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 then, increasing control […]
After a hundred and fifty years of unparalleled innovation, the most far-reaching development in art hasn’t turned out to be the splatter elbowing aside the brush, or performance taking the place of the object, or even abstraction replacing representation. Since 1912, when Picasso glued a picture of chair […]
Some years ago I was standing with a friend, looking up at the night sky, when she suddenly announced that she could see a face in the full moon’s disk. Yes, I replied: the Man in the Moon. Then she explained that in her forties she still thought […]
Chad Tolley & Members Show continues at Saltgrass Printmakers through the end of May. A postcard from SaltGrass Printmakers announcing a members’ show always gets posted by my door: a “must-see” event that by itself justifies a trip to Sugarhouse and the downtown environs. The collective of artists that make up the […]
Bill Viola, this year’s Tanner lecturer on human values, is the best known and most critically admired video artist. He has the kind of all-but-exclusive prominence held by Nam June Paik in closed-circuit TV and Robert Smithson in earthworks, that Dale Chihuly has in glass or, for that […]
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 […]
The camera looks out through a small, square window set high in a wall overlooking some trees and what might be a garden run wild. Through it we see an odd figure shamble into view, walking away from us. His shapeless clothing and bucket-like hat hide any sense […]
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 […]
The documents on display in Amy Jorgensen’s The Body Archive: Residual Evidence must be among the most gregariously challenging photographs ever shown. (At the Central Utah Art Center in Ephraim through December 6 and at Art Access from 15 June through July 30, 2007.) Large and colorful, they are full of the optical pleasures […]
A long time ago in a gallery far, far away, rebels banded together to create an art with a new relation to reality. They called their art “Realism,” but we know it today as merely the opening engagement of a movement that came to be called “Modernism.” The […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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: […]
