Rachel Kho at Chapman Branch Library in Salt Lake City

There’s a particular pleasure in noticing something small on a walk you’ve taken a hundred times — a door where there wasn’t one, a sculpture tucked into some bushes, a box of books where where before there was just a hedge. Part of the joy comes from what these tiny interventions encourage: to slow down, crouch, look closer.

Little free libraries have made this a familiar experience across Salt Lake City, and photographer Rachel Kho has spent months walking the city to document them for The Little Libraries of Salt Lake City, on view at the Chapman Branch library through August 28. Kho works on foot, and her images catch the format’s full range — a birdhouse-gabled box tucked under eaves, a windmill-topped one in someone’s yard, a banned-books banner draped over another. Then there’s her favorite: a repurposed grill, painted like a cheeseburger. Open the lid and you’ll more than a dozen books. She’s drawn to how these boxes function as small public spaces: built by neighbors, stocked by strangers, running on trust instead staff. It’s the same territory she covers in her ongoing project Stops, Steps & Sights, which documents shopfronts, transit stops, and other overlooked street-level infrastructure—the unglamorous fixtures that end up revealing a neighborhood’s character.

Art is starting to show up at the same scale. Three tiny galleries around the state are proving that a gallery doesn’t need square footage so much as accessibility.

The Helper Mini opened on Helper’s Main Street in June 2024, the brainchild of designer and artist Kevin K. Perry. It’s the size of a mailbox. Its first show featured Salt Lake artist Trent Call, whose inch-tall cutouts read, out of context, like scaled-down versions of the much larger work he’d shown at Finch Lane Gallery the year before. On view now is The Last Plane Out by Dan Evans, a multidisciplinary artist and designer whose work spans 2D, 3D, and time-based media, installations, immersive theatre, and site-responsive performance. Perry stages a new show for each of Helper’s monthly Gallery Strolls, and once a year the project outgrows its own premise: this August 20–23, during the Helper Arts Festival, it goes “Mega” for the second year running, with nine contemporary artists—including Alexander Long, Chad Kirkland, and the duo Andrew Rease Shaw & Mary Toscano — scaling their Mini-format work up to full size for a group show at the Helper Art Workshops Gallery.

The Helper Mini in May, 2026, with an exhibition by Grace Kennison.

Provo has The Tiny Gallery, the latest home for McKay Lenker Bayer’s long-running Tiny Art Show. Bayer started staging pop-up miniature exhibits in 2018—in museum floorboards, a utility box, even New York City’s Central Park—before landing, after an eviction and a Kickstarter campaign, in a permanent home built into a former stairwell on University Avenue. At just over three-feet tall, the space mimics a full-scale gallery down to the wall text, complete with a gift shop whose windows now pop out so the whole family can browse at once. A recent installation, “People of Provo,” lined the tiny purple gallery walls floor to ceiling with dozens of miniature gilt-framed community portraits. Bayer also puts out her own tiny newspaper, The Tiny Times, chronicling the wider world of miniature art she’s discovered along the way—a mini skatepark, a fairy village overtaking a neighborhood in Point Richmond, California, a $1 mini-art vending machine that’s reportedly sold over 3,000 pieces in under a year. You can peak in the Tiny Gallery anytime at 35 N. University Ave. To reach in the gift shop, visit Saturdays, 5–8pm.

Salt Lake City has its own version of the mini gallery, tucked into the foothills near Parleys Canyon: La Petite Gallery de Lucky. It belongs to Lucky Tuck, whose paintings filled a solo show at the Utah State Capitol in 2022, Some Things You See Every Day and Some You Don’t (see our review). Tuck grew up on a small farm in the Salt Lake Valley, left home at 16, and spent years in illustration and design work for LA advertising agencies before an overseas stretch that started in Japan and wound through Europe. He came back to Utah for retirement, and for the landscapes and animals he’d known since childhood—rendered in a post-impressionist brushwork that reads as pure texture up close and resolves into the image from a few steps back.

Built in the style of an old phone booth and painted blue, with “La Petite Gallery de Lucky” lettered above the door, the case has stood outside Tuck’s home at 2735 E. Commonwealth Ave. since April 2025. It works on two levels: Tuck’s own painting occupies the top, refreshed every week—this week, a rabbit skating across a frozen river—while the lower level is given over to guest artists. Recently that spot held small lily-pond studies in acrylic and metallic paint by Emily Spaulding, a painter originally from Reno, displayed alongside a cluster of miniature figures posed like gallery-goers at an opening.

In this video spotlight, Salt Lake City filmmaker Austin Smock rings the doorbell to peek into the studio behind La Petite Gallery.

In Plain Site

With our In Plain Site byline we feature publicly viewable art, both official and street art, throughout the state of Utah.