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.
If neo-classicism was the architecture of the American republic, brutalism became the style of the American empire. Under John F. Kennedy’s administration, the federal government prioritized funding for public buildings, infrastructure, and urban renewal projects at a time when the stripped-down, imposing style was in vogue in architectural […]
Your intuition might suggest otherwise, but abstraction has been the rule and realism the exception in art. From the caves of Chauvet to the walls of Canyon de Chelly, artists have always extrapolated from the material world to create a pictorial language. (And a written one: most of […]
This might be the one gallery we don’t want to move downtown. With the number of galleries closing up or moving away from our bedraggled, yearning city center (see our article here), any new blood would be welcome blood. Right? But Mestizo Arts’ strength, its crowning achievement, its […]
Symbols being slippery things, you don’t have to believe Joshua Luther when he tells you his current works are about the transmission of knowledge and wisdom. Or, believe him, Luther being the hand that drew these images and the mind that conceived them. But don’t feel constrained by […]
His show now up at Fice is not the one Chuck Landvatter wanted to hang. There were technical glitches — evasive studs, hardware failures, a broken TV — so that the piece he was most proud of, a video collaboration with Eric Overton, ended up precariously propped on […]
“Morag Shepherd never plays it safe,” is what Matthew Ivan Bennett wrote about the Utah playwright in 2022. His words ring true a year later, as Immigrant Daughter’s Theatre prepares to stage Shepherd’s “Worship,” a play that delves deep into the complexities of devotion and the dark undercurrents of […]
In the West it can be easy to be seduced by the grand vistas — the panoramas unveiled at high places. As Louise Fischman shows in her current exhibit at the Gallery at Library Square, the details are just as visually intriguing. And even related. In Unearthed, she […]
On a paved path that brings you from 21st-century, highway-adjacent developments toward the classic 20th-century town center, three cut-out metal sculptures greet you: a miner, a dinosaur and a pictograph. Welcome to Price, Utah. First there were the dinosaurs — the nearby Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, on the […]
In the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary art, new mediums and materials constantly emerge, challenging conventional notions of what constitutes fine art. But sometimes we look to old materials and techniques and reimagine or recontextualize them. For centuries the result of practical necessity — and generally considered a folk […]
If you like your skateboard decks artistic, but whole, rather than chopped up and stitched together (see here), the Urban Arts Gallery’s annual skateboard deck competition may be your thing. Every year in conjunction with the Utah Arts Alliance’s Urban Arts Festival, the gallery and streetwear shop located […]
Portraits are almost awkward by definition: how to pose; to smile or not to smile; what to include in the background. All these decisions, and the primary decision to have ones portrait painted in the first place, give all but the best portraits a sense of awkwardness. Self-portraits […]
Will it matter to you to know that these winding, twisted orgies of positive and negative space, these three-dimensional doodles spiraling and folding onto each other, these rigid stacks of competing planes frozen in time and space, were made from old skateboards? It would explain some things, like […]
It’s just all so much — the contrasting palettes and swirling forms, the scraped, stained and splattered paint, the disembodied heads and piercing shafts of color. It’s the maximalist expressionism of Matthew Choberka, this month at ‘A’ Gallery. The Weber State University professor has always practiced a style […]
Early in her career, Grayce Cutler painted traditional landscapes and floral works. At the end of it, with a nudge from Hans Hofman, she produced water scenes in forceful, expressionistic modes. In between, when the Utah art world was experimenting with new and often controversial idioms, she painted […]
Salt Lake City, and Utah more generally, needs more housing. It’s indisputable. But one suspects that in five or ten years, or even less, all these apartment dwellers embracing urban life are going to be like, “You know what would be really cool? If this neighborhood had an […]
It’s all Hegel’s fault. Abetted, in his time, by Clement Greenberg. It’s this idea that history is working along a single path, towards some specific end. (You could blame the early Christians as well). It’s the type of myopic concept that, in the art world, gets us talking […]
In certain respects the spaces couldn’t be more different. The one is a wide, dimly-lit, makeshift sort of space, tucked away in an untrafficked area on the second floor of the University Place Mall in Orem. The other is a sprawling mansion, perched on a hill, surrounded by […]
This Friday, Park City’s Gallery MAR opens an exhibition celebrating 15 years of business with a show that focuses on the gallery’s roster: all 30 artists will be represented by works that measure 15 x 15 inches. All that work wouldn’t come together without the vision of the […]
