The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.
When Briana Dolan and Kevin O’Keefe opened the doors of the Mountain America Exposition Center in Sandy on May 14th, they were testing a thesis. Salt Lake City, they had argued for the better part of a year, was ready for a serious, national-caliber fine art fair. The […]
When Ann Poore wrote about Clubhouse on South Temple for 15 Bytes in early 2017, the ink was barely dry on the deed. Dave Brewer and Jessie Jude Gilmore, then co-owners of Photo Collective Studios, had purchased the historic Ladies’ Literary Club building had purchased the historic Ladies’ […]
Twenty years ago, 15 Bytes paid a visit to what we called one of the most unique sculpture gardens you’ll find “well, anywhere.” The Gilgal Sculpture Garden, tucked behind houses and businesses at 749 East 500 South in Salt Lake City’s Central City neighborhood, hasn’t moved. Many Salt […]
A father’s wishes for his son can be a dangerous thing. Arash Shoveiri’s father was an art lover. “He always told me: you have to grow in your art and be successful. This is my wish for you.” But he also stressed that as an artist, you must […]
THE NOMAD’s Issue 4, “Breakthroughs,” is more about the through than the break. There are few explosive moments, not many trumpet blasts. Instead, the issue gathers fiction, memoir, lyric essay, prose poem, and poetry—fifty-four pieces by twenty-seven writers—around breakthrough as passage, as a moving through. The variety of […]
“Besides my children, this has been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. I would have done all this for free.” Lesly Allen is talking about South Salt Lake’s Mural Fest, now in its ninth year and established as Utah’s largest mural festival. She’s not being sentimental. She […]
Before it became International Workers’ Day, before it became a bank holiday, May 1st was a festival of spring: dancing, drinking, flirtation, communal release. It was a ritual of renewal with pagan roots and Christian overlays, not wholly approved by the authorities, where villages gathered around a tall […]
“I don’t want my kids to do my legacy,” says Greggory Wood. “I’m hoping my kids will think well enough of me that they’ll think I’ve given them enough tools to live their life—but not live their life like I think they should live it.” It’s a statement […]
When curator Jeff Lambson first arrived in Utah in 2007 to become the first curator of contemporary art at Brigham Young University’s Museum of Art, it felt like a moment. Contemporary art in the state was gaining momentum, and institutions that had not always been in conversation with […]
“Architecture is the way we commit to a political philosophy in a lot of ways.” Van Lewis says it almost in passing, but it carries weight. It suggests buildings aren’t neutral containers for life — they record what a city believes about itself, or at least what it’s […]
For an exhibition of Christian art, there are surprisingly few images of the main character. The first painting you encounter in Earthbound and Heavenward is Herbert Schmalz’s “The Return from Calvary”—a large, theatrically lit academic canvas that anchors the exhibition’s entrance. It depicts a group of four women […]
You don’t pay taxes on unfinished homes. That may not be the only reason so many houses in the community of Colorado City-Hildale went unfinished, but it is what first drew Jim Mangan to the place. Known for his work across the American West—particularly in Utah and Colorado, […]
Those who follow Utah’s legislative sessions will have noticed the passage last month of SB 193, a bill that would make Good Friday—or at least four hours of it—a state holiday beginning in 2027. Those in certain social media circles will also have heard the clamor surrounding the […]
Light is doing a lot of work in Gwen Davis-Barrios‘ exhibit at Border and Square. And it’s not the flattering kind. Headlights, streetlamps, the ambient glow of a building—her scenes are lit the way the world is at certain hours. Partial light. Temporary light. The kind that picks […]
The exhibition of John Hafen’s work at the Springville Museum of Art is quietly beautiful: pastoral landscapes float in soft tonal harmonies; fields, trees, and distant hills seem to belong to a quieter century. The paintings are assured and accomplished, the work of an artist clearly in command […]
Artists often enter school with raw talent and leave with newly sharpened skills, expected to begin careers—sometimes before they’ve lived long enough to know what they want to say. That possibility nagged at Ben Childress. After a year at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, he […]
Students at Yale can’t finish an entire book. Film students won’t sit through a two-hour movie. These are the headlines used to announce the decline in attention, deep thought and intellectual stamina of America’s rising generation. Enter Darryl Stamp, whose new play, DUMBED DOWN, opens with a scene […]
For poet and book artist Jess Challis, the boundary between writing and visual art has never been a firm line. Her work moves fluidly across mediums—poetry, image, book objects, multimedia—guided less by genre categories than by instinct, material, and the body’s experience of making. “I’ve never felt the […]
Most photographs aren’t begging to be turned into paintings. The things a camera captures effortlessly—busy detail, awkward smiles, a split-second expression—can become stiff or even unbearable once translated into brushwork. But Kirsten Holt Beitler has a rare ability: she can take the casual, unpolished image and make it […]
