Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
If you’ve been to the state Capitol recently, say for marches about the election or Black Lives Matter, you may have spotted a sculptural commemoration of inequality at another time in our history: the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19 th Amendment that gave many women the right to vote […]
If you’re being followed or navigating a dangerous place, your natural defense mechanisms activate and start tuning. These mechanisms are buried in our mind and body, just as they are in any other domesticated animal. Colors get brighter, movements slow down, and you can shift from terror to […]
Stepping into the basement of the Finch Lane Gallery this past week was a surreal experience. First, due to COVID-19 restrictions, the gallery is currently open only by appointment, so the whole space was profoundly silent. Second, Kasey Lindley’s exhibit has transformed the industrial environment of the cinder […]
When historians scramble to find physical evidence for understanding a culture or period, they may consider utilitarian fine art as a harbinger of a new century, a reflection of a nation’s existential crisis, evidence of a major war, or proof of an economic recession; but, generally, crafts and […]
With our “Still Here” series, we are checking in with members of Utah’s art community to see what the past six months has meant for them. James R. Swensen is an associate professor of art history and the history of photography at Brigham Young University. His research interests […]
Walking into Phillips Gallery at 4 p.m., an hour before closing time and a day before Stroll and the official opening, I see Meri Ploetz DeCaria, a third of the current show in the Main Gallery, chatting on the phone — animatedly for the usually reserved gallery director […]
It’s an art show you can’t get in to see without a ticket – to Providence, or Paris, or even just to Portland (Oh, wait, not going there right now). Yes, Salt Lake City’s new International Airport is operational, with a decent budget for art, though most work by Utah […]
We all can relate to the idea of the inner child, the concept introduced by Freud that everyone possesses a “childlike aspect” within the unconscious mind. This inner child manifests as a subpersonality, an aspect of one’s character that is shown during times of challenge. It is a […]
“There is much in the scenery to admire; mountain rising above mountain, precipice rising above precipice.” — Samuel Parker, Journal of an Exploring Tour: Beyond the Rocky Mountains in 1835 How do you review mountains, or paintings of mountains? Mountains too formidably, completely, contain all opposites: in paintings, every […]
Linguist Noam Chomsky says language often has been considered “the core defining feature of modern humans, the source of human creativity, cultural enrichment, and complex social structure.” Yet one language dies every 14 days. Nearly half of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken on Earth today will disappear by […]
Playing off Virginia Woolf’s classic essay, A Room of One’s Own, the BYU Museum of Art’s exhibition A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists from the MOA Collection, honors women artists represented in the museum’s collection who were able to find that proverbial room, time, space, or means to […]
In downtown Salt Lake City, nestled in the shadows of skyscrapers and surrounded by the rumble of passing Trax cars, five sculptures emerged on Friday afternoon. It was the middle of the day, just after lunch when the pavement had been thoroughly heated from the sun. These sculptures […]
Look! Waaay up there! That’s an Edie Roberson flying machine perched in a vibrant blue sky on the Dinwoody Building, 37 W. 100 South, in downtown Salt Lake City. Soaring over a wall brimming with portraits of 268 Utah women, it is part of a community-created mural directed […]
What does it mean to be a woman in Utah? In the exhibit Rogue: Utah Women’s Voices, curator and artist Nancy Andruk Olson’s selection of works by Utah artists focuses on women’s relationships with their homes, nature, and with others. Olson’s stated purpose in the exhibition is sharing […]
Although Jimmie Jones exhibited at Phillips Gallery in downtown Salt Lake City for more than a decade (1977-88), some people north of southern Utah have not heard of the great canyons’ landscape artist who died in 2009 at the age of 76. After spending his childhood growing up […]
Florence Ware aimed big. A stalwart of the Utah art community in the 1930s and 1940s, Ware was anywhere you looked. She was the first president of the Associated Utah Artists, taught art at the University of Utah and at venues in the community, showed in galleries from […]
If you hit UMOCA on Saturday night, opportunity for fame awaits: the chance to digitally distort or enhance the work of a respected local or nationally or internationally famous artist and get your resulting image in a database and printed catalog. Not only that, but at 8:30 sharp […]
Never underestimate the influence of teachers, wherever you may find them. Connie Borup, now one of Utah’s best-known landscape painters, hadn’t the slightest inclination of becoming an artist until she met an art history teacher in Germany. Borup was raised in Kaysville, Utah, a town that was still a largely rural community dominated by fields in the 1950s. Growing up in that environment has its advantages, but Borup always knew she wanted “to get out.” Which explains why she jumped at the chance to become an exchange student. “That was such an eye-opener,” she recalls. “A 17-year-old Mormon girl leaving her town and going to Germany.” At the gymnasium in Cologne, she met Herr Beppo, who opened her eyes to art. “I made a decision right then — I’m going to be an artist.”
Our relationship with the land is an ancient one, one as old as civilization. One device we have invented to navigate this connection is landscape painting, a genre dating back several millennia. As we approach a situation in which the delicate balance between ecologies becomes increasingly untenable, we […]
