Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
News broke in December of one of the great, unanticipated art discoveries in our lifetimes. Found in a remote, uninhabited wilderness location that preserved it in a pristine state for years, it is large, mysterious, and unlikely ever to be explained or understood. Discovered by scientists working in […]
By David and Sara Lindsay (with frequent additions by their children) Since moving to Utah, we have noted several characteristics and peculiarities of the art in the state. We found that the Springville Museum of Art’s 96th Annual Spring Salon highlights some of these peculiarities. On our visit […]
Fire up your computer, pull up a chair, and you’ll have the best seat in the house for three days of plein air painting instruction from 24 instructors who are members of Plein Air Painters of Utah (PAPU). The three-day event is enrolling students now and will go […]
In order to enter Material Issues, the pieces of which can be seen from above, spread invitingly across the ground level gallery of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, you must cross the familiar steel bridge and descend the switchbacks of the staircase, first walking away, into the […]
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 […]
