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.
Seventy years ago, Utah artist Lynn Fausett wanted to turn the administrative building of the soon-to-be-demolished state penitentiary into an art center. Other ideas for the old prison’s acreage (now home to Sugar House Park and Highland High School) included a reconstruction of the old Salt Lake Theatre […]
The pandemic interrupted many habits and routines. Two years later, some of them are welcome losses, a few we may have resumed regretfully, while the resumption of others are joyful rediscoveries of the before times. Jaunts to the Salt Lake City Library, which for 70 years has provided […]
Zachary Proctor paints moments of courage and triumph: race car drivers, acrobats, horsemen and stunt jumpers. But his works are also full of foreboding and disaster: a race car smashing into a wall, a mammoth shark seen rising to engulf a small boat (see our review from Feb. […]
Mrs. Wallen could not understand why more Americans did not own fine art. “In Sweden,” she said, “a family of modest means will save for years to purchase a good painting or an exquisite piece of furniture.” (Salt Lake Telegram, 15 May, 1950, p. 16) Vera (if we’re […]
Gail Martin had one of the better retorts to the modern art skeptics of his day: “Strange is it not, that the man who demands the latest models in motor cars, who would not be found dead in a 1929 Ford, that the women, who wears only the […]
Though they might be lazy or imprecise, we’ll use them, if only because they are the categories Utah’s mid-century art community used: the modernists and the conservatives — two camps, engaged after the conclusion of the Second World War in a battle for what little attention, prestige or […]
We expect art to do a lot of things: be visually stunning, yes, please; express something meaningful, hopefully; teach us something important, possibly. We also hope art can change the world. And the world needs a lot of changing: institutional inequities, catastrophic climate change, terrorism and torture, the […]
As a follow up to our article on the history of the serigraph in Utah, we take a look at three Utah artists working with screen prints. University of Utah professor Justin Diggle is known for the deep, rich qualities of his etchings, so you wouldn’t think that […]
Maybe it seemed to come to him in a flash of divine inspiration. Or maybe it was simply a mundanely obvious solution to the task at hand. When Anthony Velonis joined the Work Progress Administration’s poster division during the Great Depression, he became one of scores of artists making […]
In Renaissance workshops, artists often specialized: for a nativity scene or portrait of a noble, one artist might work on all the background landscapes, while another might be called in to paint the folds in a saint’s robes and a third would show off their skills on delicately […]
Emily Hawkins is rummaging around the flat files at Salt Lake City’s Saltgrass Printmakers. She’s looking for sheets of Mylar. “That’s too thick,” Saltgrass director Stefanie Dykes tells her, though she’s not quite sure what Hawkins is looking for. “We use that one for printing,” she says when […]
Tucked up against the mountains at the south end of Utah Valley with a view of Utah Lake to the northwest, Woodland Hills is a quiet, wooded community with large lots and a secluded feel. And the town of just 1500 has a high concentration of artists, six […]
All the state’s big annual shows – the statewides and the invitationals – have their own personalities. Springville’s Spring Salon is as different from UDAM’s Statewide Annual as each is from the Eccles’ Black and White show. Personality is partly a matter of geography (art can be expensive […]
In a postscript to an email I sent, in my capacity as editor, to the staff of 15 Bytes at the beginning of this year, I mentioned that my email responses — never arriving at a whiplash pace — might, for a while, be slower than normal: during […]
Ten years ago, Nathan Florence, a Salt Lake City artist known for his figurative and landscape work, announced his newest project, a documentary film that would explore the Art & Belief movement — a group of Brigham Young University art students in the late 1960s who, dissatisfied with […]
The role the Art Barn has played in nurturing contemporary art in Utah cannot be overstated. Now known as the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, which is celebrating its 90th anniversary with a retrospective exhibition in its Street Level Gallery, the community-driven organization was created during the Great […]
Utah’s governor made national news when, faced with a historic drought years in the making, dire predictions for the upcoming wildfire season and vastly depleted reservoirs, he asked his fellow citizens to pray for rain. (He did also urge land owners to let their yards and parking strips […]
(This article was written while Annie Blake was in hospice. On Dec. 16 her husband announced on Instagram that she had passed.) “How could it be possible to take in all the sad stories and become big enough to hold them all? Or to compress them […]
When the pandemic hit, Utah Chamber Artists’ artistic director Dr. Barlow Bradford resisted pivoting to virtual concerts. Large groups of people singing live in enclosed spaces was definitely out. But recording separate individuals singing in their own homes? Where in that process, he thought, was the art? But […]
