Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
Photography officially turned 200 years old this year (or next year, we don’t know for sure. Perhaps Joseph Niépce neglected to organize his EXIF files properly). Initially just a clever employment of physics and chemistry, photography became a powerful player in politics, culture, and commercialism, and one of […]
Thanks to the mighty efforts of artists, history lovers, and people who care deeply about rural life, Helper, Utah has transformed from a near‑abandoned coal mining town into a thriving arts destination that is on a path of rapid growth. It started more than thirty years ago, when […]
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 […]
At first glance, Heather Stamenov’s paintings depict people interacting with the landscape in playful ways, or responding to natural elements and seasons through athletics. But soon, something uncanny begins to surface. Synchronized swimmers glide through snow in the middle of winter. Aerialists swing from a ski lift chair, […]
Myth and memory can be both very personal and very universal. In The Stories We Hold: Journey through Myth and Memory, at the UVU Museum of Art, six artists display more than five dozen works that boil down to one thing: myth and memory unite us. Even the […]
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 […]
“About an hour in, you start to really relax,” Dallin Orr says in this video profile by Austin Smock. “You start to feel really connected to things. That deep sense of purpose and peace, that’s what I’m chasing every time I go out.” For years Orr has […]
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 […]
There’s a particular pleasure in noticing something small on a walk you’ve taken a hundred times — a door where there wasn’t one, a sculpture tucked into some bushes, a box of books where where before there was just a hedge. Part of the joy comes from what […]
There’s definitely a bit of odd packed into this nook of Salt Lake City: a bike park with a freeway for a roof, a winery that’s also a temple, a steel shop turned graffiti wall, a community garden in the middle of an industrial stretch. If you wanted […]
That it was installed during the Cold War didn’t help. Neither did the color. Or the reaction by the general Utah public to abstract art. When this sculpture was first erected in 1982, some saw in the sculpture a hammer and sickle. Anchoring the entrance plaza of what […]
It seems like every year rumors circulate that the Face of Utah Sculpture may have run its course and might be cancelled. Glass artist Dan Cummings, who founded the event 22 years ago and shepherded it through the COVID-19 shutdown six years ago, admits that he and folklorist […]
Roland Thompson breathes color into minimalism with exceptionally crafted painted aluminum works. The paintings are non-pictorial — no image, no story attached. Their straightforward outer shapes hold a spot on the wall that begs close examination. Their bold colors and patterns are at once reminiscent of something […]
Miri Kim recognizes the influence of Seventeen magazine in her art history trajectory. It was in the pages of the teen magazine that the BYU Museum of Art curator first heard of Rice University, which she left Utah for as a college freshman. At a preview week in […]
Work began on Cole Eisenhour‘s Japantown mural Saturday, when community members painted design elements during the Salt Lake Buddhist Temple’s Obon Festival on July 11. This week, tucked behind the temple where he’s easy to miss, Eisenhour has been at work with smaller brushes. He’s painting portraits, black-and-white […]
It’s probably a good thing that so many sales galleries are going into smaller spaces and, especially, spaces with scaled-back rooms, hallways, and other narrow spaces. One reason is that this gives viewers a chance to see how well they work in similar spaces they may have at […]
New York art critic Jerry Saltz once offered a piece of advice to artists, collectors and critics alike: know what you hate. And this sculpture, on South Temple, is what he hates. In March 2018, Gillie and Marc Schattner unveiled “The Last Three” in New York’s Astor Place: […]
Horses have inspired artists for millennia. From the mesmerizing silhouettes in the Panel of the Horses at the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave in southern France, to the dynamic Mycenaean frescoes of ancient Greece, to Deborah Butterfield’s widely recognized sculptural interpretations, the horse has remained a persistent muse across cultures […]
