Visual Arts

The SLC Peformance Art Festival is Ready to School You

 An empty art classroom featuring multiple rectangular tables arranged in a row with black chairs. The room is well-lit with natural light from the side windows, and various art supplies and educational posters are visible around the space.

Kristina Lenzi’s classroom at the City Academy in Salt Lake City, which will be the host of the 11th annual Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival. Image credit: Kristina Lenzi

Long live the SLC Performance Art Festival.

In an article published last year—a profile of Salt Lake City artist Kristina Lenzi and the festival she has helmed for more than a decade—we reported that the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival was soon to be homeless. After ten years, the Salt Lake City Library had announced it would no longer host the international event. Paul Reynolds, Lenzi’s longtime collaborator on the project and her liaison at the library, was the one who informed her. “It was a total surprise to me,” Lenzi says.

A year later, Lenzi is preparing for the 11th iteration of the event, to open at City Academy on Saturday, April 6.

As late as September of 2023, Lenzi was still exploring options for the festival. In addition to providing a dynamic venue and built-in audience, the Salt Lake City Library had also been a principal financial sponsor of the festival, helping to provide stipends for the artists and a marketing and administrative budget. For the 2024 event, Lenzi had been able to secure a grant from the Salt Lake City Arts Council, and a promise of generous private support from T.K. Stephens—but she still had no venue. She was talking about the problem with colleagues at City Academy, the charter school where she has worked for the past two years, when the school’s executive director, Sonia Woodbury, overheard. She suggested Lenzi use the school.

“It’s a small school. It’s nothing fancy,” Lenzi says. But like the festival, the school is focused on community (students are required to perform community service to graduate and they participate on different committees within the school to keep it running). It’s also downtown, a few blocks from the library.

Lenzi is honest about how much they’ll miss the old venue. “We’re going to miss the magnificence of the building. There’s so many more options at the library,” she says. But the heart of the festival remains. “It’s still a family-friendly kind of thing. It’s still weird performance art.”

The festival will consists of eight performances happening over eight hours, which is about half the size of previous festivals. Performances are staggered, so visitors can come and go. “There’s a lot of stuff within walking distance,” Lenzi says.

“The biggest difference is we don’t have passersby like we did at the library. So we have to get as many people as we can there.” She says the nature of the audience may change the performances. “It will likely affect the performances in a way. … You as a performer react differently based on who’s there.” An audience who comes specifically to experience performance art is different than one who stumbles across it on their way to drop off a borrowed book. Audience size may also affect longterm viability of the event. “It makes me nervous we won’t get the audience we need to continue to get funding,” Lenzi notes.

The nature of the venue will likely affect the performances as well. It’s been a challenge to communicate the possibility of the space to artists who are coming from out of town. They’ve sent images, but some are waiting until they get here to plan their performance. A few have chosen to respond to the new venue specifically. Marilyn Arsem, a Boston artist who has been a regular at the festival, will be in a math classroom for her performance, “Teach me.” She has asked people sign up to come in one at a time and teach her something. “They can even give her a test and a grade,” Lenzi notes. Eugene Tachinni, another regular, is bringing soil from the Navajo Reservation, where he now lives, to create a sense of a common center. Other performers include Swedish artist Gustaf Broms, Jeff Huckleberry from Boston, Preach R Sun, Sam Forlenza and Dawn Oughton, all previous performers.

For the first time in the festival’s 11-year history, Lenzi won’t be performing. “I just decided I had so much on my plate this year that I couldn’t perform.”

Paul Reynolds, Lenzi’s long-time administrative collaborator, was also scheduled to perform. It was to be his first performance, but to the surprise and dismay of the Salt Lake City art community, he died on March 15. Reynolds had created a-four sided, square easel on which he was to place freshly painted panels. During his performance, he was going to very slowly, and without looking, make a mark across the panels, similar to works he has created at Finch Lane and Modern West. To honor Reynolds, Lenzi has decided to place Reynolds’ structure on the school’s sports court. She is asking performers to walk around the structure slowly and silently, and asking the community to do the same. “It’s very sad,” Lenzi says about Reynolds’ passing. “There’s a lot of grief in the community right now but I hope [the memorial performance] will be a healing thing for the community.”

The same could be said of the festival itself. The library will be missed as a venue, but the SLC Performance Art Festival lives on, a fact can be healing for the community. If the community will come.

A photo of a man crouched down inspecting a large, flat, yellow square art installation on the floor of a gallery. The background shows a wood-floored gallery space with other people observing artworks.

Paul Reynolds explains his process in preparation for a performance at Modern West gallery in Salt Lake City. Image credit: Liberty Blake

SLC Performance Art Festival, City Academy, Salt Lake City, Saturday, Apr. 6, 10 am – 6 pm

Categories: Visual Arts

1 reply »

  1. I’m sad that the library is no longer supporting the festival and hope they reconsider for next year; it’s so important for our community. I’m glad City Academy has stepped in though.

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