10/13 SLTRIB: Sign-painting is in this Salt Lake City artist’s blood, and her work is unavoidable
Salt Lake City residents may not know of Shley Kinser, but they almost certainly know her work.
A 40-foot graphic for Spy Hop on 900 South. A musical ode on a wall outside the Hip-Hop Education Resource Center. A massive old-timey mural at Gracie’s Gastro Pub. A kaleidoscope mural at Blended Table. An antique-style piece inside Templin Family Brewing.
Kinser grew up in a Utah sign shop — Schmidt Signs and Graphics — where she studied under her family and a mentor, Ken Shelley. Creativity, she said, was always part of her family.
10/12 DESERET NEWS: Bronzed: The art and politics of statues
Matt Glenn’s sculpture studio is a lively place, jammed with works in progress. In one corner, a life-size clay figure of Johnny Cash, guitar over his shoulder, is serenading statues of Jackie Robinson, Elon Musk and Mr. Toad from “The Wind in the Willows.” A Vietnam War soldier stands guard over them all. It’s like the most interesting social event you’ve never been to, crowded into an unassuming building that once housed his father’s auto body shop. A genial older man in bronze sits on a park bench, smiling and taking it all in.
“His wife wanted to still be able to sit with him,” explains Glenn, a tall 53-year-old with a quarterback’s build and dark hair down past his ears. Glenn is a sculptor-for-hire, a 19th-century trade that is enjoying a 21st-century revival. Every figure in his crowded, rather messy studio in Provo, Utah, tells a story. Johnny Cash was commissioned for a music museum in Nashville, but when the pandemic hit, the order was paused. So were several others.
10/10 SLUG MAG: The White Buffalo Called Her to Clay: Pahponee’s Ceramics and Bronze Art
It was when she visited a rare white buffalo and her calf that Pahponee really took her calling to clay pottery seriously.
“That white buffalo gave artistic assignments,” Pahponee says. “She started communicating with me in a way that I could see her image on clay. So at that moment in time, it was almost like watching a shooting star go across the sky. I knew exactly where I needed to go after that and what I needed to make. There was no more guessing at that point, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”
It is now Pahponee’s 43rd year as a full-time practicing artist and her 10th year exhibiting at the annual Indigenous Art Market at the Natural History Museum of Utah, happening on October 12 and 13 this year.
10/7 SLUG MAG: Anti-Protagonists and Anti-Detectives in Michael Farfel’s Glossy Eyed, Buzzy Fly
Michael Farfel story leaves reality eventually,” says the author of Glossy Eyed, Buzzy Fly. His most recent work proves no exception. Presenting as a tale of a private eye trying to solve a murder, Farfel’s work sheds its skin almost instantly. After editor Ricky Maroon is found brained over a copy of an unpublished manuscript, the titular Fly must call upon Vivian, a woman who is able to visualize what an author looks like after reading their work. With his new psychic friend, the Fly crosses the threshold into the unreal.
Before GEBF left reality, it first had to leave Farfel’s head. The author had just published his first novel, The Reluctant Journey of Manfred Bugsbee, and was unsure of what was next. “The first chapter was really just me forcing myself every day to sit down [and write]. I committed myself to making something new and not giving up.” Farfel’s uncertainty and drive prodded him to write about the very thing he found difficult: limitations.
10/6 ARTFUL TV: Emily Hawkins / Bruce Naigles
Emily Hawkins began making art when she became a mother and uses her work to express her feelings about her children and motherhood. Bruce Naigles uses sculpting to answer his questions about life, focusing on staying joyful despite hard times.
10/3 SLUG MAG: Russel Albert Daniels’ “Wild Roses” Brings Visibility to Indigenous Communities
Russel Albert Daniels describes his family’s history as a blend of early Mormon settlers and Native Americans. His parents were born and raised on a Ute reservation, although he admits they were more Ute by culture than by blood.
His photos have been shown at the Library of Congress, Utah Museum of Fine Art, National Museum of the American Indian and in publications such as National Geographic, The New York Times, Mother Jones and more.
“When I look at the history of my family, I can just see what happened here in the West,” says Daniels. One of his ancestors, a Diné woman, was taken by the Ute people in the mid-1800s and sold to a polygamist Mormon settler. Her name was Rose Daniels.
9/30 DESERET NEWS: 200 years of Latter-day Saint art: New exhibit paints the picture of a global faith
The “largest and most comprehensive attempt ever” to show the variety of Latter-day Saint art is now open for visitors at the Church History Museum of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to museum director Riley M. Lorimer.
The exhibit — representing a “historic effort to understand, contextualize and present the breadth of Latter-day Saint art” — is a collaboration by the museum and The Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, an independent nonprofit organization that seeks to be an “an artistic and cultural hub” for members all over the world, inviting people to explore “the wealth of the artistic tradition of Latter-day Saints.”
It was 40 years ago at the Church History Museum’s opening that Ezra Taft Benson, then president of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, said: “I can see in my mind’s eye myriads of people, the curious and the critics, the young, the old, the sophisticated and the humble, passing through the doors of this edifice. They will see that the church draws from cultures around the world, yet unifies them with a common theology.”
9/29 ARTFUL TV: Season 5, Episode 4: David Sandum and Elise Wehle
David Sandum discusses how artists Edvard Munch and Vincent Van Gogh helped him through depression to create art of his own. Elise Wehle talks about the process that lead her to printmaking with plants and natural materials.
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.
Categories: Mixed Media
