Walking upright on two legs is arguably the most essential human trait. Walking—and the vertical posture that enables doing it—are believed to have freed early hominids’ hands to develop and exploit fine skills, which in turn called on their brains to grow larger and more versatile. Walking thus […]
In Master Classes, we were taught never to start an essay with a dictionary definition and to avoid the thesaurus at all costs. So I’m going to break two expensive rules by quoting the thesaurus here, concerning the title of one of artist Jordan Layton’s pieces, currently on […]
On Friday evening, as part of the August Gallery Stroll, the ever-gracious and most erudite David Ericson and his staff hosted the Wheatley family of artists in their cozy gallery in the Avenues. In an exhibition titled Date Night, pride of place went to Justin Wheatley, fresh from […]
“I just want somebody that sees my work to get an experience they wouldn’t get anywhere else”—Jeff Juhlin, 15 Bytes, 2011 His supporters at ‘A’ Gallery have assembled a small but eloquent introduction to the revolutionary new direction Utah native Jeff Juhlin has taken over the past few […]
“I paint what I feel through what I see.” —John Sproul “If I’m going to be isolated, I’d rather do it alone and not in a crowd.” This familiar wish of one beset by strangers comes to mind when contemplating the art of John Sproul. Consider the painting […]
There’s a tree-lined, shady lane in a Salt Lake City suburb that isn’t quite a dead-end street, blending as it does almost imperceptibly into the grounds of the local grade school. In the middle of that final block, behind a hand-forged iron gate, sits a modest-looking home—a house […]
“What is the answer?” And after a pause, “What is the question?” These famous last words of Gertrude Stein, spoken from a hospital bed to her lifetime partner, Alice B. Toklas, in 1946, seem to echo the question asked every year for the latest quarter century by The […]
An American became and remains an international figure in his art in spite of never having spent a day in art school. Asked about the sources of his creative approach, he complained that he was always “reinventing the wheel,” that is, struggling to find techniques that he later […]
Utah artists and their audiences are no strangers to the salvage of discarded objects possessing the power to suggest rich associations between these things and new ideas. Nor do we lack experience with assemblage, the bringing together of unrelated bits and pieces to stimulate the cerebral and aesthetic […]
Josh Winegar’s Future Monuments, currently in the Projects Gallery at UMOCA (behind the gift shop, which the gallery doesn’t employ as an exit) includes 12 untitled, heavily manipulated, black-and-white composite photographs assembled from, among other things, photos of carved stone sculptures (presumably originating from monuments). Winegar has gone […]
If there is an artistic form that the Utah audience might survive seeing less of, surely it’s the landscape: a medium that is tolerant of exploitation almost to a fault, and which has seemingly been shown in every way imaginable. Of course, discerning individuals might argue that what’s […]
I have a new hero. And she’s a Pop artist. Pop Art is the most—OK, popular—art movement in America, rivaled only by Impressionism. Those French artists looked seriously at modern life as they witnessed its changes: the coming of the steamboat and the railroad, the remodeling of their […]
The phrase “perennial avant-garde” may sound positive, but it’s actually a criticism of one of the primary characteristics of Postmodernism: the need of mainstream artists to continue demolishing the user-friendly accessibility of traditional forms in order to advance the task of making room for a revolutionary new art. […]
It has happened again. In the immediate aftermath of my breakthrough in understanding an artist whose labors in two separate artistic gardens had puzzled me for years (see here), another artist has brought forth a similarly converse second body of art. Robert Füerer is a seasoned world traveler, […]
After a hit Broadway musical, the curious presentation of an animated TV show, and a live-action series on plural wives—each more popular than could have been anticipated—it may be hard to believe that there was a recent time when some Latter-day Saints, except when on a mission, didn’t […]
I have friends who deny themselves the pleasures of visiting a gallery, so determined are they to avoid the wall signs that they interpret as telling them how to look at the art, how to interpret it, and how to respond. They’re equally determined not to read the […]
There are any number of categories into which the variety of fine and visual artists, and their works, can be divided. There are characteristics of the artists themselves: are they men or women? Are they young and newly fledged (like those in Artists of Utah’s 35×35 exhibit) or […]
