Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
Recently, Smock & Roll, the Salt Lake City mural duo of Caroline Kane and Alli VanKleek, let their cans rip on a whole back-store plaza in downtown Provo, adding several murals to an area already throbbing with street art. The works are located on the 200 North block […]
Connie Borup’s decision to foreground water in her current work is timely, given the combination of threats coming from drought, the draining of the aquifers, the unequal division of a dwindling supply, and the ongoing fight over rights to it, all contributing to unprecedented water insecurity. But it’s […]
“It looks like an airplane from here,” one of our visitors from out of town says as we approach the roundabout in our car. (The visitor has actually flown planes.) “It looks like the back of a penguin,” says his wife. “And look, there’s a setting sun on […]
Probably all the important essences of human life in this world can be summed up by the works at 15th Street Gallery: paintings of humans’ cities, paintings of humans, paintings just for the joy of painting and vessels made from clay. Most of Aaron Memmott’s paintings (“State Street […]
The earliest clear warnings of the coming environment crisis, fifty years ago, included the horrific-sounding, and indeed horrific, acid rain. Pollution from coal-fired electrical generation and similar industrial activity was filling the atmosphere with sulfuric and nitric acids, which fell with the rain, killing plants and polluting rivers […]
Because exhibitions are scheduled months, if not years, in advance, it may be a while before we see the curatorial hand of the Utah Museum of Fine Art’s new senior curator. But, with the goals she has set, Alisa McCusker has plenty to keep herself busy behind the […]
Are We Here For Ourselves Alone? With this question, artist Christine Atkinson introduces a new, holistic way to looking at our environmental predicament, one that asks how we got to this dire point by asking us to consider where we went wrong in the first place, and arguably […]
First, let’s begin by acknowledging that there is no more important work being done by human beings than that undertaken every day by our mothers. In high school, I studied Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, which has saved countless millions of lives. Alexander Fleming had a mother. Like […]
With much of the state taking fall breaks, Moab will be a prime destination this October. It’s a playground boom town always flush with recreators of all sorts: bikers, hikers, rafters, four wheelers. But you can only do those activities for so long before the gas tank goes […]
It’s quite likely that, when Frances Geerlings Paxton set up her watercolors and acrylics in front of a dilapidated water tower and began to paint, what she primarily had in mind was to capture a bit of Utah’s romantic rural scenery, not unlike what her peer, Jeanie R. […]
“Epigenetic Mechanism #1” sits humbly on the floor of the underground gallery at Bountiful Davis Art Center, part of the circle of objects Art Morrill calls “Material Support.” Nothing about it refers back to previous art works, though it makes copious references to what lies outside today’s art. […]
In her opening remarks on Friday, October 7, 2022, UMFA executive director Gretchen Dietrich stated that Air (on display until Dec. 11) is an intentionally diverse exhibit. Former UMFA curator Whitney Tassie’s artist selections range from local artists like Virginia Cathrall highlighting the air quality issues experienced here […]
This essay was published in conjunction with Frank McEntire’s exhibit Through a Narrow Window: our impact on the environment, Snow College Art Gallery, Aug. 29 – Oct. 14, 2022. All images: installation views from the exhibit, courtesy the artist. These jars were provided by scientists, artists, philosophers, historians, […]
A medium shot of a forest, with a hint of sky at the top, dense foliage on skinny trees, shrubbery surrounding their lower parts. But what’s this? The black-and-white image covers only the top two thirds of the page, while the lower third includes not only the continuing […]
There’s an old saying among artists, and there can be no doubt whose boast it is, that painters make pictures of things, while sculptors make things. That distinction may come to mind while contemplating the works of Anna Laurie Mackay, currently on view as part of Interwoven, a […]
What is Art? This is a common question, perhaps even a tired question, but one that any lover of arts has or will encounter at some point in their studies. It was the question that filled my brain while walking through the Eccles Art Center’s Art In Bloom […]
In Utah, modernism was welcomed with open arms by only a belated minority. Three decades after New York’s Armory Show — when the various isms of modern art developed in Europe were revealed to the American public — artists in the state of Utah were still struggling with skeptical peers and a bewildered if not belligerent public — a public that often chose not simply to ignore the new isms, as they might with artistic trends today; they attacked, or at the very least, mocked them. Modern artists, to much of the Utah public, were considered incompetent or deranged, seen as hucksters and commies.
When Emily Hawkins exhibited two pigment-printed photographs from her “Matriarch Diptych” series this year in the Bountiful Davis Art Center’s juried annual, and one took first prize, her image of a luminous presence prompted speculation that she meant to invoke a divine being. Indeed, she may have had […]
There’s an old story about someone who stared at something so intently it began to smolder — and eventually burst into flames. It’s suggested this is only possible when one looks at it the way artists look at their subjects. And no, they don’t look at things the […]
