Walking into Phillips Gallery at 4 p.m., an hour before closing time and a day before Stroll and the official opening, I see Meri Ploetz DeCaria, a third of the current show in the Main Gallery, chatting on the phone — animatedly for the usually reserved gallery director […]
Two feisty spirits with plenty in common makes for an interesting friendship, one that can be traced back to when Claudia Sisemore was Trent Alvey’s uber-cool creative writing teacher at Hillside Junior High. Their artwork, though, has less in common, which makes for an interesting show at The […]
“Metallic Dream,” Lee Deffebach, 1986. Once they were our Young Turks, upending the establishment, smashing the windows of a staid and conservative artistic world with new styles, techniques and ideas. Because they found a home in Phillips Gallery, they thrived, determining the tastes of a generation of Utah […]
Connie Borup’s exhibit of new landscape paintings at Phillips Gallery once again demonstrates the artist’s ability to create ethereal images that cast a loving gaze on the continual shifts of the natural world. Claudia Sisemore’s film “Nature Observed,” shot in 2008, reminds us that this current work goes […]
Teacher, artist and filmmaker Claudia Sisemore was “hot stuff” when she was 21, says Layne Meacham of his former Hillside Junior High teacher. “All the guys would talk about her and her silver Jag XKE,” the Salt Lake City artist recalls. Local artist Trent Thursby Alvey, then […]
ririewoodbury ririewoodbury2 It’s an institution that has been in the state for more than a half century, one that has attracted national and international acclaim, and one that elicits, from local cognoscenti, fierce loyalties. But chances are most Utahns don’t even know about it; or if they do, […]
Though over the past couple of years we’ve been able to capture interviews with a number of Utah artists, we have a ways to go before we’ll catch up with Claudia Sisemore.
This Friday, May 7th, Park City’s Kimball Art Center will open a unique exhibition: an artist’s retrospective that is in reality a group show. David Chaplin’s Opus is a retrospective that displays the personal work of this long-time Utah artist as well as the work of students he […]
Retro Furniture Changes Colors — Chroma Gallery
In the late ’80s, Erdmann ran the Salt Lake Contemporary Gallery in downtown Salt Lake where he showed minimalist and color-field art at a time when “Mark Rothko wasn’t a household word.” Reception to the gallery was not overwhelming and it eventually closed down. Since that time, abstract art has failed to achieve a pervasive presence in Utah. The Salt Lake Art Center has had more and more exhibits highlighting contemporary art and Phillips Gallery has survived showing abstract work, but few other venues for abstract art have proven viable…
