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.
“Besides my children, this has been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. I would have done all this for free.” Lesly Allen is talking about South Salt Lake’s Mural Fest, now in its ninth year and established as Utah’s largest mural festival. She’s not being sentimental. She […]
Before it became International Workers’ Day, before it became a bank holiday, May 1st was a festival of spring: dancing, drinking, flirtation, communal release. It was a ritual of renewal with pagan roots and Christian overlays, not wholly approved by the authorities, where villages gathered around a tall […]
“I don’t want my kids to do my legacy,” says Greggory Wood. “I’m hoping my kids will think well enough of me that they’ll think I’ve given them enough tools to live their life—but not live their life like I think they should live it.” It’s a statement […]
When curator Jeff Lambson first arrived in Utah in 2007 to become the first curator of contemporary art at Brigham Young University’s Museum of Art, it felt like a moment. Contemporary art in the state was gaining momentum, and institutions that had not always been in conversation with […]
“Architecture is the way we commit to a political philosophy in a lot of ways.” Van Lewis says it almost in passing, but it carries weight. It suggests buildings aren’t neutral containers for life — they record what a city believes about itself, or at least what it’s […]
For an exhibition of Christian art, there are surprisingly few images of the main character. The first painting you encounter in Earthbound and Heavenward is Herbert Schmalz’s “The Return from Calvary”—a large, theatrically lit academic canvas that anchors the exhibition’s entrance. It depicts a group of four women […]
You don’t pay taxes on unfinished homes. That may not be the only reason so many houses in the community of Colorado City-Hildale went unfinished, but it is what first drew Jim Mangan to the place. Known for his work across the American West—particularly in Utah and Colorado, […]
Those who follow Utah’s legislative sessions will have noticed the passage last month of SB 193, a bill that would make Good Friday—or at least four hours of it—a state holiday beginning in 2027. Those in certain social media circles will also have heard the clamor surrounding the […]
Light is doing a lot of work in Gwen Davis-Barrios‘ exhibit at Border and Square. And it’s not the flattering kind. Headlights, streetlamps, the ambient glow of a building—her scenes are lit the way the world is at certain hours. Partial light. Temporary light. The kind that picks […]
The exhibition of John Hafen’s work at the Springville Museum of Art is quietly beautiful: pastoral landscapes float in soft tonal harmonies; fields, trees, and distant hills seem to belong to a quieter century. The paintings are assured and accomplished, the work of an artist clearly in command […]
Artists often enter school with raw talent and leave with newly sharpened skills, expected to begin careers—sometimes before they’ve lived long enough to know what they want to say. That possibility nagged at Ben Childress. After a year at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, he […]
Students at Yale can’t finish an entire book. Film students won’t sit through a two-hour movie. These are the headlines used to announce the decline in attention, deep thought and intellectual stamina of America’s rising generation. Enter Darryl Stamp, whose new play, DUMBED DOWN, opens with a scene […]
For poet and book artist Jess Challis, the boundary between writing and visual art has never been a firm line. Her work moves fluidly across mediums—poetry, image, book objects, multimedia—guided less by genre categories than by instinct, material, and the body’s experience of making. “I’ve never felt the […]
Most photographs aren’t begging to be turned into paintings. The things a camera captures effortlessly—busy detail, awkward smiles, a split-second expression—can become stiff or even unbearable once translated into brushwork. But Kirsten Holt Beitler has a rare ability: she can take the casual, unpolished image and make it […]
Photographers spend their lives recording other people’s stories—weddings, events, news, the fleeting moments that make up someone else’s memory. But they rarely turn the focus on themselves. For longtime Utah photographer Steve Coray, that inversion became both a creative challenge and a reckoning. His recently self-published photo book grew […]
Fans of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing may remember the show’s famous jab at the Mercator projection, a map so ubiquitous we mistake it for neutral. Little could those viewers have known, back in the George W. years, how much that same projection would come to shadow a […]
Those of us of a certain generation will be familiar with this refrain (and may have repeated it ourselves so often that it feels like a truism): Utah supports the performing arts much more than it does the visual arts. There are historical reasons for that belief: Unlike […]
Maureen O’Hara Ure’s work has long felt like a private language, built from fragments of art history, accumulated marks, and creatures that seem to emerge from some half-remembered medieval imagination. This makes her paintings immediately recognizable, and if you’ve followed her work over the years—especially her solo exhibition […]
One of the disappointments at the semiannual Poor Yorick Open Studios is the absence of James Charles. He occupies prime real estate at the crease in Poor Yorick’s B-wing, operating out of a large, enclosed space that you can catch glimpses of in our video profile of the […]
