A customer speaking with Elpitha Tsoutsounakis at the counter inside Books & Supply, surrounded by shelves of art and design books.

All images by Steve Coray.

“It just wasn’t a good fit anymore,” says Elpitha Tsoutsounakis, who after a decade and a half as a professor at the University of Utah has resigned her position—to open a bookstore.

On a quiet stretch of Salt Lake City’s historic Film Row, inside a former film-reel vault that once housed Cosmic Aeroplane, Elpitha Tsoutsounakis is hoping to build a new kind of creative space—Books & Supply, an art and design bookstore and supply shop that doubles as a studio, gallery, classroom, and community hub.

At the University of Utah, Tsoutsounakis co-founded the Multi-Disciplinary Design program thirteen years ago, an experiment in collaborative, practice-driven design education. “We thought we were really well poised for me to go on to tenure track and do my own research,” she says. “But then everything changed.” She spent years teaching, mentoring, and ultimately pursuing tenure-track research, even as the institution struggled to define what creative work looks like at a Research 1 university. “I still really believe in [the MDD] as an educational model. But the university has changed since COVID, since the political shift . . . The minute I started down the tenure track, I felt like if I kept doing the work the university wanted, it wouldn’t be the work I wanted to do.”

What kind of work does she like to do? Much of it involves playing in the dirt.

In “Unknown Prospect: Body, Pigment, Swatch,” Tsoutsounakis mapped the journeys of ochre—from tailings piles to the human body—through field-gathered materials, pigments, and archival images. The project reframed ochre both as a geologic technology and a contemporary lens for thinking about extraction, memory, and place. She exhibited it at Salt Lake City’s Finch Lane Gallery in 2022 before it traveled to the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023.

Unknown Prospect: Body, Pigment, Swatch at Finch Lane Gallery.

Her current research project, “Labor Pile,” imagines moving an entire tailings pile in Tintic, Utah, by hand as a meditation on extraction, time, and human–geological entanglement. “I’m just curious, like, how long does it take one person to move a pile like that bucket by bucket.” The project made it to the second round of the Creative Capital grant process this year.

Despite the professional recognition her work has received, not all university administrators could wrap their heads around it.

With three children rooted in local schools, and a partner running restaurants in the city, the traditional academic path—relocating for a tenure-track job elsewhere—wasn’t realistic. “I wasn’t gonna go, you know, like a typical academic, go and chase a job. Who knows if I would have been able to find another place.”

So she left. And into that void came an idea both deeply personal and wildly risky: open an art and design bookstore in Salt Lake City. “We used to have design bookstores here,” she says. “Do you remember Bibliothek? Salt Lake City has changed a lot in the last 20 years, and I’m hoping, I’m betting, that we have enough people who are interested in design and who are designers and artists and creatives that it will support it.”

The bookstore is just one revenue stream in a braided model she’s building. Others include selling specialty art and design tools; client-based design work; grants to support her research; flexible event-space rentals; possible co-op or membership programs; adjunct teaching; and public open-studio and critique sessions. Everything has been designed to be flexible. The shelves are on wheels, built so the entire store can transform in minutes into a lecture venue, gallery, or studio classroom. Tsoutsounakis occupies the middle space as a studio and a small back room serves as a micro-gallery, and recently hosted a concert. “I would also like to eventually get together maybe some kind of community where you apply to be part of the studio throughout the semester… It’s almost like a little bit of a school model, but it’s totally public.”

Books & Supply is housed in the Film Exchange Building, one of the last intact structures from the city’s Film Row—once home to film distributors who stored reels in concrete vaults and rented them to local theaters. Today the building has new ownership and new tenants, nearly all women-led: a sign painter, a tattoo studio, a salon, boutique retailer Momu, and the cult-favorite pastry shop Eats. Tsoutsounakis is the last of them to open her doors. “I think the owner has a good head on her shoulders. She really supports local business. She values the fact that it’s a historic building, that it’s the right scale of availability.” All the tenants will be opening their doors this Saturday for the Central City Gift Exchange, 10am-3pm.

Financially, Tsoutsounakis hopes a “thirds” model will stabilize her businees: books, client work, and grants covering costs like rent and health insurance. “People still want good tools. They still want a beautiful book. They still want a community. If I can help make that happen—and pay the rent—then I’ll consider it a win,” she says.

Success won’t be measured in profit margins anytime soon. As she puts it, “I know that it takes one or two years to build a business… success in six months? Who knows.” She describes her measure of success simply: “The fact that I’m just healthier and happier having left a situation that didn’t work for me, is successful.” The rest she’s willing to build bucket by bucket.

Books & Supply features a curated selection of art, design, ecology, and theory titles—all part of Tsoutsounakis’ vision for a creative community bookstore.

Books & Supply is located at 252 E. 100 South in Salt Lake City. Free parking is available in the rear. Visit Saturday, Nov. 29, 10am-3pm for the Central City Gift Exchange.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.