Author, master printer, multimedia artist and Weber State professor, Susan Makov was among the first artists to sound a warning about the plight of the natural environment, depicting things in her prints like birds beset by the trashy artifacts of human overpopulation. It fact, she arrived so early […]
Welcome, my cool cats and kittens, to the . . . Circus of Death After navigating the Ramp of Doom, you’ll be faced with the Beams of Peril! Survive that and be tested by the Balancing Ball of Fright! Lucky enough to live through that? Well, try making […]
“I’m not the artist my family members are, but I write.” What Ashley Marie Farmer almost certainly means is that she never felt the sense of vocation that led her grandmother, mom, and sister to paint, her brother to shape pottery, and her grandfather to build a house […]
With an unknown number works of art accepted, the Spring Salon at the Springville Museum of Art — far and away the exemplary annual show, at the definitive repository of homegrown Utah art and artists — defies imagination. Because it occupies almost the entire main floor, flowing from […]
“I could not do this in my head,” Jerrin Wagstaff says as he passes an open palm over “Ultrascape #21,” the latest of his new paintings. This is a man who has spent half his life doing something most people rarely do, which is to create pictures of […]
Walking into the small gallery at the Bountiful Davis Art Center where Paper Bandages is installed feels like departing on a road trip so early in the day that it’s still dark out. Silhouettes and familiar shapes can be made out at first, but as inky darkness gradually […]
On the one hand, the term “orb” might mean nothing more than a sphere, which is what McKenna Anderl, recently the Junior Artist in Residence at BDAC, chose to paint on a salvaged dictionary page. But then again, the word, primarily used in phrases like “the orb and […]
An influential art gallery doesn’t just record the history of art; they help make it. An excellent example is the current, primarily painting exhibition at Modern West, shared between gallery director and painter Shalee Cooper and Navajo sculptor and painter Sheldon Harvey. When the gallery’s founder and guiding […]
“I want to make the art that ends up in the history books. “With that remark, a local artist — who had gone to the Coast to polish some skills, only to return when it turned out that impressing the Big Pond is harder than it had looked […]
Faced with Kristina Lenzi’s 11 wicked caricatures at Bountiful Davis Art Center, “subtle” might not be the first word that comes to mind. Such large, distorted heads sitting atop long necks that grow out of bodies so tiny a viewer may overlook them — it all feels less […]
When Mary Hutchings arrived at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center on March 4th to deliver a handmade landscape she’d been invited to show, titled “The Banks of the Susquehanna River,” the gallery was full of artists dropping off their own pieces, which would eventually number more than 50 […]
Aïsha Lehmann emerged on the art scene rather dramatically last October with Mixed, a sensational exhibition at Finch Lane Gallery. Mixed featured nine large portrait figures, and while “mixed media” may no longer be a useful term, due to its nearly universal use by artists today, in this […]
There’s a strong case to be made that the most unjustly neglected art form of the last two centuries is the graphic, serial narrative: i.e. the comic, or at it’s often put today, comix. What holds comics back among more traditional art studies is the matter of class. […]
Performance Art is a twentieth-century name for a twentieth-century art form. It is also the title of David Kranes’ most recent collection of short stories, symbolized by the jumbled letters of the title that, on the cover, have pulled themselves up into a human figure and stepped into […]
Technical language, used without regard to its actual meaning, has become a mainstay of entertainment. In just one example, the engines of the starship Enterprise were powered by “dilithium crystals.” Those words name two real states of matter that have nothing to do with each other, except as […]
Maia Cruz Palileo paints vivid and colorful scenes of life in remarkable detail, full of specific portraits of what are, however accurate, ultimately imaginary Philippine places and characters. Like her charming figure sculptures, they have not been drawn from life, but rather distilled from research into the history […]
Every museum or community art center needs a really big room. At the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, the biggest gallery extends like an atrium up through the floor above, so when they wanted to showcase Salt Lake’s explosive mural art movement, which has decorated buildings of every […]
