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.
Like most writers of his generation, Paul Ketzle has spent considerable chunks of his time honing his craft at creative writing workshops — the good ones, where “this is what I see you doing” leads the discussion, as well as the bad ones, where it’s “if this were […]
Identity is a tricky thing. It’s hard to know anymore if we are supposed to proudly declare our differences or attempt to blend them seamlessly into the larger tapestry; be aware of color, gender, ethnicity, or blind to it. The task is made more difficult for the hyphenated […]
Our attention was riveted first by the election. Then, the transition. And now by the new administration. Political engagement in America seems to be surging, with people from both sides of the political spectrum taking to the streets. One wonders, though, if that energy will be turned into […]
Over the past decade, Minerva Teichert’s work has surged in popularity, receiving from the Mormon community the sort of enthusiastic embrace the artist dreamed about for much of her life — 40 years after her death, reproductions of her work can be found in meetinghouses belonging to The […]
John Burton, a California artist based in Carmel, was drawn to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by reading the accounts of his Mormon pioneer ancestors. So it seems fitting that, shortly after converting to the church his family had been absent from for a generation, […]
I can’t tell if Zaq Landsberg is simply having a good bit of fun or actually taking himself seriously. Landsberg is the founder of an art project in Utah’s west desert called Zaqistan, which consists of two rather inaccessible acres of scrubland that has been given the meta-contextual […]
Call it persistence or call it foolishness, but we’ve been at this for 15 years. It was the first week in September of 2001 that 15 Bytes put together some basic html, a bunch of words and some small jpeg images and posted its first edition online. Earlier […]
Andrew Rice’s new works, on exhibit at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art’s Projects Gallery, are filled with dark masses, scrubbed in black oil sticks, covering a rainbow of hues that struggle to emerge through the darkened planes. They define abstracted interior spaces, corners of large rooms, two-sometimes-three-stories […]
Sibylle Szaggars was in her high desert home in the southwest of New Mexico when the idea for the rain paintings came to her. It was 2010 and the monsoon rains, visible for miles in the distance, would arrive regularly in the afternoon. She decided to lay one […]
All of us — well, most of us — have become conscientious recyclers, making sure to set aside our plastic bottles and aluminum cans so they can be turned into bicycles, or our cardboard and paper products so they can, well, be turned back into paper and cardboard. […]
What does one say about abstract art? It neither depicts a scene nor tells a story. It does not reference, investigate, or negotiate — or any number of the vague, Latinate verbs endemic to curatorial statements these days— anything. It is, in a term which has been largely […]
It’s not every artist who can get their own museum. Certainly, no Utah artist has.* But to hear talk at the ribbon cutting of the new Southern Utah Museum of Art (SUMA), it seems Jimmie Jones has come close. Jones was the impetus behind the sweeping white structure […]
If one felt the need to defend the relevance of Shakespeare in the 21st century, it would be difficult to manufacture better coincidences to do so: on the eve of Utah Shakespeare Festival’s staging of Henry V, a play about public morals and individual responsibility, of the duties […]
It became the Marx Brothers’ first feature film, released by Paramount Pictures in 1929, but it began as a Broadway musical in 1925, with book by George S. Kaufman and music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. Cocoanuts is a musical romantic comedy invaded by vaudeville. Adapted by Mark […]
She’s known for goats and for soldiers. The first she has raised for years on her ranch south of Manti, where she’s been given the nickname The Goat Woman: she bears the moniker proudly, her affection for the animals going back to an almost mythical origin story, her […]
It’s not enough to paint well. Any artist, no matter how talented with pencil or brush, must also find a subject, a message for their medium. Holly Cobb, an MFA candidate at the University of Utah, has found hers in food. Cobb’s interest is not in the food […]
Take a warehouse space near Salt Lake City’s baseball stadium, throw in a team of dancers, choreographers, artists and architects and tell them to create a work together. If it sounds a bit like our co-lab series, that’s precisely why we’re excited about it. But whereas we give […]
Michael Ryan Handley and Cara Depain, native son and daughter of Utah, returned to the state this month for solo exhibitions at CUAC, in Salt Lake City. Handley has been living in Philadelphia and New York City after finishing an MFA at Yale, and Despain has been working […]
Branding the American West, the new exhibit in Brigham Young University Museum of Art’s main floor gallery, is so full of colorful, engaging, accessible paintings, by talented, brand-name artists of regional interest, that patrons likely will find themselves breezing through the exhibit, enjoying one scene after another, with […]
