Utah Exhibition Reviews published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s art magazine, including reviews of local Utah artists, regional artists, group exhibitions and traveling exhibits of national and international artists.
From the high deserts of Utah to the shores and redwood forests of the Pacific, the exhibit Intersections in Nature describes and investigates landscapes that have impacted artists and local residents Cody Chamberlain and Len Starbeck. Both artists use their histories of mixed outdoor employment to inform their […]
Abstraction broke onto the art landscape of different countries at different times, but often as a response to disillusionment with the narrative art relied on previous knowledge of religious or mythical stories. Instead, abstraction provided a totally self-referential possibility, where an artist created their own code of line, […]
Like clockwork, at 10 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Willie Smith, who has mild Down syndrome, accompanies his father Tony from their home in the Avenues to their West-side studio across the street from the LDS Church’s Welfare Square in Salt Lake City. Willie immediately goes to […]
We know him — if we know him at all — as the creator of “Metaphor: The Tree of Utah,” the 87-foot tall sculpture that surprises travelers driving through the Bonneville Salt Flats along Utah’s I-80. But Karl Momen is more than this one-hit wonder (or miss — […]
Art has long sought to capture the transitory and sensory in physical form. From the transformative capabilities of an artist’s two-dimensional canvas to contemporary art’s revolutionary experimentation with media, material doesn’t just inform art, it is art. Or as philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously stated, “The medium is the […]
Audience tastes evolve, institutional needs change. Which is why museums can find it difficult to always hew closely to the visions of their founders or the intentions of their donors. When it opened in 2016, the Southern Utah Museum of Art honored, as its inspiration, Jimmie Jones, a […]
‘“Where are my people?” the mountains cry out.’ This line from a young Diné (Navajo) poet sets the tone for an exhibition curated by Dr. James Swensen, Melanie Allred, and Meagan Anderson. Featuring visual art, poetry, and ephemera produced by students of the Intermountain Indian School, the display […]
“Peonies VII,” etching by Jenni Christensen, photo by John Snyder “I have always loved flowers and the garden. The variation is endless.” – Jenni Christensen Although in the high desert of the Great Basin, you could mistake a small patch of Pleasant Grove, Utah, for a flower-filled backyard […]
Disposable plasticware is advertised as a convenient alternative to washing dishes, but are disposables really more convenient? With plastics clogging the ocean, factory waste, climate change, and multi-billion dollar initiatives needed to pull the earth back from the brink, we are being killed by disposables. However, convenience has […]
The history of photography is bound up in chemical and technical overhauls, and when artists combine and tweak these photographic processes, new levels of expression emerge. Contemporary photographers Christine Baczek and David Hyams, co-founders of Luminaria in Salt Lake City, are reviving alternative photographic agents and playing with […]
Utah will be host to at least four major quilt shows in 2019. Is this the best one? Possibly. Technically, it’s not a quilt show. Things That Matter is a “fiber art” exhibition. With one or two exceptions, however, these works are quilts, ones that, as the show’s […]
“Use of color” is an expression over-abundantly used, often because someone doesn’t know what to say about art, or artists: as an artist, you are congratulated on “your use of color” when, of course, you usually have no choice. Color’s there, it happens; you might have chosen the […]
