The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.
Gregg Deal’s music is full of piss and vinegar, righteous anger delivered with a hot blade of wit and invective. “I’m not a very good Indian,” he announces in “Bad Indian,” one of the songs he performs as frontman for the punk band Dead Pioneers. “My cheekbones aren’t […]
When Stephen Trimble published The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin in 1989, the metaphor of his title seemed almost inevitable. Sagebrush blanketed nearly half of the Great Basin, the enormous sweep of basin and range country extending from Utah across Nevada and into California […]
If you’re new to Utah’s art world, right now the work of Anna Campbell Bliss may feel like one of those odd vocabulary words you’ve only just learned and suddenly hear everywhere. Her geometric compositions, built from color and repetition and carrying a glowing, mesmeric power, have been […]
When Gilmore Scott got in trouble at school, he had to help the teachers explain his misdeeds to his mother. The youngest of six children, Scott grew up in Blanding, Utah, where his mother raised the family on her own and worked as a cook for the San […]
As a child, Liza Doran fell in love with the souks of Arabia. As a young woman, she fell for the textile traditions of Belgium. Then she was seduced by photographs of a beat-up stone building in Bluff, Utah. For the next 40 years, she learned what […]
An old, turquoise-legged ironing board topped with a plank of unfinished wood stands in the middle of Finch Lane’s West Gallery. On it are five oval platters, their rims crimped like pie crusts, their centers glazed white, soft gray and pale blue. One carries a ladder-like motif drawn […]
Growing up in Flagstaff, Arizona, Kate Aitchison had a father who could tell her what everything was. A naturalist and photographer, he knew the plants of the Southwest—which were native, which were invasive, what belonged where. His daughter wasn’t particularly interested. “Now I wish that I could record […]
Trent Alvey has been around for a bit. When she first appeared in the pages of 15 Bytes in 2003, she was already an established artist. (But if you’ve known Alvey long enough, you can imagine her interjecting: an artist should never be established, she would say. […]
Imagine if Salt Lake City gave $4.4 million in artist grants every year. And if you really want to get crazy, imagine all of it going to just two artists. A pipe dream, certainly. But on a per-capita basis, that’s roughly what happens in Boulder, Utah. For the […]
Two months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Frank McEntire and his wife traveled to New York City. The wreckage of the World Trade Center was still being cleared, but throughout the city another response to the attacks had appeared. McEntire remembers “altar-like memorials” on fences, […]
When the Utah Museum of Fine Arts opened in the new Marcia and John Price Museum Building on the University of Utah campus in 2001, it seemed all anyone could talk about was the color. Frank Sanguinetti, the museum’s longtime director and the driving force behind its new […]
The day young Vaughn Reid came home from a summer of falling timber and mentioned he was thinking about buying old Harry Gordon’s scrapyard, his father wasn’t having it. “You’re not gonna be a damn junk man, boy.” Old man Reid is buried a few miles from this […]
If you’re a newcomer to Salt Lake City’s art scene—say, sometime in the past decade—you may have no idea that this stretch of 500 West was once one of the most vibrant corners of the city’s cultural landscape. It began 25 years ago. Downtown was looking west, […]
They bought the property on a whim. David and Brigitte Delthony were mid-career artists out of Berlin traveling through the Southwest when they stumbled across a property for sale outside the small town of Escalante, Utah. It was a former sawmill. The owner needed cash for another project, […]
In a recent article, Art in America cited a somewhat vague statistic: 95 percent of museum collections are hidden from view. The magazine hedged on the accuracy of the figure, but it could be off by ten, twenty or even thirty percent and still drive home the point: […]
Utah has never been as monolithically Mormon as the cliché would have us believe. As evidence: the many virgins of Salt Lake City. Of course, native peoples were here first. Then, after 1847, whole towns were established by Latter-day Saint immigrants, and many remain predominantly Latter-day Saint to […]
The gas station may have become America’s true third space—that place outside home and work where strangers and neighbors still routinely cross paths. Banking has gone online. The post office is going bankrupt. Even grocery shopping increasingly happens through apps and home delivery. But until electric vehicles charged […]
After pushback from community members—more about the site than the visual content—Sabin Howard announced this week that he’s leaving Utah and looking for a new home for his Grand Liberty Arch, the massive bronze monument he’d proposed for a park near the Capitol. The Grand Liberty Arch is […]
He was a painter of vivid, luminescent wildlife paintings and energetic plein air works, but James Kirkland will probably be best remembered for three major mural projects he executed in Salt Lake City. The Utah artist died July 20, 2026, at the age of 66. His niece, Amy […]
