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.
There’s a novel waiting to be written in the basement of the Harold B. Lee Library. Or — considering the visuals — maybe a film or limited series for the small screen. The essential treatment is ripe for development. At the start of the 20th century, two young […]
We could say that art of the landscape is always concerned with scale. Land art was so revolutionary precisely because it brought us out of the gallery and restored us to the immense scale of the actual landscape. But we make a distinction between Land and landscape art […]
So light and airy, transparent even, is Claudia Casarino’s “El Otro Abrazo,” you might miss it, tucked away in the corner of the BYU Museum of Art’s exhibition Monumental Matters. A tulle blouse scaled up to fit an individual who would be several stories tall, it has been […]
Hikmet Sidney Loe left in the summer of 2021. Left Utah, that is. Moved her residence 385 miles south to Nevada, where she now teaches in the art history department at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Left Salt Lake City, where she had lived for decades, working […]
I’ve been thinking about Colour Maisch’s porcelain pieces ever since I saw them at Current Work in the fall. Not sure why. Maybe because they remind me of a philosopher’s stone (as in the Chinese Gongshi, not as in Harry Potter). I just think I’d like to look at them for a long while. Sculpture isn’t cheap, though (Go big or go home, is how I’m feeling this year), and I don’t really hang with a wealthy crowd, so, here’s what I’m thinking: she’s got a show going up at the Kimball In Park City on December 9. Hang out in their parking lot next week and while she’s loading the pieces in and out …
Veera Kasicharernvat stands tall, though not rigid. As he moves about his studio, weaving between press and table and bookshelves, his movements are supple, purposeful. Quick with a smile, his is a quiet, joyful presence. The energy he brings to this space, where he paints and prints and […]
Like so much that has to do with Ukraine, the Southern Utah Museum of Art’s exhibition of Ukrainian photographers, up through Dec. 23, can’t help but be subsumed by the massive pain and destruction caused by the Russian aggression against the country. In May of this year, when […]
Because exhibitions are scheduled months, if not years, in advance, it may be a while before we see the curatorial hand of the Utah Museum of Fine Art’s new senior curator. But, with the goals she has set, Alisa McCusker has plenty to keep herself busy behind the […]
In Utah, modernism was welcomed with open arms by only a belated minority. Three decades after New York’s Armory Show — when the various isms of modern art developed in Europe were revealed to the American public — artists in the state of Utah were still struggling with skeptical peers and a bewildered if not belligerent public — a public that often chose not simply to ignore the new isms, as they might with artistic trends today; they attacked, or at the very least, mocked them. Modern artists, to much of the Utah public, were considered incompetent or deranged, seen as hucksters and commies.
Tiffini Porter couldn’t not do this. “This” being a crisp new gallery space — sharp white walls, weathered concrete floors — tucked into a nondescript warehouse space in Salt Lake City’s Granary district. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long, long time,” says the newly minted gallerist. […]
Seventy years ago, Utah artist Lynn Fausett wanted to turn the administrative building of the soon-to-be-demolished state penitentiary into an art center. Other ideas for the old prison’s acreage (now home to Sugar House Park and Highland High School) included a reconstruction of the old Salt Lake Theatre […]
The pandemic interrupted many habits and routines. Two years later, some of them are welcome losses, a few we may have resumed regretfully, while the resumption of others are joyful rediscoveries of the before times. Jaunts to the Salt Lake City Library, which for 70 years has provided […]
Zachary Proctor paints moments of courage and triumph: race car drivers, acrobats, horsemen and stunt jumpers. But his works are also full of foreboding and disaster: a race car smashing into a wall, a mammoth shark seen rising to engulf a small boat (see our review from Feb. […]
Mrs. Wallen could not understand why more Americans did not own fine art. “In Sweden,” she said, “a family of modest means will save for years to purchase a good painting or an exquisite piece of furniture.” (Salt Lake Telegram, 15 May, 1950, p. 16) Vera (if we’re […]
Gail Martin had one of the better retorts to the modern art skeptics of his day: “Strange is it not, that the man who demands the latest models in motor cars, who would not be found dead in a 1929 Ford, that the women, who wears only the […]
Though they might be lazy or imprecise, we’ll use them, if only because they are the categories Utah’s mid-century art community used: the modernists and the conservatives — two camps, engaged after the conclusion of the Second World War in a battle for what little attention, prestige or […]
We expect art to do a lot of things: be visually stunning, yes, please; express something meaningful, hopefully; teach us something important, possibly. We also hope art can change the world. And the world needs a lot of changing: institutional inequities, catastrophic climate change, terrorism and torture, the […]
