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. 

Throughout the 2018 festival, the Mormon Arts Center filmed all the events, performances, presentations, discussions, and panels at the Italian Academy on the campus of Columbia University. Our goal is to have all of these wonderful documents posted on YouTube in the next two weeks. That's an ambitious goal, given that it is many hours of programming, but we want everyone--no matter where you live--to have full access to what went on. We can't wait for you all to experience it. 

The deliveries are coming fast and furious now--treasures of books, posters, magazines, and CDs that will be available and displayed at the Festival, starting on Thursday. The biggest, heaviest, and most exciting to me are the cases of Mormon Cinema. Biggest because the boxes and boxes of books are taking up the lion's share of my little apartment; heaviest because at 680 pages, the book is our heftiest offering by far; and most exciting because after 20 years of research, a major publication is seeing the light of day.

In addition to the crew of committee members and supportive friends, the Center has been the recipient of some anonymous kindness in preparation for the festival. One of the last checklist items before the festival opens on Thursday was a series of posters and banners to decorate the Italian Academy itself. Printing oversize posters can be expensive. A large poster can be about $200. So I was pretty nervous when I went to my local shop and gave them a flash drive with about 15 posters--some of them to be mounted to foam core.

Mormons a generation or two ago knew the music of Evan Stephens like the back of their hand. It was everywhere. Nearly two-thirds of the hymns in the early 20th century hymnal were composed by him. Conductor of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, prolific composer of hymns, anthems, oratorios, and operettas, and a master choral teacher: Stephens was easily one of the most influential men of his era in the Church. How did this son of a Welsh coal miner, with almost no musical training become such a force?