There’s a small problem with Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal’s first book, and while it doesn’t adversely affect her sophisticated and engaging essays, it could discourage potential readers, which is clearly the opposite of what the publishers intended when they packaged the collection 20 years ago. First, the […]
“I was planning to fail in my own way. I thought that was the point.” Among the benefits of public radio, which began half a century ago seeking, unsuccessfully, to liberate the airwaves from corporate control, were the many outlets it created for telling intimate stories to a […]
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, […]
Despite appearances to the contrary, group exhibitions of art are the norm, and should be. A theme, familiar or exotic, or a location, a medium, even a gender can provide the opportunity to compare how different artists handle the same materials: physical, emotional, contextual. From landscapes featuring Mt. […]
News broke in December of one of the great, unanticipated art discoveries in our lifetimes. Found in a remote, uninhabited wilderness location that preserved it in a pristine state for years, it is large, mysterious, and unlikely ever to be explained or understood. Discovered by scientists working in […]
In order to enter Material Issues, the pieces of which can be seen from above, spread invitingly across the ground level gallery of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, you must cross the familiar steel bridge and descend the switchbacks of the staircase, first walking away, into the […]
Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World collects fifteen personal essays written by Jennifer Sinor over about that many years. The collection opens with “Headwaters,” an account linking a family death and a coincidental birth, one life ending and another continuing in its place. By comparison […]
It’s early summer and the water is high. My mother grasps the handles of two wooden oars and feels the Colorado River surge through her arms. A gray ring of raft surrounds her, sixteen feet from bow to stern, and beyond it, the mud-red river roils. Near the […]
I am a different kind of lover of truth now Since his death in 2011, Edwin Parker ‘Cy’ Twombly, Jr. has emerged as a key figure of 20th-century art, even as many of his contemporaries and followers have fallen behind. Ironic confirmation of his importance comes from […]
The Greeks had a word for it. They called it Symmetry, which today often means a mirror-image. For an older society, one less needing to simplify an overly stimulating world, it meant balance. A symmetrical composition presented a balanced image. They may have found this concept in the […]
Minneapolis Institute of Art shares with Utah Museum of Fine Arts the advantages that come with not being located in Paris, London, New York, or other locales requiring a presence on the international art scene. Instead of always keeping one eye on their competitors, MIA and UMFA can […]
Stefanie Dykes has a busy fall. She has curated Poesis, a group exhibition of printmakers at Art Access (see our review) timed to coincide with the Rocky Mountain Printmaking Alliance Symposium (Oct. 9 – 12); and her work appears in In Good Company, an exhibition at the Simmons Pioneer Memorial Theatre’s […]
Jason Lanegan’s “Ancestral Reliquary II: Sylvina Belle Frohlich” could be described as a geometric assemblage that, hanging on a wall, establishes a context that literally connects it to architecture. The reference is underscored by hints in its shape: complex, house-like, but initially disorienting, not least because of the […]
Half a century ago, the children of Frank McEntire’s generation studied science in classrooms that self-consciously resembled laboratories: microscopes stood on tables and gas jets protruded from black, plastic-topped counters. On the walls hung graphic summations of fundamental scientific knowledge: evidence of taxonomy, the original business of sorting, […]
“By the Sea,” the characteristically collectible catalog Susan Meyer put together for her annual presentation of Brian Kershisnik’s new directions for 2019, includes a challenge from the artist to everyone who’s ever written, or even thought about, his art: The heavy symbolic weight of books in my […]
“The artist Guy Dill has carved out a unique niche for himself on the borderline between abstract and figurative sculpture.” That’s the metaphor that first comes to mind, but the thing is, it doesn’t really work, because he doesn’t carve. They’re assembled in that distinctly American geometric style, […]
With so much political art being made and shown these days, it would be easy enough to conclude that social criticism and satire are about the only ways art can help in troubling times. Yet however much contemporary art’s moralizing encourages its fan base, it’s far from being […]
“I want to take a viewer somewhere”—Roland Thompson There’s something that in theory can happen to any artist, but is particularly wonderful when it happens to one who has chosen an arduous path: one that imposes some external standards of its own on the craft of art making. […]
You don’t take a photograph, you make it. —Ansel Adams In a decade shy of 200 years—since its invention by British artists seeking a faster, easier way to draw from life—photography has joined those two great clichés of human invention, fire and the wheel, as […]
