Community arts organizers and developers, DJs, folk bands, food trucks, artists and crafters, community members, and even visitors from as far as Florida gathered on Saturday evening to celebrate the first Mural Fest held in South Salt Lake. Organized at and around the Art Factory May 12th through […]
When Ballet West Artistic Director Adam Sklute welcomed the audience to the second annual National Choreographic Festival last night, there was tangible excitement in the auditorium: not only was every work on the program created by a female choreographer, but the artistic directors of the visiting companies, Richmond […]
When Clement Greenberg wrote his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in 1939, he declared art as standing opposite kitsch, as a remedy to the dumbing down of taste in a consumer culture. In the decades since, however, many painters and sculptors have skipped back and forth across the line […]
When Madison Donnelly showed her sculpture, “User Centered Design,” at the 2017 Statewide Annual Exhibition, it was outstanding in a field of more conventional works. As a photo that ran in 15 Bytes at the time reveals, even the staff at Rio Gallery seemed to think so: in […]
READ LOCAL First represents Utah’s most comprehensive collection of celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary non-fiction, and memoir. This week we bring you Reiser Perkins, a Utah native who currently lives in Hawaii. She joins a distinguished group of writers, including Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal, former Utah Poet Laureate Katherine […]
“Return,” the third and final work of Daniel Charon’s Together Alone trilogy, premiered in the Eccles Theater’s Regent Street Black Box, placing the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company performers in a new and exciting venue, so different from their home at the Rose Wagner. The audience sat in the […]
Once plants — were art? Most knew them, at least something about their medicinal powers, their lore. Unlucky Ophelia had her declarative listless list of flowers, her mad list, herb and flower names (“…rosemary, that’s for remembrance…Pansies, that’s for thoughts”) symbolizing pre-suicide remembrance and rue—though why-hadn’t-Hamlet-loved-her-enough was the […]
by Kristina Gibby Steven L. Peck’s Gilda Trillim: Shepherdess of the Rats, winner of the Association for Mormon Letters’ 2018 award for novel, is at once whimsical and intensely meditative. It is cosmic in scope, yet profoundly intimate. In other words, it is full of paradox, the kind […]
“Many people might not have a specific book in mind when they come in, but they look through our shelves and when they find ‘it’, they just know.” Cindy Dumas describes one type of experience that customers might expect when they visit an independent bookstore. For Cindy, the […]
David Bintley’s “The Shakespeare Suite,” the title piece of Ballet West’s spring season, opens with Kyle Davis as Hamlet and a chorus of four couples slinking across a maroon carpet, the women dressed like Audrey Hepburn in “Funny Face” and the men (save Davis) in kilts and mesh shirts. Davis […]
“I’ve had a good run.” My son and I joke about this pronouncement, now, because I’ve said it so many times before, promised to give up poetry cold turkey, only to find half a pack of menthols stashed in the writing desk drawer and start up again. But […]
Repertory Dance Theatre’s Current included five dances presented one after the other, after the other, and yet… after another. Because they were all made recently, they are a reflection of “right now”; they are current. To begin, the silhouettes of Justin Bass and Tyler Orcutt spoke their way across the stage, […]
Figurative artist William "Bill Whitaker died on March 6, aged 74. We remember him with this interview, conducted in 2007 by the late Ehren Clark.
The Ascension of Classical Arts: An Interview With William Whitaker
Many are aware of classical art, but most are unaware of the fullness of the tradition, whose elements are so fundamental to the basic structure of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was a tradition that had its genesis with the Greeks, the Romans, subsequently the Renaissance revival, and a 400-year dominance of the French Academy, only to become obscured, lost amidst the paths of the modern. With limitless forms of contemporary art, are we to find classical art, in its pure and original state, a part of the forefront of mainstream art once more?
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