Editor’s Note: The Selective Echo will present eight days of in-depth coverage of the Utah Arts Festival, beginning today. Previews of various events and activities will be followed by frequent updates and spotlight features during the festival. 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. Readers also are encouraged to subscribe, for free, to the Twitter feed here.

A 700-foot Earth Harp, an impressively diverse independent film festival, the Wasatch IronPen literary competition, an interactive Art Yard for budding youthful artists, more than 85 musical acts, three world premieres of music commissioned specifically for the festival, a focus on Uintah Basin artists, and 133 visual artists – of which 70 percent are new this year – are incontrovertible evidence that the 32nd Utah Arts Festival will be the largest cultural undertaking ever in the state’s history.

And, with a forecast of sunny, very warm days, attendance could easily top the 80,000 mark during the festival, which runs from Thursday, June 26, through Sunday, June 29. All events will be at the City Library Square.

Undoubtedly, the 2008 festival represents the coming of age for the state’s largest arts organization, a benchmark opportunity to position the four-day event among the nation’s most important regional summer arts festivals. The timing certainly couldn’t be better given a recent study by The National Endowment for the Arts which indicates that 2 million people in the United States report their primary occupation as artists (visual, creative, and performing). Utah with more than 14,400 artists had the second-fastest growth rate of any state in its artistic population. The NEA report also suggests that as the state’s population has grown, so has its segment of artists.

The celebration of Utah’s growing artist colonies is evident in several ways. This year’s logo (featured above) is a painting by Utah artist Meri DeCaria, the first of a series in which a state artist’s work will be added to the festival’s permanent collection to be exhibited at the festival’s office space at the downtown Artspace location.

And, the UAF has revived its Arts Partners Program – an important initiative, dormant since 2001 – which supports artists outside the Salt Lake City metropolitan area. Artists from the Uintah Basin, noted in both NEA and Utah Arts Council data as representing one of the state’s community areas on the threshold of dramatic change, will be featured at this year’s festival.

“These exchanges provide benefits both ways – for the artists and for our work in strengthening and expanding the state’s artistic profile,” Lisa Sewell, festival executive director, says. “Working as a conduit, we can connect artists to a larger community, opening up networking channels and access to motivated audiences.”

The eight artists – representing Daggett, Duchesne, and Uintah counties – often have traded the lack of exposure for the spectacular visual and aesthetic benefits of living in an area known for its remarkably unspoiled landscapes and rural features. Hazel Jensen, a wildlife and landscape artist whom is one of this year’s partners, says the festival is the reward for what often has been a lonely, uphill battle. “This validation is one of the greatest things to happen to us,” she explains. “The invitation is an immeasurable opportunity for exposure in an environment of great magnitude and proportion and validates our efforts as artists.”

Festival visitors can expect to see a great many new faces among the corps of 133 visual artists who will populate this year’s marketplace. More than 90 are first-time participants in a venue that will feature everything from pottery in both serious and whimsical forms, rich hand-made and hand-woven fibers, jewelry in glass and metal forms, oil paintings in serious and comical representations, scenic watercolors, clever toys, and photography in exceptionally executed prints and originals.

Among the artists to be featured include Amos Amit (fiber), Tanya Doskova (oil and mixed media), Jerry Fuhriman (oil), Joe Hoynik (digital), John-Paul Jespersen (photography), Mindy and Greg Rhoads (pottery), and Brett Varney (oil pastel and gold leaf).

Returning award-winning artists include Deborah Mae Broad (graphics/printmaking), JD Hillbery (drawing and pastels), Joachim Knill (photography), Rick Preston (photography), and John Sproul (painting).

Festival organizers, working with SLC Mayor Ralph Becker, also will present the Mayor’s Artist Awards. This year’s winners comprise Edward Bateman (Visual Arts), a digital media artist who teaches at the University of Utah; Lisa Bickmore (Literary Arts), a poet and creative writer on the faculty at Salt Lake Community College; Jerry Rapier (Performing Arts), producing director of Plan-B Theatre which has gained national recognition for its provocative, spiritually intense, and often poignant original productions; Maria Garciaz (Service to the Arts-Individual), a key figure in Neighborkworks Salt Lake and the organizer of the Bridges Over Barriers mosaic project, and the Utah Cultural Alliance (Service to the Arts-Organization), which has organized many grassroots activities and outreach programs involving the state’s expanding diverse cultural communities.

