Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
I began by asking myself, “When was the last time I walked into a gallery and immediately burst out laughing?” The conclusion I finally arrived at was, “Never happened before.” There are rare times when we all laugh on emerging from a gallery, unable to believe what we’ve […]
At present, the main space at Modern West is devoted to a single artist, the Diné master Shonto Begay, whose primarily acrylic-on-canvas paintings have a unique way of showing the interconnection between, on one side, people who live their lives in complete partnership with the land and, on […]
Can anyone be an artist? Harold D. (“Pete”) Petersen seemed to believe so. In 1993 he and son Mark founded the Petersen Art Center in Sugar House to nurture and shape artistic dexterity. The new Dictionary of Utah Fine Artists describes him as, “a talented watercolorist and art […]
So light and airy, transparent even, is Claudia Casarino’s “El Otro Abrazo,” you might miss it, tucked away in the corner of the BYU Museum of Art’s exhibition Monumental Matters. A tulle blouse scaled up to fit an individual who would be several stories tall, it has been […]
Esther Hi’ilani Candari’s pro-tip for 2023: “If you want to have a lot of amazing projects on your desk, tell yourself that you are going to slow down. It seems like that is when they always come out of the woodwork.” The Hawai’i native now living in Utah […]
For instance, I hold life, pressing thunder, another breakdown and through A simple whisper darling I press the trigger on the limbs of another day. —Nicole LaRue, “For Instance” Poetry is an art form, but one that essentially stands in opposition to visual art. Calligraphy might be shown […]
Painters and dancers alike make their arts in space: visual design and movement through three dimensions are essential tasks they face in common, skills they must possess. Painters create imaginary space and choose the optical illusions that take place within it. For dancers, real space is the primary […]
Sarah May is a storyteller. Those stories may appear as poems, images, sculptures or combination of the same. You may remember her 2016 exhibit at Mestizo Gallery, where she used the folk art form of the retablo to explore issues of identity and racial stereotyping. In Glances, a […]
“…My salad days, / When I was green in judgment, cold in blood/To say as I said then!” The speaker is Cleopatra, but the words come from Shakespeare, who invented more words and phrases than any other English speaker. He intends his Egyptian queen to mean in her […]
In a brilliantly luminous and subtly surreal oil painting, titled “Pink Lake (Where Will She Go?),” Holly Hind places a young lady, or perhaps a child, on the near shore of a sizable lake, under a livid red sky — perhaps the sunset to end all sunsets — […]
“Everything is Gray,” a photo-realist oil painting by Nicole Woodruff, doesn’t resemble an ordinary photograph; it looks like a camera error, a multiple exposure in which the same couple, the man sitting on a sofa and the woman reclining across both the couch and his lap, are seen […]
Chrysalis Jiri’s untitled watercolor depicts a rooster strutting on a grassy field, with a fence, a river, and a mountain range in the distance, all beneath a scrubbily-brushed, cloudy sky. Nowhere does the painting technique approach optical realism, but everything is clearly identifiable — not least the rooster, […]
Susan Klinker’s assemblage, variously titled “Scarab Piece” or “Desert Transformation,” recounts what she describes as her “transformative experience during a desert meditation” while she was “on a three-day prayer retreat at Christ in the Desert Monastery, Abiquiu, New Mexico.” The work initially seems to resemble a rugged, weathered […]
Hikmet Sidney Loe left in the summer of 2021. Left Utah, that is. Moved her residence 385 miles south to Nevada, where she now teaches in the art history department at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Left Salt Lake City, where she had lived for decades, working […]
Hospitals are bustling busy places where people move quickly with purpose, where missteps can divide life and death, and where hurting people spend countless hours waiting. The team of chaplains at the University of Utah hospital, along with architects, designers, and artists, have created a space of respite […]
Beginning 2023, sculptor Nathan Brimhall is very excited about a commissioned piece he’s working on for a private residence in the Colony in Park City. “It will be the largest work I’ve done at between 20-24 feet tall,” he says. The idea dates back to 2017. “It is […]
As 2023 begins, Susan Makov is anticipating the publication of poet Gary Stein’s Getting to Heaven (and Other Miracles). Makov’s work, based on images the poets sent as source material, graces the cover. The book cover was just part of a busy 2022 for the retired professor. She […]
Personal identity is one of the most influential issues of the day, one with its essence to be found in memory. Recalling not only what has happened, but what we felt like then is how we create a durable sense of who we are. In the 21st century […]
A friend suggested, in jest, that I spend a few years editing down the thousands of entries in the new Dictionary of Utah Fine Artists to a more manageable Dictionary of Utah Fine Artists Who Matter. They all matter, of course. Not being an artist himself, my friend […]
