Book reviews on visual arts books and books related to Utah’s art community.
A friend suggested, in jest, that I spend a few years editing down the thousands of entries in the new Dictionary of Utah Fine Artists to a more manageable Dictionary of Utah Fine Artists Who Matter. They all matter, of course. Not being an artist himself, my friend […]
Just eight years before his death at the age of 90, artist and photographer Gaell Lindstrom wrote: “Art starts where words leave off … I hope not to produce paintings that require words. I don’t think writers would want to write something that needed visual illustrations. A significant […]
Life magazine published “Three Mormon Towns” on September 6, 1954. Today, the photo-essay by Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams — two of the best-known photographers in the medium’s history — is largely unknown. James Swensen’s new book, In a Rugged Land: Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and the Three […]
Museum collection catalogs provide one entrée into a museum’s collections and serve as a resource to highlight important works; they also serve to entice readers to visit the museum to experience art firsthand. With a catalog as beautifully produced as Collecting on the Edge: The Nora Eccles Harrison […]
I like a man who fly-fishes; who has spent much of his life, “thigh deep in moving water.” Don’t know much about fly-fishing, myself, though I know many who do and revel in its necessary quietude and Zen-like keen focus. Oh, and c’mon, can there be a better-named […]
Many years ago, when my larger-than-life uncle drove from his home in Florida to Salt Lake City he arrived at my parents’ house and bellowed, “What a godforsaken place you live in!” Which was shocking to me since I had always considered my homeland one of the most […]
Early in Chalk hints of a fault line emerge, suggestions of a latent tension that will unfold throughout and disrupt the course of Joshua Rivkin’s rewarding excavation into the life of Cy Twombly. An alumnus of Black Mountain College in the 1950s, Twombly was a rising star in […]
[dropcap]Brian[/dropcap] Kershisnik could be called the Mormon Norman Rockwell – if Rockwell had painted like Chagall and Mormons were still called Mormons – they aren’t supposed to be, I know, but can’t for the life of me recall what replaces the term so recently declared out of favor […]
We are pleased to announce that Hikmet Sidney Loe’s innovative exploration of Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork, The Spiral Jetty Encyclo, has won the 15 Bytes Book Award for Art Book for 2018. David Habben’s steampunk coloring book and Mary Lee Fulkerson’s survey of women artists of the Great […]
Though people travel from around the globe to visit Robert Smithson’s monumental Spiral Jetty, located on the northeastern shore of Great Salt Lake, to this day some Utahns have no idea that one of the 20th century’s most iconic artworks exists in their own backyard. One who does is […]
John Burton, a California artist based in Carmel, was drawn to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by reading the accounts of his Mormon pioneer ancestors. So it seems fitting that, shortly after converting to the church his family had been absent from for a generation, […]
“So, I guess there’s Maynard Dixon and this guy,” a friend muses, thumbing through landscapes of Zion and Grand canyons in The Art and Life of Jimmie Jones. And because he is an excellent landscape painter himself, that comparison sticks. Although Jones exhibited at Phillips Gallery for more […]
Branding the American West, the new exhibit in Brigham Young University Museum of Art’s main floor gallery, is so full of colorful, engaging, accessible paintings, by talented, brand-name artists of regional interest, that patrons likely will find themselves breezing through the exhibit, enjoying one scene after another, with […]
Factoid: White men can’t dance. (Well there was Baryshnikov, Nureyev, David Bowie. . .) But this has nothing to do with our book review—just an attention-grabber. Factoid: Most artists can’t write about their own work . . . Fact: It’s much easier to write long than short. So […]
by Christine Baczek America’s West is full of lonely roads and desolate countryside where a paper map and spare tire are more important than a cell phone. These roads set the stage for Passing Through, in which author and photojournalist Richard Menzies recounts the “existential wonderland of a […]
Commissioned to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 2016 formation of the National Park Service, the book is a joy to peruse. At a whopping 288 pages, this coffee-table-size tome brings the Grand Teton Range and Jackson Hole area to life in two dimensions. From “Trappers and Traders” to more contemporary works (by Poor Yorick’s Brad Slaugh, for one) it includes more than 375 paintings, drawings and photographs of the Tetons landscape and its wildlife covering over 200 years.
In the 15th Century morality play Everyman, the common conceit is that mankind will come upon a day of reckoning whereupon each man’s life will be scored by each of his good deeds. Everyman, reminded of death at all turns, seeks assurance from his fellows that he has […]
