Features on public art published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s art magazine.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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: […]
When the Southern Utah Museum of Art opened in Cedar City in 2016, the sculpture court east of the building was more promise than reality. During the summer, a single bronze figure—Jane DeDecker’s “The Sower”—stood alone in a field of gravel, an apt symbol for a collection that […]
I arrived in Provo, UT, on an unseasonably warm May afternoon to photograph Everett Thorpe’s New Deal-era mural “Early and Modern Provo,” which hangs near the entrance to the J. Will Robinson Federal Building. To my surprise, the two guards at the entrance told me the Thorpe mural […]
Springville seems like it’s had an antipathy (or is it fear, or maybe indifference?) to murals, ever since they painted over the Gordon Cope mural in the 1940s. Home to the first and one of the biggest art museums in Utah, with sculptures installed all over town, Utah’s […]
The Salt Lake City Arts Council has thrown down the gauntlet. They say that at nearly 2,000 feet, Strut is the longest continuous public artwork in Utah. The piece by Seattle-based duo Laura Haddad and Tom Drugan (Haddad|Drugan) runs along the south side of the 400 South […]
In 2001, as the University of Utah prepared the George S. Eccles Legacy Bridge for its Olympic debut, a copper skier statue called “Go for the Gold” went in near the bridge’s west stairwell—donated, not commissioned, by private donors. At the time, a university representative told the Daily […]
Few people stop at Cisco, Utah. Cyclists pedaling the long haul from Moab to Loma, Colorado pass through it. River runners cut straight across it on their way to the Cisco boat launch to start the three-to-four day float back to Moab. In its heyday, near the turn […]
Twenty years ago, 15 Bytes paid a visit to what we called one of the most unique sculpture gardens you’ll find “well, anywhere.” The Gilgal Sculpture Garden, tucked behind houses and businesses at 749 East 500 South in Salt Lake City’s Central City neighborhood, hasn’t moved. Many Salt […]
For all its cranes, new apartments, and redevelopment buzz, the Granary District has always been a place of odds and ends: empty lots the size of moonscapes, century-old warehouses slouching against cinderblock additions, and industrial streets that still bear the ghosts of rail lines. It’s a neighborhood defined […]
Cedar City was always an improbable place. If it hadn’t been for the iron ore deposits in the hills nearby—deposits that Brigham Young wanted to exploit for the fledgling Utah Territory—Mormon settlers might never have come to this particular stretch of the high desert at all. As recent […]
Sometimes your neighbor is just lazy. Halloween ends, the pumpkins collapse, and a plastic skeleton is forgotten in the yard. But take a closer look, because sometimes something else may be going on. In the Liberty Wells neighborhood of Salt Lake City, a skeleton family has settled into […]
Fans of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing may remember the show’s famous jab at the Mercator projection, a map so ubiquitous we mistake it for neutral. Little could those viewers have known, back in the George W. years, how much that same projection would come to shadow a […]
Park City’s public art program started with an accounting error. David Chaplin was going through the books of the Park City Arts Foundation when he came across a felicitous accounting error. Chaplin, an avid skier, professional artist and instructor at the high school and college level, had moved […]
