4/30 CITY WEEKLY: SLC and the creator of “The Whale” take 630 victory laps around a beloved public artwork.
On a chilly, overcast morning in February, a fit man in his mid-40s jogged steadily in small concentric circles, looping a roundabout in the middle of Salt Lake City’s eclectic 9th and 9th neighborhood. His gait was smooth and practiced, the stride of someone who has likely run marathons—someone familiar with the rigors of pushing through 26 grueling miles.
But on this day, he ran in tight, dizzying, .04-mile loops—630 of them, to be precise—around a fiberglass whale.
Tom Mi, founder of the Salty Star Run Club, said the image is a regular occurrence. He can’t help but laugh when he thinks of Jackson Bradshaw—the first person believed to have ever completed a full marathon around the whale sculpture, now dubbed the first official “Whale-athon.”
“It started as a joke,” Mi said. “But now it’s almost like this semi-religious cult following. Obviously, I don’t think any of it is super serious, but people love it.”
4/30 SLTRIB: This Diné author’s novel showcases the ‘grit and resilience’ of Indigenous people. She just received a major honor for it.
When Stacie Shannon Denetsosie first got the news that she was one of The National Book Foundation’s 2025 “5 Under 35” honorees — she thought it was a spam call. Then, came the tunnel vision, followed by the tears.
“I immediately started crying,” Denetsosie, who is a member of Navajo Nation, said. “I scared the poor woman who called me, because it is incredibly special. It shows that my craft as a Diné woman, as a writer, it’s been recognized.”
The foundation acknowledged Denetsosie for her 2023 debut novel, “The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories” — a collection of short stories about the long-lasting effects of settler colonialism on Diné people.
4/30 SLUGMAG: The Enigmatic Artist is Resurrected in the Form of Elmer Presslee
What happened to the artist? I’m not talking about modern-day gimmicky artists looking to go viral and clout chase on Musk’s internet, I’m talking about the true blue artist. People who pour their souls into their work and birth a new life into popular culture. The enigmatic, sometimes unappealing, making us reflect inward against our own will, artists. Think Keith Haring or Edward Hopper. While all hope might seem lost, the last true artist is alive and well, and his name is William Robbins a.k.a. Elmer Presslee.
This interview is unlike any interview I’ve conducted thus far in my SLUG career. Presslee is hard to follow, and I don’t mean in terms of talking — we bounce from room to room in his gorgeous home/private art studio while we talk about LSD, aliens and government conspiracies. We ascend up a ladder to a loft filled with art of big-eyed children, David Bowie portraits, sad clowns caressing monkeys and even an original print of the (slightly racist, as Presslee admits) haunting mural from the original Terror Ride at Lagoon before they painted over it. His living room and kitchen are adorned with a wall of old-school Simpsons figurines and Presslee’s own art. He has an old tube TV that he modified into a fish tank and a Garfield coin-operated mall ride that’s still functional. While we walk and talk, we are followed by his loving and adorable bambino hairless cat, Ziggy. To say I could’ve stayed there for hours would be an understatement.
4/25 DESERET NEWS: Latter-day Saint artists ‘Lift Up the Hands Which Hang Down’ in new exhibit
Months after The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was formally organized in 1830, Frederick G. Williams chose to be baptized as a member of the Church. Williams’ wife, Rebecca Swain, had already joined by that time, and the two were living in Kirtland, Ohio. Williams almost immediately served a mission with Oliver Cowdery to Missouri. And less than two years after he was baptized, Williams was called to serve as a counselor to the Prophet Joseph Smith. This calling is recorded in Doctrine and Covenants 81.
The Lord’s counsel to Williams in the fifth verse of that section called him to be faithful and to stand in this new calling. Four months earlier, Williams’ predecessor in the same calling had been released “when he failed to continue in a manner consistent with this appointment” (Doctrine and Covenants 81, section heading). The Lord continued in the second part of verse 5 saying, “Succor the weak, lift up the hands which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees.”
4/25 SLTRIB: New international exhibit showcases the wide range of LDS art
Art remains one of the best ways to tell the story of faith in all its marvelous variations, which is why The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been sponsoring an international art competition every three or four years since 1987.
“A different style of art is like a different language. ….We have such a variety of art languages as people ‘liken the scriptures’ unto themselves,” said Latter-day Saint art curator Laura Paulsen Howe, who curated the 13th International Art Competition that opened Thursday in downtown Salt Lake City. “Artists are going to use the visual grammar that makes sense to them, that they grew up in and that they learned.”
4/19 SLTRIB: Could this Salt Lake City artist’s Granary District dino sculpture become the ‘whale of the west’?
One of Utah’s native creatures hopes to find a permanent home in the Granary District.
“Kosmo” is a 20-foot-long steel sculpture of a Kosmoceratops, a plant-eating dinosaur discovered in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. He’s the creation of Salt Lake City woodworker and artist Garth Franklin, who hopes Kosmo will become a mascot and anchor of the city’s Granary District, like the 9th and 9th’s whale has become to the east.
Kosmo came about through the open streets initiative, an annual project between the city, the Downtown Alliance and The Blocks Arts District meant to improve walkability and promote pedestrian-friendly streets.
UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.
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