Before COVID, Madison Donnelly was headed to Yale. Like so much else for so many others, that was put on hold. Donnelly is one of Utah’s more promising young artists. While still working on her BFA in Sculpture from the University of Utah, she earned a juror’s award […]
Jerrin Wagstaff spends a lot of time on the internet, and watching TV. But he’s no couch potato. It’s work. The BYU (BFA) and California State University, Long Beach (MFA) graduate, who is currently an instructor at Brigham Young University, is a painter whose works “address the nature […]
No self-respecting dramatist would set a Biblical Apocalypse in the parking lot of a shopping center; it’s too mundane, too much a whimper and not a bang, to produce the proper sense of doom. Yet today it’s a routine event to carry the groceries out to the car, […]
Raised by a single mother in Clearfield, Taylor Knuth, new assistant director of the Salt Lake City Arts Council, says, “Art saved my life, being a young gay kid in Utah.” When asked flat out what he wants people to know about him, he adds, “We should be […]
The way Andrew Rice describes his current situation may encapsulate how a lot of us feel: “I’ve been trudging along, trying to see what happens next…” For the past year, Rice was involved in The Open Room, which, as Ann Poore described it for 15 Bytes, began in […]
If you’ve been to the Eccles Theatre in Salt Lake City, you’ve experienced Laura Sharp Wilson’s work: she created the terrazzo floor design beneath your feet. Wilson is an East Coast girl. After earning a BFA at Carnegie Mellon, she spent time as an intern at the Fabric […]
First introduced in 1892, The Nutcracker has been a Christmastime staple in the US since the mid-twentieth century. Municipal Ballet’s condensed and sophisticated take on the ballet, River of Rosewater, was released on December 23 via Youtube. If you stan a traditional Nutcracker, be warned: this version will […]
Artist and poet Rebecca Everett, a Utah native who studied painting at Brigham Young Unviersity with Robert Marshall and Trevor Southey, has lived many places, pursuing artistic activities in each one: in Bavaria, she studied weaving, stained glass and pottery; in England, she began work in photography and […]
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 […]
Artist Selected for New Sculpture Commemorating the Workers Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad
The National Park Service (NPS) and Golden Spike Foundation – Spike 150 have announced that Ilan Averbuch has been selected to design a new commemorative work that will be donated to Golden Spike National Historical Park. Averbuch is an Israeli-born artist who studied sculpture in England and the United States. The purpose of the piece, titled “Monument to Their Memory,” will honor all the railroad workers from many different cultures and backgrounds whose backbreaking efforts were crucial in the construction of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad.
The design of the sculpture is being finalized with a goal to start installation of the work in late summer. NPS will complete a review of the project for compliance with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act before the work is installed.
Claire Taylor holds a Master of Science in environmental humanities and a Bachelor of Fine Art with a printmaking emphasis from the University of Utah. She has been an artist in residence at the Natural History Museum of Utah and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and has held teaching-artist residencies with the Utah Division of Arts and Museums. She has exhibited extensively in Utah and her work has been commissioned by many Utah organizations including the Salt Lake City Public Library, Ken Sanders Rare Books, Back of Beyond Books in Utah, the Sustainability Office at the University of Utah and Torrey House Press. She formally worked as the Studio Manager, Instructor and Lead Printer at the Book Arts Program & Red Butte Press at the University of Utah.
To discover more artists, visit our Utah Artists Directory
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