Geoff Wichert has degrees in critical writing and creative nonfiction. He writes about art to settle the arguments going on in his head.
Installation view of “Cities of Conviction” at UMOCA. My dad told me a story once, from his childhood in Kansas. This kid lost all his money at a carnival, pitching rings at the necks of Coke bottles, trying and failing to win a prize for his sweetheart. The […]
Angela Ellsworth’s “Seer Bonnets” frame works in the modern and contemporary gallery. Perhaps the only constant for venues that show art is change. Exhibits come and go, while curators faced with more objects to show than space to display them rotate often uncompromising objects through necessarily flexible, though […]
Also known as prestidigitation or legerdemain, sleight of hand refers to the manual dexterity used by conjurors and magicians to manipulate commonplace physical objects so that they appear to materialize and dematerialize right before our eyes, making the impossible and remarkable appear normal and ordinary. The painter Jeff Juhlin does something analogous in […]
“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times . . .” So Charles Dickens celebrated an era that has resonated far too often with human history, but perhaps never more so than it does with the Americas today. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens […]
Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change, into something rich and strange In a now-legendary time, Howard Brough carried primary responsibility for the splendid, if spatially challenging gallery on the fourth floor of the City Library. During those years of service he must have […]
Arguably the greatest American photographer, Walker Evans was visually omnivorous and found unprecedented subjects everywhere he looked as he traversed the United States before and after, but most effectively during the Great Depression. Among the most eloquent of his discoveries were the advertising and information signage he spotted […]
Sometime after World War II, the field of literature—readers, writers, publishers, and commentators—split in two, leaving academics and historians on one side and current producers—makers of what in the visual arts is now called ”contemporary studio practice”—on the other. Frequent wailing about the death of reading refers primarily […]
Sometime in the 1980s, art world observers began to notice that artists were often among the first entrepreneurs to move into neighborhoods widely considered uninhabitable, where they would jump-start what soon became the gentrification process. It would have been in large, coastal American cities’ industrial and warehouse areas […]
The Gallery at Library Square boasts a unique perspective, allowing its audience to peer from its tidy enclosure over the fourth floor railing and into the towering abyss of the library’s atrium. Yet so quick are we to become inured to experience that this once acrophobia-inducing encounter has, […]
Carel Pieter Brest van Kempen is a Utah native who grew up in Emigration Canyon, but his name invokes the Northern Renaissance: the great scientific and artistic era when Carel Fabritius painted “The Goldfinch,” an ornithological study celebrated in a 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel; and Pieter Bruegel the […]
C.C.A. Christensen painted his most important work, the “Mormon Panorama,” in the mid-1870s. Even though as an immigrant he hadn’t witnessed the persecution and violence central to the stories he gave visual form, it was his dramatic images, in which nature herself seemed to recoil in horror, that […]
In “Dig,” a large and very colorful landscape in a portrait format, a middle-aged man, lean and strong from a lifetime of hard work, leans forward from the waist, his bare torso so shiny with sweat it reflects the sky above him. As he digs, the passion of […]
