Recently deceased Utah artists remembered by their friends and colleagues, published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s art magazine.
A gallerist who helped build Salt Lake City’s thriving art scene, Dolores Chase died on April 18, 2023. As her obituary states, Chase was “passionate about poetry, the visual arts, roses, the ocean, and politics.” Chase, who grew up in Berkeley, spent three years in Europe before completing […]
Can anyone be an artist? Harold D. (“Pete”) Petersen seemed to believe so. In 1993 he and son Mark founded the Petersen Art Center in Sugar House to nurture and shape artistic dexterity. The new Dictionary of Utah Fine Artists describes him as, “a talented watercolorist and art […]
Vicki Acoba was a well-known fixture in the Utah arts community, especially noted for her small porcelain teapots. She regularly sold out her stock at the Avenues Street Fair, Utah Art Market, Holladay Blue Moon Festival and various galleries along the Wasatch Front – a fact which always […]
Nestled away from the sounds of the city, an art studio sits in Ogden’s foothills. To the average eye, it masks itself as a beautiful house, with architecture unlike others in the area. The studio was designed and built by the artist who works in it, Paul Butler. […]
Thomas Brewster Kass, 85, “an artist, a friend, a mentor,” according to architect Kenneth R. Pollard, passed away early Tuesday morning, the 26th of July 2022. “He was a brilliant teacher who touched many and made people see the color of the day,” Pollard says Born in Rochester, […]
John Hess, 83, was reportedly a patient sort, a mandatory virtue in a successful weaver or, as he put it, “a mixed media textile artist, concentrating on folded, double woven cotton reliefs.” He died Friday night, July 15, at a cousin’s home, of causes related to age, after having […]
There will be no funeral for Gary Max Collins, a prolific Utah painter who made his career from art for five decades. A celebration of life, a chance to share stories? Maybe, at a later date, as he directed in the obituary he prepared for himself, where he […]
A quiet man with a sincere smile and a great handshake, Sam Stewart was a wizard financier, admittedly “hooked” on stocks but unattached to money itself. Instead, he gloried in what he could make money do for nonprofit organizations, to aid museums and change the lives of artists, to further […]
(This article was written while Annie Blake was in hospice. On Dec. 16 her husband announced on Instagram that she had passed.) “How could it be possible to take in all the sad stories and become big enough to hold them all? Or to compress them […]
Friends hoped Fred Adams would go on forever. Not in order to keep having grandiose ideas like that of founding a world-class Shakespearean festival in the middle of the Utah desert (and then bringing that dream to fruition in a big, Tony- and Emmy-award-winning way), but just to […]
“The strange and disconnected are the stuff of my creations.” – Marcee Blackerby Like Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, Salt Lake City author and artist Marcee Blackerby, born in Castle Dale 75 years ago, followed her star and left this planet around 1:15 a.m. on Dec. 30, 2019. […]
Bob Kleinschmidt, who taught printmaking at the University of Utah for 30 years, died peacefully Friday night, Aug. 2, at home surrounded by his family following an extended illness. His friend and colleague Joseph Marotta remembers him as the “Buddhist master of the Art and Art History Department […]
“Life is too short to eat bad food,” Robert Lewis Bliss, FAIA, always declared as he appreciatively dug a fork into a small plate of seared prawns in a Zürsun yellow split pea puree at Manoli’s fine Greek restaurant near Liberty Park; or when he hoisted a thin […]
[dropcap]U[/dropcap]tah painter and sculptor Franz M. Johansen, who died Aug. 23 in Provo, found his artistic mission on an LDS church mission in the British Isles. There, his wife Josie Morris confirms, he learned about William Blake, who as a boy said he had seen God through a […]
Early on in our relationship, Tom Alder had to convince me on an important point: a lack of evidence should not get in the way of a good story. Evidence should be sought, Tom conceded, arguments for plausibility laid out, but ultimately, if nothing disproved a story or […]
