For Springville Museum of Art director Emily Larsen creating exhibitions is about forging connections between people and the larger human experience. It’s a philosophy rooted in a life-changing moment at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. As an LDS-missionary facing a mental health crisis, Larsen made the difficult decision […]
You never know where an exhibition might take you. For Jessica Kinsey, Executive Director of the Southern Utah Museum of Art, an exhibition experienced in Oklahoma ultimately brought her to Utah. Originally from Oklahoma and raised in Indiana, Kinsey returned to her birth state to study art history […]
When Kasey Lou Lindley visits an exhibition she looks at it through the eyes of both an artist and a curator. A multidisciplinary artist based in Salt Lake City, Utah, Lindley approaches her work through the lens of intersectional ecofeminism, addressing place-based issues with a focus on nature, […]
For Janalee Emmer, the transformative power of exhibitions remains at the heart of her curatorial philosophy. Whether engaging with medieval altarpieces, contemporary landscape photography, or Renaissance sculpture, she sees exhibitions as portals into other worlds, capable of reshaping how we see and experience art. Emmer, director of the […]
When asked about artistic influence, Courtney Derrick doesn’t turn to the history books or international art stars, but to someone closer to home: Randall Lake. After earning her BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Utah in 2002, Derrick left the state and worked for a […]
For Vanessa Romo, art is more than a discipline or a profession; it is a way to navigate and understand the complexities of life. Her inspirations—Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, and Maryann Webster—act as pillars that inform her artistic practice, influencing both her subject matter and her approach to […]
For Laurie Lisonbee, art is a meditative, almost metaphysical process. “Art is a fascinating search for something that is coming into consciousness and making itself known,” she explains. “The process of artmaking then gives physicality to what was formerly intangible and unknown.” Her paintings combine traditional realism with […]
“I was almost 30 when I started my bachelor’s degree at Weber State,” recalls Amber Peck. Having stepped away from college years earlier to raise her growing family, Peck found herself deeply immersed in the complexities of motherhood. “I was depressed, and I needed something for me. So, […]
Museums, hikes, restaurants — parents expose their children to a variety of experiences, never knowing what might stick. Shauntel Clements’ parents couldn’t have known that, when they stopped to tour the Maynard Dixon home, the experience would remain with their 10 year-old daughter, and inspire her artistic career. […]
The first real art Dennis Stott encountered was a drawing he discovered as a young boy while rummaging through an old, roll-top desk. That small artifact set him on a path that took him first to Butte College then CSUC in northern California. It was at Chico State […]
For nearly three decades in his role as a professor of ceramics at Brigham Young University’s department of art, and as an award-winning artist with a long list of regional and national exhibitions on his CV, Brian Christensen has been able to observe the changing critical and commercial […]
When Claire Tollstrup thinks about influence her first thoughts go to Monet, though Mary Cassatt would be a close second. “Claude Monet showed in his later work how to be free in his paintings. His loose brush strokes give every artist permission to be themselves and to interpret […]
Those of a certain age may remember the 1997 exhibition of James Castle at the Salt Lake Art Center, back when Ric Collier was the director: small works on cardboard, depicting interior settings and rural scenes, made using the Idaho artist’s spit mixed with soot from the fireplace. […]
Sam Forlenza says that whether working as a clinical psychologist or as an artist, “tapping into feelings is critical. I seek to uncover emotions known or unknown, old, or new.” A native of Newark, NJ, Forlenza has an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from Rutgers University (where he […]
“Drawing is at the center of what I do,” says Suzanne Bybee, a Salt Lake City artist who relocated to Utah after living in Washington, D.C. for many years. “[My] pieces are conversations; my aim is to listen and be a part of the dialogue developing, learning from […]
When Richard Taylor scrawls mathematical equations across a canvas, as he does in his 2019 piece “Schwarzschild and all that,” or invokes a German physicist and astronomer in the title, it’s not some form of intellectual posing, an aesthete veering sharply out of his lane. The Salt Lake […]
Joseph Toney looks to a variety of sources for influence. He aspires to be like Albrecht Dürer, the German Renaissance artist who was an early typeface designer, mathematician, painter, illustrator and printmaker, by mastering several mediums. He looks to 20th-century art movements like Cubism, Futurism and Op Art […]
