Utah Artist Profiles published in 15 Bytes, featuring magazine length profiles of Utah artists.
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 […]
What happens to a successful artistic collaboration when it ends in the death of one of its members? In the midst of their lives, after their children were grown, and with years of opportunity to make splendid works of art before them, Marcee and Ric Blackerby suddenly faced […]
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 […]
Photographers spend their lives recording other people’s stories—weddings, events, news, the fleeting moments that make up someone else’s memory. But they rarely turn the focus on themselves. For longtime Utah photographer Steve Coray, that inversion became both a creative challenge and a reckoning. His recently self-published photo book grew […]
When Alli Harbertson first walked into the Andrews home, it was the paintings that stopped her. “They’re everywhere,” Harbertson recalls. The living room—where Karen Andrews’ hospital bed had been placed—was filled with artwork, paintings covering the walls and leaning against furniture while ceramics, blankets and small sculptures covered […]
Ryan Harrington has lived in Utah long enough to watch its creative landscape reshape itself—slowly, unevenly, and often through the efforts of people working quietly in the background. Over the past two decades, he has become one of those people. His art blends the clarity of design with the energy of urban visual culture: his marker and acrylic works are built from clean lines, calibrated color interactions, balloon-lettering structures, and a long-running block-head character that shifts mood with the smallest change in outline. The work is approachable, polished, and distinctly his. But Harrington’s influence extends far beyond the pieces he makes. Through framing, curating, collecting, teaching, and simply showing up for other artists, he has become a connective thread in Utah’s creative fabric.
When Nuha Moretz moved to Salt Lake City, she found herself drawn to two paths: in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, she launched an art career that had been simmering for years; and, to build a social circle in a new city, she and her husband joined […]
Holly Rios began her training at Western Colorado University, studying printmaking and English, until—as she puts it—she “did the art-school thing and dropped out to learn about real life.” The time away didn’t pull her from art so much as widen the lens: work, people, desire, power, and […]
At the entrance to Saltgrass Printmakers’ Salt Lake City studio, a sinuous form winds across the wall. The dozens of two-foot-square woodcuts, each carved by a different artist and fitted edge to edge, form the Year of the Snake Exquisite Corpse, a sprawling, collaborative print project conceived by […]
If you happened to have visited The True and the Real exhibition at UMOCA during the NCECA annual conference back in March, you probably came across Jason Walker’s “Trophic Cascade.” The sculpture presents a jaguar poised to launch at its prey from a tree hybridized with civic sewer […]
It all started with a dream she had in her mid-20s. She was seeing herself, middle-aged, spinning wool on an old-school spinning wheel in front of a field of sheep. “At that time I knew nothing about [spinning wool], so I had to figure out what this was […]
In the tattooed hands of Virginia Catherall—inch markings on her left hand for ease of measuring lengths in purl and knit—two simple sticks and a single strand of yarn transform into wearable landscapes that capture the sublime beauty of Utah’s salt flats and vistas of glacier-carved mountains. Her […]
Spring is emerging. Critters are out, both in the soil and on the canvas. There’s no one better than Salt Lake City painter Trevor Dahl to manifest the good happy stuff of this season of re-emerging life and blooming. Whether it’s on canvas, stretched linen or the side […]
They are part ceramic, part painting; filled with girls, in fancy dresses, climbing trees and mountains in exotic landscapes; and there are monsters, lots of monsters, threatening or doing battle with the young ladies. In one work, a girl hefts a giant sword to slice open the gut […]
Elise Wehle mentions two big accomplishments in 2024: For the first time in her career, a museum purchased her work; she also potty-trained her youngest child. “Although I’ve been creating art professionally for twelve years, this year was the first time a museum acquired my art…not just one […]
It would surely come as a surprise to visit an artist’s home and find in it no works of art, no books, and most unlikely of all, little evidence of the owners’ creativity. The home of Mark and Kari England, a charming house on a street devoid of […]
Kent Christensen is an acclaimed artist, illustrator, and designer as comfortable in New York City and London as he is Sundance or the Sugar House neighborhood of Salt Lake City. For more than four decades he’s been making art from all of those places, as we see in […]
There is something to be said about experience, about story. Every person has their own and no story is exactly alike. Yet, somehow, all stories have the power to connect us. The human experience, though unique, shows evidence of a life lived. Stories allow people to relate to […]
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 […]
