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.
Culture has a powerful ability to shape many aspects of personal identity including political, social and familial interactions. Gender also plays a powerful role in this equation. Much has been made about how cultures structure male and female roles, but what happens when this culture is transplanted to […]
Art critic Clement Greenberg once said that “…for Western art in its Modernist phase ‘purity’ has been a useful idea and ideal, with a kind of logic to it that has worked, and still works, to generate aesthetic value and maintain aesthetic standards as nothing else in our […]
To consider oneself an American is to acknowledge an inherent lack of cultural homogeny. The nation is comprised of countless national ancestries, cultures, religions and customs. So much so that the traditional and hopeful “melting pot” metaphor has given way to the more realistic “tossed salad.” The Utah […]
Inspiration comes from many places, and what inspires an artist to create may not be the same thing that inspires a viewer to appreciate, but the power of good art is that ability to act as a mediator, as a go-between, from the source of initial artistic inspiration […]
Beginning this Friday, the Granary Art Center in Ephraim, Utah will be assaulted with a visual overwhelm of printed Instagram images for #Blessed: User-generated Content and Indexing Spirituality. The hashtag #blessed has been used over 34 million times since Instagramʼs inception. It was used well over 8,000 […]
A 2012 profile in Southwest Art tells the coming-of-age story of Billy Schenck, painter of the southwest now exhibiting at Modern West Fine Art: a Midwest boy who learned how to draw by copying comic books, in the mid-1960s he heads to art school, where he discovers the works […]
When Jena Schmidt saw ‘Black North’ written inside the lid of her grandfather’s brass compass, the words resonated with her painterly project as though she’d found a fellow explorer. While compass directions have rich associations for us, they don’t really have colors: north is no more black than […]
Narrative painting, in the form of history painting, was once the pinnacle of Western art, the zenith of Alberti’s 15th-century treatise on painting, and a prerequisite for anyone seeking access to prestigious academies in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the advent of modernism, narrative’s importance waned, while […]
Roundly praised, intermittently censored, and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. —Margalit Fox, New York Times obituary The news that a touring exhibit of works by Maurice Sendak, the […]
One of the key questions art plays with at the present moment can be implied to the five-word phrase it is and it isn’t. Most traditional works of art unambiguously intend viewers to see just what they pretend to be: a visage, a human figure, a moment from life. Kandace Steadman pulled three artists from Finch Lane’s slush pile, the stack of proposals every gallery (like every publisher, whence the term is borrowed) draws from, and juxtaposed them to call attention to three relatively new forms of this ambiguity.
The Topaz Museum in Delta opens this month with an exhibition of works on paper by artists interned at the camp during World War II.
In Don’t Read This, eight artists attempt to explore incorporating the verbal content of a message into the way it’s presented without allowing text to hijack the image.
Ehren Clark puts together the pieces of Andrew Ballstaedt’s art, from Klee-inspired houses to friendly monsters and family flags.
Hikmet Sidney Loe knows the Great Salt Lake. The Westminster College professor and scholar has spent years visiting, studying and writing about the lake since she first came West and fell in love with Utah’s desert landscapes, especially the basin and range areas to the west of the […]
The current exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) has a deceptive title: [con]text could lead one to believe there is some sort of trickery at work, a deception, a con. But this exhibit is the real deal, an inviting array of linguistic imagery, culled from […]
In the past, many artists and art critics dismissed pastel as messy, unstable, and useful only for sketching. But a revival of passionate painters with improved techniques has fostered a different perspective, establishing pastel’s reputation as a medium equally worthy of assessment, appreciation, and exhibition space. Curator Kathy […]
In Giorgione’s enigmatic “The Tempest,” probably the most famous image of lightning in art, an electric blue bolt slices open a stormy cloudscape, dividing the landscape in two. It’s title alerts us to look for visual contrasts and symbolic conflicts, appropriate and easily found in a work done […]
In the contemporary mode, portraiture should and does explore the extremities of the subject, to the extent that the content of the portrait is no longer the subject alone, but expands to speak on an expository, universal level, addressing relevant truths and unique ontological states of being. Such […]
Throughout history, when the vast majority of the populace was illiterate, the visual arts have been used to tell the stories and express the aspirations of religious and spiritual communities around the world. The arts could be a tool of enlightenment but also a tool of control, used […]
