The librarian on the City Library’s fourth floor proffered a warning: there hadn’t been enough space to hang everything in the correct order. She referred to the thirteen poems by Lynn Kilpatrick and fifteen drawings by John Sproul that together comprise To Be Unnamed. Probably everyone has an opinion on which works of art look...
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ONE FATHER’S APPREHENSION: Interview with memoirist Maximilian Werner
Maximilian Werner will read from and sign copies of his memoir Gravity Hill at the King’s English Bookshop 1511 S. 1500 E. Salt Lake City Friday May 10, 2013, 7 pm. Maximilian Werner’s memoir Gravity Hill contains stories nested inside other stories. In its framing tale, we meet Max about five years ago, a young...
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Jana Richman’s Ordinary Truth
In a tense moment near the climax of The Ordinary Truth, a woman in her seventies wades across a rocky creek in a remote forest in the dark of night. As she feels her way, her senses heightened by danger, she conjures for readers the feeling of finding their way in the dark by the...
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Pulp At Play: The Handmade Papers of Tamil Nadu at Red Queen Book Arts
It’s an open secret that outside the enormous industrial manufacture of paper for packaging and publishing, paper making remains one of the more prolific creative crafts in the world. Visitors to Saltgrass Press in Sugarhouse will have seen exotic papers, made in places like Japan from a range of renewable, vegetable sources, used to add...
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Gravity Hill, by Max Werner
A bee at work in the cherry blossoms Gravity Hill, by Maximilian Werner For an essayist and fishing enthusiast, popular University of Utah writing professor Maximilian Werner didn’t do too badly with Crooked Creek, his first novel. Nominated for the Utah Book Award, it went up against In This Light, a collection of short stories...
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Danielle Blade’s Glass in Park City this Weekend
Glass is the most contentious medium in art, and has been so since mid-way through the 20th century. Before that there were just as many arguments among glass artists and their audience, but they were tempests in so many blown glass teapots. What happened to change all that was, as could be expected, money. Glass,...
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Painted Faces: Bierstadt to Warhol at the UMFA
Individual works in Bierstadt to Warhol: American Indians in the West at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) may include western scenery, desert skies, colorful iconography, ethnic clothing and possessions, horses, and assorted mythic activities, alone or in various combinations. Some contain none of these. But the one thing they all have in common is...
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The Earth Is Not Flat: A Reading at Kings English
The theme of Friday evening’s festivities at King’s English was “The Earth Is Not Flat,” from the title of Katherine Coles’ fifth volume of poetry, just published and eagerly anticipated by followers of Utah’s leading poet. If that title sounds more like it belongs on a scientific treatise than it does a collection of lyrical...
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Alex Danchev’s Cézanne, A Life
Artworks can make visible the success of their makers, but to understand the struggles that produced them, and so the triumph they represented, something more is needed. Paul Cézanne was an artist who mastered his chops long before he was accepted by the gatekeepers, and the stories of his masterworks, and the fates that befell...
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RELAY—Shalee Cooper and Amanda Moore at Kayo Gallery
by Geoff Wichert Within the matte and frame lies an almost blank, gray rectangle. Recognizing the one contrasting spot—a foot, toes downward, entering at the top-left corner—causes this undifferentiated area to pop into focus: a reach of asphalt or concrete stretching away from the camera, into which open space a woman is just stepping. The...
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Koichi Yamamoto: the Local Benefits of a Peripatetic Printmaker
by Geoff Wichert “With no news from abroad, a culture ends up repeating the same things to itself. It needs the foreign not to imitate, but to transform.” —Eliot Weinberger We take for granted that Utah has one of the more vibrant and lively arts cultures in the nation. That said, it also has its...
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Ryan Harrington and Gentry Blackburn at Kayo Gallery
by Geoff Wichert At Kayo in November, two eternal, contrary trends in art occupy opposing walls in what has become Shilo Jackson’s signature exhibition style. On one side, Ryan Harrington’s exquisitely crafted assemblages exemplify the Contemporary mode: each broadside makes a philosophical statement: here they comment on the universal, counterintuitive resort to organized, industrial violence...
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CUAC North? A Response
by Geoff Wichert My first published writings on art were written in Southern California, and published by a magazine in Portland, Oregon. They were written in the LA area because that was where my stained glass studio was, and the city was then a hot place for glass art. My articles, about glass art in...
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Personal Testimony: Battleground States at UMOCA
by Geoff Wichert In so many ways our modern societies are enlightened, more civilized in matters of personal liberty than was true in the past. Most of us probably take for granted that the ongoing debate over same-sex marriage marks a watershed in evolving public attitudes. Yet while there has been intolerance and intransigence in...
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Melanie Rae Thon’s In This Light
by Geoff Wichert In This Light, University of Utah English Professor and award-winning author Melanie Rae Thon’s most recent story collection, brings together works from a quarter century of her writing, thus becoming in effect a cross section of her artistic development. It begins with two of her early stories, which are accessible if almost...
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