It felt strange seeing all of the paintings and drawings from the exhibition Nzambi (God) down off the walls at the Italian Academy this week. Columbia had requested that the show stay around another month after the festival ended in June so more people on campus could see it. I went to the gallery and removed the paintings, took off the hardware, pulled off the wall labels. The room felt so lonely. The director of the Italian Academy, Rick Whitaker, told me that he already missed the works. 

We were pleased to read this week a critical review of the Mormon Arts Center publication, Immediate Present, by Laura Allred Hurtado in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. The reviewer was Sarah C. Reed. In 2017, for our first Mormon Arts Center festival, Hurtado brought together a group exhibition of two dozen contemporary Mormon artists. For the exhibition catalog, she paired an equal number of authors who wrote a response of one kind or another for each visual art work. Hurtado wrote an extended essay on Mormon art that introduced the volume. 

In a Church News article over the weekend that highlighted events of the Mormon Arts Center Festival, staff writer Morgan Jones described some exciting elements of our June event. Although it happened far away from Salt Lake City, the Center has been very fortunate to attract the attention of media outlets in Utah, including the Salt Lake Tribune, the Deseret News, Church News, and KSL-TV. 

YouTube videos of the 2018 festival continue to be posted. There are currently 19 new videos, for a total on our channel of 52. That's hours and hours of presentations, performances, and interviews. Subscribe and receive notification when new videos appear on YouTube. 

A priority for the Mormon Arts Center is sharing.  It's no surprise, then, that after the festival our main goal is to get dozens and dozens of hours of video edited and posted online. The first eight presentations are now on YouTube, with more coming every few hours. Even for those attending, these should be welcome because the presentations and concerts were overlapping. Nobody could be everywhere at once. Well, our video crew could. Enjoy.

Before the festival ended, the Italian Academy requested that Hildebrando's exhibition Nzambi (God) remain on display until August. We were prepared to take it down, but having an extension "by popular demand" so to speak, was more than welcome. It gives people a little bit longer to see it. The building is open to the public.