well as six display cases highlighting iconic memorabilia from the festival.

“The festival’s archival collection has extraordinary historical value and constitutes an extensive intact historical documentation of the community’s arts and culture development covering this particular period,” Giacoletto explains. Describing it as a rich public treasure of resources for community research and historical information gathering, she says the UAF collection arrived in exceptionally good condition.

“The slides and photos are in solid condition and everything is well organized,” she adds, “especially for designing topical themes for displays and exhibitions.” Photos depict every imaginable festival element including families, performing artists, ballet and dance performances, living statues, artists and artisans, Earth Team members, vendors, and iconic activities easily identifiable according to a particular festival year.

“It’s been a labor of love working with this collection,” Giacoletto says. “I can’t remember not going to the festival and, now with a two-year-old child, I’m planning to make sure she has that same opportunity to enjoy the activities as well.”

Giacoletto also encourages visitors and community members to share their UAF experiences and to help identify individuals shown not only in the festival exhibition but also in the archived collection at the Marriott Library. Sewell adds that the UAF also has started a five-year oral history project that will be the focus of a special presentation at the festival’s 40th anniversary in 2016.

Concurrent with the archival exhibition will be ’35,’ featuring new works by six young Utah artists that signal the next generation of creative expression that will become familiar to festival goers. The works comprise a variety of media including painting, printmaking, sculptural mixed media, photography, sound and video. The invited artists are Ashley Knudsen Baker, Orem; Namon Bills, Spanish Fork; Jared Latimer, Ephraim, and Chadwick Tolley (PHOTO: ‘Sugar Mountain’), Rosi Hayes, and Michael Ryan Handley, Salt Lake City. The exhibit is curated by Shawn Rossiter, a local artist and editor of the online art magazine ‘15bytes.’ (Look for a separate feature preview of this exhibit in The Selective Echo’s coverage later this month.)

For more information about the collection, see here. And, for more information about the festival, see here and follow The Selective Echo’s extensive coverage throughout the remainder of June.

NOTE: Many of the photos from first UAF in 1977.