Eva Jorgensen
A profile of Utah artist Eva Jorgensen.
Geoff Wichert
Geoff Wichert has degrees in critical writing and creative nonfiction. He writes about art to settle the arguments going on in his head.
Glass Art Guild Exhibit at Patrick Moore
by Geoff Wichert Forty-five years is a lifetime on the job: long enough to stretch from school to retirement. It is also the age of the American studio glass movement, which began in the 1960s with glass blowing breakthroughs by Harvey Littleton at the University of Wisconsin. Since […]
The Chosen Place, The Timeless People: Kathleen Peterson & Blanche Wilson @ Phillips Gallery
It’s hard to imagine how two bodies of work by two established artists, each making original and mature art and each working at the top of her form, could look more comfortable together than these two. When artists show together they sometimes divide the gallery between them […]
Criticism in the Moment
Art Czar, a recent biography of the dominant critic of modern American art, is sub-titled “The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg.” I take pleasure in these words, and particularly in the word fall. Every critic dies, every critic is diminished by subsequent discourse; but not every critic […]
Encoding the World and Getting the Joke: Stefanie Dykes at C.U.A.C. in Ephraim
Printmaker Stefanie Dykes, whose mostly black-and-white relief prints dating from 2002 till 2005 are on exhibit at the Central Utah Art Center until October 3, apparently finds the present (pun intended) easier to swallow when it’s dressed up to look deceptively like the past. One of the more […]
New Approaches to Utah Standards: Kathleen Peterson and Brian Kershisnik at the CUAC
“Why are the people in Brian Kershisnik’s paintings so ugly?” This question from a visitor to the Central Utah Art Center’s just-concluded exhibit of recent paintings by Kathleen Peterson and Brian Kershisnik sent the director, Adam Bateman, and me searching for an answer. It wouldn’t help to point out that beauty is […]
The Glass Art Guild at Patrick Moore
Glass is unique among the mediums of art for being identified not with a technique or a format but with a material. A glass artist may think of herself as a painter if she focuses on the decoration of two-dimensional surfaces, or a sculptor if she arranges three-dimensional […]
What is Art: Sean Morello at the CUAC
At first sight, Sean Morello’s two-dimensional works seem too slight to support a title that properly belongs to an encyclopedia. But to view What Art Is as a summary is to look through the wrong end of the telescope. Morello, like Art Danto in “The Transfiguration of […]
Sexual Dimorphism & the Sacred Profane: Casey Jex Smith and Sara Osebold at C.U.A.C.
I. If it has become a cliché that art usurps the place in modern life once held by religion, it’s an ironic cliché, for of all the subjects and sources of our art, religion is surely one of the least respected. In fact, in its purest sense […]
Not Your Mother’s Mormon Art: Annie Kennedy at the Central Utah Art Center
In Doctrine and Covenants, a kind of L.D.S. handbook, Joseph Smith enjoins his followers on venerable theological grounds to practice moderation in all things. Those good people, responding out of impulses set even deeper in human nature, have striven ever since to do twice what he asked of […]
Brian Christensen at the CUAC
Some sculptors treat language as just another malleable substance, no different from wax or bronze. BYU Sculpture Professor Brian Christensen has chosen to call the dozen new works on display at the Central Utah Art Center Body and Time. Here “and” stands in for a word we lack: […]