Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
Growing up in Flagstaff, Arizona, Kate Aitchison had a father who could tell her what everything was. A naturalist and photographer, he knew the plants of the Southwest—which were native, which were invasive, what belonged where. His daughter wasn’t particularly interested. “Now I wish that I could record […]
“We focus on the Spirit of the West,” says Shalee Cooper, gallery director and curator of Under Open Skies, a group exhibition of contemporary landscape art at Modern West Fine Art through November 6. “We really support established and emerging artists.” Demonstrating an abundance of creativity across painting, […]
Looms sit threaded and incomplete, the shuttles hanging in a cross overhead. Threads drape off cacti and railings and a nearby tree; shirts hang as if in your closet, runners and shawls ready for an evening with family at the dining room table. Shawls hang like ancestors on […]
Among the countless artists I met in the 1970s and ’80s who employed glass as a primary medium, “stained plastic” was about as derogatory a term as was likely to be heard. Stained glass is conventionally handmade from materials of the highest quality, incorporating both accidental and intentional […]
Trent Alvey has been around for a bit. When she first appeared in the pages of 15 Bytes in 2003, she was already an established artist. (But if you’ve known Alvey long enough, you can imagine her interjecting: an artist should never be established, she would say. […]
In a 2006 interview, Robert Enright described the works of contemporary painter Peter Doig as being “fixed in a sort of drift,” embodying a seemingly contradictory in-between zone that holds tightly to both stasis and movement. Carried into the current exhibition at ‘A’ Gallery is this same tension, […]
Imagine if Salt Lake City gave $4.4 million in artist grants every year. And if you really want to get crazy, imagine all of it going to just two artists. A pipe dream, certainly. But on a per-capita basis, that’s roughly what happens in Boulder, Utah. For the […]
A few days before his wife, Lori, died, Russell Wrankle applied for Family and Medical Leave from his teaching position at Southern Utah University. Emergency room visits had become too frequent for him to continue teaching, though the couple still hoped a new drug might extend her life. […]
“I saw my darkness, I saw my light, I saw everything in between, and now I’m a new human being,” says Aziza Abdieva. “I’m a Phoenix rising.” Fear is a darkness that is hard to climb out of, but Abdieva has made her artistic career by welcoming it. […]
The warm, inviting style of 1930s Spanish Colonial architecture is one of many elements that makes the Springville Museum of Art distinctive. The focus on Utah artists, on the surrounding community, and on educational outreach—all critical to the museum’s mission and history—are others. But it’s the people that […]
Twenty-five years ago this month, Sunnie Bybee was a young artist fresh out of BYU when her work appeared in In and Out of Habit, the six-person exhibition reviewed in the very first issue of 15 Bytes. A quarter century later, Bybee is still making art—and still interested […]
Two months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Frank McEntire and his wife traveled to New York City. The wreckage of the World Trade Center was still being cleared, but throughout the city another response to the attacks had appeared. McEntire remembers “altar-like memorials” on fences, […]
It began with a hymn. Methinks the Spirit whispers, “No man has found ‘pure space,’ Nor seen the outside curtains, Where nothing has a place.” Camilla Stark, Rusden Scott, and LAZERos set out to create an elusive “place” in downtown Provo. All they needed was a title. “We […]
When the Utah Museum of Fine Arts opened in the new Marcia and John Price Museum Building on the University of Utah campus in 2001, it seemed all anyone could talk about was the color. Frank Sanguinetti, the museum’s longtime director and the driving force behind its new […]
The day young Vaughn Reid came home from a summer of falling timber and mentioned he was thinking about buying old Harry Gordon’s scrapyard, his father wasn’t having it. “You’re not gonna be a damn junk man, boy.” Old man Reid is buried a few miles from this […]
Twenty-five years ago this week, in the first issue of 15 Bytes, Casey Jex Smith made an appearance in these pages. He was fresh out of art school and participating in his first exhibition, In and Out of Habit, a six-person collaborative show at the Salt Lake City […]
Rebirth & Healing, an exhibition of watercolors and woodcut prints by Nancy Steele-Makasci, on display at the Sweet Branch Library through October 3, is visually enticing for gallerygoers. In the show, the artist offers a series of vertical stripe paintings—twelve in total—whose bands of variable widths and iridescent […]
A charcoal-grey smog sweeps across an American highway, the acrid tang of exhaust fumes so strong they snake into the cabin through the front windshield. A motorcycle, indefinitely rendered useless under a layer of cold plastic, leather, and steel. A single, perpetually parked car. The moment between calling […]
If you’re a newcomer to Salt Lake City’s art scene—say, sometime in the past decade—you may have no idea that this stretch of 500 West was once one of the most vibrant corners of the city’s cultural landscape. It began 25 years ago. Downtown was looking west, […]
