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.
Freedom Would Be Mine at the Kimball Art Center celebrates the career of feminist art heroine Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002), whose earliest sociopolitical artwork preceded the 1970s flourish of feminist artists. Because she was an initial outlier to the feminist art movement typically associated with names like […]
When the towers—there were more than two—of the World Trade Center fell on 9/11, emergency medical personnel anticipated an avalanche of critical injuries. While the survivors on that day were never counted, responders knew from experience what to expect: eight years before, when a bomb exploded beneath one […]
A sometimes helpful way to conceptualize Modern Art is “old wine in new bottles.” James Joyce, the essential modernist, took a 2,500-year-old epic poem, the “Odyssey,” and repackaged it as a novel—a literary form only a couple of centuries old—that he called “Ulysses,” after the poem’s protagonist, even […]
“Blind Faith” (detail) by Vincent Mattina There isn’t any rule against making art from a personal, as opposed to universal, point of view. Indeed, it could be argued that most good art started out with something private in it that energized the man or woman who made it. […]
In biology, circumstances—what scientists call “niches”—summon particular organisms into being. So it may have been inevitable that BYU and Snow College, two of the principal breeding grounds of Utah art, would each possess a teacher who is also a prolific artist, a keen student of local culture, a […]
Curation is always difficult. It involves hours of work and focus with the added combination of a keen eye and a strong will. More often than not, it means accepting that in the eyes of some you’ll be a hero and a genius, while for others, you might […]
We cross paths with dozens or more people in our communities every day but how often do we take the time to sit down with them and share stories? For Holladay artist Jim McGee the chance to get to know his neighbors came when he applied for and […]
“The Set” (detail) by Wren Ross. Sometime around 1970, feminist historians began to make all sorts of discoveries about the primacy of artistic and scientific discoveries during what has been called the Enlightenment. Among these was the realization that, just as artists often perform the difficult early stages […]
There is a neat taking-off trick here: two of Jennifer Rasmusson’s back-in-time representational paintings are here, separated from her New Abstracts now filling A Gallery’s white-on-white indoor sky-lit courtyard area. The pre-abstract “Collection of Blues” is eye-level; it’s very large; one bloom is the size of your head. […]
Whether it is upheld as an integral part of a religious belief system or simply acknowledged as myth by a more secular audience, what took place in the Garden of Eden continues to inform the way Western civilization has come to understand, represent, and feel about the body. […]
“In the Top of the Mountains: Jon Browning” by Rob Adamson The past is becoming an increasingly hot topic in the present as scientific and technological advancements have made DNA analysis relatively simple and cheap, and the amassing of historical documents, journals and photos, easily accessible online. These […]
Installation view of Cordell Taylor’s Process exhibition at The Gallery at the Main. The gallery on the fourth floor of the City Library includes not only a large interior space but also its exterior walls and the mezzanine-like floor space outside. Normally, it rewards two artists sharing the […]
