Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
Felicia Baca, who has succeeded Laura Durham as manager of the Visual Arts Program of Utah’s Museum and Arts division, is happy and excited to be a public servant. In fact, that’s one of the things she finds most intriguing and challenging about the position she’s held since […]
Osral Allred would make you rethink watercolor. Spend any time with his work and you were quickly convinced that watercolor was not simply the realm of broad washes and cheery, bright colors; nor that it was only for painting pretty flowers. For over forty years his dappled surfaces, […]
Occasionally I will return to a familiar subject or location that I happen to like and paint it again. I have actually done this on a number of occasions, and each time I have enjoyed the experience. Why? A good subject is a good subject, and painting on […]
Forget Idealism. In the hands of an artist, hard truths can be made immortal. Goya’s “The Third of May, 1808” and Picasso’s “Guernica” continue to speak on behalf of murdered innocents long after convincing the world that it was the pretensions and excuses of their powerful, military butchers that were […]
Back in the September 2013 edition of 15 Bytes we featured a photo essay on the street art — public and private — of South Salt Lake. Because our office is in the city, we continue to get to know the area and discover new gems, including this pair of […]
If asked to name an artist they know something about, most people would probably reply, ‘Vincent.’ They might well defend their nomination by pointing out that he was precisely what comes to mind when someone says ‘artist.’ He was notoriously daft: inspired, driven mad by the very […]
Unlike most traveling exhibitions, the pieces on display as part of do it did not arrive at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA) in large wooden shipping crates to be unpacked and installed. Instead, the do-it-yourself project, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and organized by Independent Curators […]
Christmas is a time for traditions, mostly welcome, but we could do without a recent one: the culture clash that’s come to be known as the ‘Christmas Wars.’ The pattern will be familiar to anyone who has followed the national news, or for that matter ever been bullied, […]
“My paintings come out of my love/hate relationship with Modernism,” says Utah artist Steven Stradley. “Modernism pigeon-holed itself, I think. [Clement] Greenberg pigeon-holed it as he had all of those ideas about painting as a flat surface, ideas about painting super-imposed upon the work that maybe did not […]
“Money doesn’t talk; it swears” — Bob Dylan Money does a lot of things, and like swearing, they can be good or bad. Consider twenty-first century art, for example. Money attracts talent, and with unprecedented amounts of money flowing into the art market, there is so much wonderful […]
The nineteenth-century Utah artist Alfred Lambourne (1850-1926) loved Great Salt Lake. Nestled within a basin, the body of water he referred to as his “inland sea” was his source of adventure and joy, his faithful companion and as such, his preferred place for solitude. His relationship with […]
Waterscapes by Connie Borup opening January 17th at Salt Lake City’s Phillips Gallery once again demonstrates the power of resurrection. Not just the renewal of nature, but the regenerating endurance of Borup’s idiom. Working in oils on medium-sized canvases, Borup continues to explore nature, and how little we […]
What is the nature of a narrative? It has a beginning, it has a development that involves content, often conflict, ideally growth and progression, and it has an end. The best narratives are the ones that have an end that does not end, that through our experience of […]
Park City has been transformed three times. First with mining. Then with skiing. And over the past two decades it has been transformed, at least one month out of the year, by Hollywood. So, as the glitterati take over this month during the Sundance Film Festival, we’re taking […]
Light has been many things to artists, from the scientific explorations of the Post-Impressionists, to the primary place it took in the Modernist agenda of formalism and even its place in contemporary atmospheres of total transience. What are we to think, then, when a contemporary artist calls something […]
As a planner and goal-setter in all aspects of my life, including art creation and marketing, I’m afraid I may overdo it. I fear that too much planning and scheduling may leave one blind to those serendipitous opportunities that could enhance creativity, not to mention joy of living. […]
A few years ago, a Snow College graduate was nearly dropped from the BFA program at Weber State for submitting drawings that resembled photographic double exposures. In one, a woman had two heads; in another, an ear of one face burst through another’s cheek. Ironically, they would […]
There’s an old rule-of-thumb in galleries, more applicable than ever these days: ‘The more text on the wall, the worse the art.’ Without an injection of extraneous text, much of today’s art would offer viewers little for their trouble. But the rule cuts both ways, and Fifteen, the […]
Photographer Mark Hedengren has traveled the world on assignment, but he says his favorite place to shoot is here in Utah, his own backyard. So when he learned that two of Photography’s greats, Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, came here in the 1950s to shoot “Three Mormon Towns” […]
