Utah Exhibition Reviews published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s art magazine, including reviews of local Utah artists, regional artists, group exhibitions and traveling exhibits of national and international artists.
The downstairs gallery at Bountiful Davis Art Center hosts the staff group show — a fitting metaphor for what lies beneath the institution above. Paintings, pottery, sculptures, mixed media. Self-taught and art-school trained. The variety is a showcase of the different approaches that make this fine center of […]
Another year, another Springville Salon, another chance to reflect on the art scene in Utah. As the recently closed Salon 100 show at Springville demonstrated, the Salon has a storied past. Perhaps most importantly, its more than 100-year history illustrates Utah’s ongoing commitment to the arts, even during […]
In third grade, Tony Jacobsen built a diorama of the Grand Canyon. His school put it on display in the library, and Jacobsen found reasons to return to it—restroom pass, lunch break, any available detour—looking again, mentally revising. Others were fascinated as well. When he had talked to […]
Every two years, the Utah Cultural Celebration Center hosts the Wasatch Camera Club’s Utah Travels exhibition. The title is a bit misleading, since while many of the high quality photographs have been taken, as implied, in some of Utah’s most photogenic places, “Utah travels” could just as well […]
What the patriarchy has fabricated for women often stretches and pulls her in every direction. Be a mom, but have a career, but have hobbies, but be a good lover so you can be a good mother. Yet womanhood also uniquely holds the power to nurture life from […]
A few years ago, artists began making work that sounded the alarm about the state of the Earth. It was a bold effort, but one came away from it—if in fact one didn’t approach it in the first place—with the realization that no work of art, or even […]
“Open wide the floodgates / wash away extractors from the shore. / may we never again measure / this body by economic value. / may we count our blessings / by the flaps of wings. / may we be the ancestors who stepped / in the path of […]
On the way to a creative life, many eager students are given advice approximately based on their interests. An avid reader might be urged to become a writer, though in truth there are numerous perfectly good and potentially more appropriate vocations for readers. One who draws compulsively may […]
In the midst of our rapidly evolving, instant-gratification society with constant distractions, I believe we’ve lost our way. —Nina Miller These days, when so much public commentary is clearly calculated to avoid offending our litigious oligarchs, we may well find ourselves searching the national conversation for evidence such […]
On a river trip, Bianca Velasquez used the solitary quiet of the desert float as a meditation on her current show’s topic. The water bugs caught her attention and a fellow mate on the trip—unbeknownst to her at the time, a wildlife biologist specializing in bears, well-versed in […]
In the foreground of a tall, slender watercolor a luminous yellow oval on the roof of a wet-looking car identifies it as a Taxi. This spot of color is echoed by the light from four narrow windows in the somber, gray structure that lines the street behind it. […]
Sometimes a gallery shows two artists simply because that’s who they have. There’s nothing wrong with that. Or they may have discovered an unknown pair: two deep excavators, say, who are mining the same subject matter. Some artists prefer to show with their friends. Again, nothing wrong there. […]
When Briana Dolan and Kevin O’Keefe opened the doors of the Mountain America Exposition Center in Sandy on May 14th, they were testing a thesis. Salt Lake City, they had argued for the better part of a year, was ready for a serious, national-caliber fine art fair. The […]
Modern West Fine Arts has had three successive locations in Salt Lake City, which is an unusual number for a gallery. For those who fondly remember the days when critics told us what was good and what was bad about things, here are some relevant opinions. The first […]
Envisioned as a 5-year long exhibition that updates the permanent American Art collection galleries, BYU Museum of Art’s latest iteration is a significant re-conceptualization not just of the collection, but of the way the institution views historical perspectives and artists’ roles in history. But instead of presenting a […]
The most commanding work at Polarized America, in the Gallery on 6th at Utah Valley University, might be Kristina Lenzi’s “Pantsuit Pattern.” Essentially an actual American flag hung on a back wall, its brilliant red, white, and blue make it strikingly visible from throughout the room, while the […]
Mimi Chen Ting believed movement could be made visible. In paintings filled with looping lines, rhythmic geometries, and figures that seem to pulse across the canvas, the artist transformed dance, migration, memory, and music into visual form. In a downstairs gallery at the BYU Museum of Art, Make […]
Before it became International Workers’ Day, before it became a bank holiday, May 1st was a festival of spring: dancing, drinking, flirtation, communal release. It was a ritual of renewal with pagan roots and Christian overlays, not wholly approved by the authorities, where villages gathered around a tall […]
There’s a wisecrack by Ad Reinhardt (or some say Barnett Newman) that a sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to get a better look at a painting. That notwithstanding, having the two media share a gallery can be an effective use of space. One […]
