2020 was undoubtedly tough, but Vincent Mattina remarks that it might have been his most productive year yet. He co-curated his first show, Anthropocene, at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center (UCCC), where, along with works by Grant Fuhst and Chauncey Secrist, his works explored environmental themes, while concurrently […]
READ LOCAL First boasts Utah’s most comprehensive collection of poets and authors. For this inaugural month of 2021, we present five poems by Cindy King. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Callaloo, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, River Styx, Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. Recently, King’s poetry was featured on […]
(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 […]
We’ve all got our Holiday media traditions, the books we reread, the movies we watch again. For some, it will be classics like A Christmas Carol or Home Alone; others may span out to less traditional fare, like say In Bruges (give it a try: if you can […]
With our “Still Here” series, we are checking in with members of Utah’s art community to see what the past several months have meant for them. Emily Larsen is a Utah-based curator and collage artist. She currently works as the Head of Exhibitions and Programs at the Springville […]
Despite appearances to the contrary, group exhibitions of art are the norm, and should be. A theme, familiar or exotic, or a location, a medium, even a gender can provide the opportunity to compare how different artists handle the same materials: physical, emotional, contextual. From landscapes featuring Mt. […]
I have been lusting after this Tarot deck for a couple of years now, ever since I saw it on an Australian website I follow, Two Sides Tarot. I couldn’t afford it but loved that it contained lots of little landscapes that looked like Utah (and no court […]
47 years of vessel-making took a rather large toll on my body, and resulted in the need for a number of hand surgeries, one earlier this year (a successful thumb repair). Sadly, I still have another surgery pending to fix a painful neurological problem, and with luck I will be a two-handed maker again.
With our “Still Here” series, we are checking in with members of Utah’s art community to see what the past several months have meant for them. Laura Boardman was raised in Utah and lives most of the time in Salt Lake City with her husband, but spends considerable […]
News broke in December of one of the great, unanticipated art discoveries in our lifetimes. Found in a remote, uninhabited wilderness location that preserved it in a pristine state for years, it is large, mysterious, and unlikely ever to be explained or understood. Discovered by scientists working in […]
READ LOCAL First: This is Utah’s most comprehensive collection of poets and authors. For the month of December, 2020, we present creative nonfiction by Utah Original Writing Competition winner Iris Moulton. The excerpt here is from Moulton’s creative nonfiction book-length manuscript, Non. Tessa Fontaine judged her winning entry. Moulton lives […]
I don’t make New Year’s resolutions because I always break them within weeks, if not days. I made two of them for 2020, however, maybe because the start of a new decade with double 2s called for committed action. Given my track record, the first resolution had a deliberately low threshold for success: Make my own granola—which I am happy to say I’ve done all year and enjoyed immensely with my morning fruit and yogurt.
Lisa McAfee is a Salt Lake City artist and arts educator. She received her BFA at California State University Long Beach and MAT from the University of Utah. She currently teaches printmaking, painting, and drawing at a public high school in Utah. Her work includes oil paintings, printmaking, and mixed media works of expansive landscapes integrated with personal symbolism.
To discover more artists, visit our Utah Artists Directory
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