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.
Big, glossy images of majestic panoramas, colors punched with saturation. With today’s portable technology and the state’s majestic landscapes these shots are easy to take: you’ll find them on just about anyone’s Instagram page. But not on Andrew McAllister’s. As if in reaction to these landscape glamour shots, […]
When she was four years old, MyLoan Dinh fled Vietnam with her family. Her mother packed a small bag with provisions. Her father burned all his identifying documents. They boarded the “Lam Giang,” the last South Vietnamese Navy ship to leave Saigon. Nearly half a century later, these […]
You could consider it the immigrant dream. Since coming to Utah from Mexico with her parents as a young teenager, Nancy Rivera has gone to university, embarked on a promising career and found a partner to share her life. She has made Utah her home. But the plaintive, […]
As the gates of heaven are opened and dead relatives reunite with their families, Day of the Dead celebrations can turn into festive events. At the many exhibitions celebrating the holiday throughout the state, including at the St. George Art Museum, you’ll find rollicking skeletons, multi-colored flags, dance […]
It’s easy to get in a rut. Same meals. Same routes. Same wardrobe. Even same art. Salt Lake City has felt in a rut. For years now, murals have been popping up all over the place. Some of them very good. Some less so. But, good or bad, […]
If neo-classicism was the architecture of the American republic, brutalism became the style of the American empire. Under John F. Kennedy’s administration, the federal government prioritized funding for public buildings, infrastructure, and urban renewal projects at a time when the stripped-down, imposing style was in vogue in architectural […]
Your intuition might suggest otherwise, but abstraction has been the rule and realism the exception in art. From the caves of Chauvet to the walls of Canyon de Chelly, artists have always extrapolated from the material world to create a pictorial language. (And a written one: most of […]
This might be the one gallery we don’t want to move downtown. With the number of galleries closing up or moving away from our bedraggled, yearning city center (see our article here), any new blood would be welcome blood. Right? But Mestizo Arts’ strength, its crowning achievement, its […]
Symbols being slippery things, you don’t have to believe Joshua Luther when he tells you his current works are about the transmission of knowledge and wisdom. Or, believe him, Luther being the hand that drew these images and the mind that conceived them. But don’t feel constrained by […]
His show now up at Fice is not the one Chuck Landvatter wanted to hang. There were technical glitches — evasive studs, hardware failures, a broken TV — so that the piece he was most proud of, a video collaboration with Eric Overton, ended up precariously propped on […]
“Morag Shepherd never plays it safe,” is what Matthew Ivan Bennett wrote about the Utah playwright in 2022. His words ring true a year later, as Immigrant Daughter’s Theatre prepares to stage Shepherd’s “Worship,” a play that delves deep into the complexities of devotion and the dark undercurrents of […]
In the West it can be easy to be seduced by the grand vistas — the panoramas unveiled at high places. As Louise Fischman shows in her current exhibit at the Gallery at Library Square, the details are just as visually intriguing. And even related. In Unearthed, she […]
On a paved path that brings you from 21st-century, highway-adjacent developments toward the classic 20th-century town center, three cut-out metal sculptures greet you: a miner, a dinosaur and a pictograph. Welcome to Price, Utah. First there were the dinosaurs — the nearby Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, on the […]
In the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary art, new mediums and materials constantly emerge, challenging conventional notions of what constitutes fine art. But sometimes we look to old materials and techniques and reimagine or recontextualize them. For centuries the result of practical necessity — and generally considered a folk […]
If you like your skateboard decks artistic, but whole, rather than chopped up and stitched together (see here), the Urban Arts Gallery’s annual skateboard deck competition may be your thing. Every year in conjunction with the Utah Arts Alliance’s Urban Arts Festival, the gallery and streetwear shop located […]
Portraits are almost awkward by definition: how to pose; to smile or not to smile; what to include in the background. All these decisions, and the primary decision to have ones portrait painted in the first place, give all but the best portraits a sense of awkwardness. Self-portraits […]
Will it matter to you to know that these winding, twisted orgies of positive and negative space, these three-dimensional doodles spiraling and folding onto each other, these rigid stacks of competing planes frozen in time and space, were made from old skateboards? It would explain some things, like […]