Along with the new artists will be the premiere performances of three musical commissions, which include a first-time jazz commission to supplement the classical composer commission, which was started in 1991, and the chamber music commission, established in 2006. Winners include Utah composer Miguel Chuaqui, whose classical work is “Tiempo Norte, Tiempo Sur (Thursday, June 26, at 8 p.m. on the main festival stage) ;” Keeril Makan, assistant professor of music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who will present the chamber composition premiere (Saturday, June 28, at 4 p.m. in the City Library Auditorium), and Melanie Shore and Courtney Smith, two young Utah composers who are the first recipients of the festival’s jazz commission (Friday, June 27, at 8:30 p.m.).

Other festival highlights:

The Earth Harp and Mass Ensemble: A large-scale architectural/musical installation of two harps anchored against the City Library’s walls and the Amphitheater Stage and involving more than 15,000 feet of brass musical wire. Created by Bill Close, artistic director of the MASS ensemble, the instrument is the world’s longest stringed instrument with up to 42 strings running 700 or more feet. The final performance – in which the audience sits beneath the instrument – will take place Sunday, June 29, at 9:30 p.m. The harp also will be a part of a Sunday morning yoga workshop.

Thirteen music headliners covering blues, country blues, reggae, experimental dub, funk, rock, afro-Cuban, juju, ethnic and world music, hip-hop, ska, calypso, “nu” jazz, and jazz. There are at least 74 other musical acts that will perform on the festival’s numerous stages.

The Target Art Yard, open every day for children during the festival until 9 p.m., with a theme of “The Sound Of Music and Noise.” Among the new features are the Rock Poster Wall, Noise Forest, Sound Wave Sculpture, Water Jug Drum Circle, and Instrument Petting Zoo with Clive Romney.

Sixty independent films from directors across the country will mark the Fear No Film festival, rich in political polemics, social consciousness, puns, power-charged semiotics, and paradigm-bending visual representations. Five films will compete in the 2008 Utah Short Film of the Year Competition.

Jann Haworth’s Pop Plastiques exhibition and festival residency. A central figure in the British Pop Art movement that started in the 1960s, Haworth’s oeuvre of Pop and Pop/Abstract assemblages is on exhibit at the Gallery at Library Square on the fourth floor of the City Library. The public also will have the opportunity to see Haworth at work in residence at the library throughout the festival.

Wine and tapas offerings will be available at the festival’s new Tapas Tent, designed by Robert “Sully” Sullivan of Utah Food Services and prepared by student chefs. Twenty other culinary vendors will provide a wide variety of foods during the festival.

Art Attack 5K run will be held Saturday, June 28, at 8 a.m. beginning at the Library Square. The event, now in its 15th year, is expected to raise $15,000. Same-day registration will be available beginning at 6 a.m. in five categories.

The festival also will feature Fare Well and Hell O, a group self described as “multimedia human performance incorporating dance, film, poetry, music, interactive electronics, experimentalism, and post-apocalyptic noisemaking.”

The usual sideline attractions also will be available including demonstrating artists, a street theater panoply of belly dancers, flamenco performers, stunt comedian, cowboy comedy magician, polka performers, and Afro-Brazilian dancers. And, the Big Mouth Café will be in force, hosting poets and storytellers.

Festival gates open at noon and close at 11 p.m. each day. Adult admission is $10 at the gate and $7 in advance. Adults 65 and over are admitted at $5. Children 12 and under are admitted free.

For those going to the festival Thursday and Friday between noon and 3 p.m., admission is $5. Four-day festival passes also are available at $30.

Detailed schedules are available here.

And, look to the blog throughout the week for daily features and announcements about festival events.

TOMORROW: Focus on marketplace artists and Uintah Basin Art Partners.