With the hydraulic whoosh of lowrider cars, the bounce of basketballs on pavement and the pulse of beatboxers, the Urban Arts Festival is set to return to downtown Salt Lake City over Labor Day weekend.
The event — which calls itself Utah’s largest free community arts festival — will expand to three days from Sept. 2-4, taking up Rio Grande Street in The Gateway, on the west edge of downtown Salt Lake City.
The festival will feature more than 100 vendors, music and entertainment on two stages, live mural painting, the Hard-N-Paint street basketball tourney, an exhibition of lowrider custom car culture and the 12th annual skate deck competition — the event that gave the festival its start a dozen years ago, said Derek Dyer, executive director of the Utah Arts Alliance, which organizes the event.
A theme of this year’s festival, Dyer said at a news conference Thursday at The Gateway, is the art of beatboxing. To further that theme, the festival’s national headliners will be the Grammy-winning beatboxing legend Rahzel, formerly of The Roots.
Rahzel, Dyer said, “doesn’t play any instruments. He is the instrument.”
(MCA Records) Rahzel, the Grammy-winning rapper and beatboxer, is scheduled to be the headlining act at the Urban Arts Festival, performing Sept. 3, 2022, at The Gateway in Salt Lake City.
Minneapolis hip-hop artist Carnage the Executioner is scheduled to appear as the opening act.
Rahzel and Carnage will take the festival’s main stage, at the intersection of Rio Grande and 100 South, on Saturday, Sept. 3, starting at 8 p.m.
The lowrider exhibition, featuring customized cars rebuilt and modified within Utah’s lowrider community, will happen Friday, Sept. 2, starting at 5 p.m., with a “hop-off” event at 7:30 p.m. and an awards ceremony — with honors in such categories as best in show, best engine and best display — to follow.
The street basketball competition is scheduled for Sunday, Sept. 4, from noon to 4 p.m.
The festival’s hours are Friday, 5 to 10 p.m.; Saturday from noon to 10 p.m.; and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The artists’ marketplace, live mural demonstrations and live music will be happening during festival hours. Admission is free.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Cleopatra Balfour, director of the Urban Arts Festival, talks about the event — set for Sept. 2-4, 2022, at The Gateway — during a news conference, on Thursday, Aug. 25, 2022.
Cleopatra Balfour, the festival’s director, said she defines urban art as an expression, just like any other art.
“Sometimes it’s not an expression that’s widely accepted and considered art, and sometimes it’s something that has to fight and make its way before it gets recognized,” Balfour said. “Nonetheless, the art is still there when you see it, when it brings out those feelings, those emotions, those thoughts, those processes the same way a Monet does.”
One example of the gradual public acceptance of urban art, cited by both Balfour and Dyer, is the proliferation of murals around Salt Lake County.
Once dismissed as graffiti, there are now more than 350 murals on walls in the county, most of them commissioned by businesses and government entities. (Some are overseen by the Utah Arts Alliance, which also sponsors the annual Mural Fest in South Salt Lake.)
For more information about the Urban Arts Festival, go to urbanartsfest.org.
