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.
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. What they rarely do is 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 […]
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 […]
When Alli Harbertson first walked into the Andrews home, it was the paintings that stopped her. “They’re everywhere,” Harbertson recalls. The living room—where Karen Andrews’ hospital bed had been placed—was filled with artwork, paintings covering the walls and leaning against furniture while ceramics, blankets and small sculptures covered […]
When Jo Roper came to Utah in the early 1960s, she was already an accomplished sculptor. Trained at Southwest Missouri State College and at Cranbrook Academy of Art, she had spent more than a decade teaching, exhibiting, and working across the Southwest, particularly in New Mexico, where she […]
In 2003, when we first wrote about Gallery 25, it was a hopeful experiment on a still-scruffy stretch of Ogden’s Historic 25th Street. Dubbed “A Northern Utah Artists Cooperative,” the gallery had been founded the previous August, when a local merchant bought a building to open a frame […]
Park City, September 2, 1963. Labor Day. The mines are quiet—most of them permanently so. The brand-new chairlifts at the Treasure Mountain Resort are also still, the engineers testing them enjoying the holiday off. The midday air remains pleasantly cool as hundreds of locals gather at the “blue […]
When Nuha Moretz moved to Salt Lake City, she found herself drawn to two paths: in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, she launched an art career that had been simmering for years; and, to build a social circle in a new city, she and her husband joined […]
Ehren Clark would have loved this show at the Sweet Branch Library—The Domains of the Mystical. The loose, swirling, sometimes turbulent brushwork; the small figures caught up in backgrounds that dissolve into clouds of abstract color fields—all this would have appealed to our late colleague. He might have […]
Is skateboarding an entry drug? To art? In our article last week on Alma Allen—the Utah-born sculptor now working out of Mexico who will represent the United States at the Venice Biennale—we sketched out his teenage years, which began with skateboarding (and hardcore music) and led, eventually, to […]
With a name like Alma, you knew he had to be Mormon. Not necessarily a Utahn, not necessarily LDS, but definitely Mormon. Anyone who grew up around the culture knows the name is a giveaway—for a man, at least. Alma is the name of two major prophets, father […]
“It just wasn’t a good fit anymore,” says Elpitha Tsoutsounakis, who after a decade and a half as a professor at the University of Utah has resigned her position—to open a bookstore.
On a quiet stretch of Salt Lake City’s historic Film Row, inside a former film-reel vault that once housed Cosmic Aeroplane, Elpitha Tsoutsounakis is hoping to build a new kind of creative space—Books & Supply, an art and design bookstore that doubles as a studio, gallery, classroom, and community hub.
From more than 30 years of launching exhibitions, Kevin O’Keefe has learned one thing above all: face-to-face connections matter. “It became clear that getting in front of the right person shortens the time to a decision and dramatically increases business,” he says.
The metal air filters should be your first clue that Carson Cahoon is interested in materials. Six of them, in a row, without comment or adornment, frame one end of his exhibit Dead or Alive, on the basement floor of the SLC Main Library, where Cahoon, a Salt […]
