Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
Depending on your algorithm, you may be clueless about what is going on in southeastern Utah, or you may be—forgive the pun—inundated with images of it: drone footage of Bluff’s homes and businesses standing in brown water, roads that have become channels, the Bluff Community Foundation’s headquarters, where […]
Over the years, Michael Childers has traveled a bit for work. He’s photographed Sir Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre in London, Arnold Schwarzenegger at Venice Beach, California, and Andy Warhol in the artist’s Paris apartment. This month, he’s headed to Logan for an artist talk and an […]
The Kimball Art Center is marking its 50th birthday Nov. 6 with cake, clay challenges and a scavenger hunt through its history. The party comes as the Kimball prepares to leave Park City proper for a new building in Kimball Junction. And in October, the Utah Museum of […]
This summer, a vacant lot on Main Street, formerly occupied by the historic Pantages Theatre, became Art Garten—a temporary gathering space featuring local musicians, food vendors, and informal social programming. Rather than centering spectacle, Art Garten prioritized presence, creating a place where people could gather without the expectation […]
The angel of craziness found Karl Momen east of Wendover and told him to plant a tree. It was August 1981, and the Iranian-born artist and architect was crossing Utah’s west desert along I-80 when the immense expanse of salt and sky caught his attention. He would later […]
Salt 18, the current presentation in the Utah Museum of Fine Arts’ international series of contemporary art invitationals, presents Amor Muñoz, a well-known Mexico City artist who researches the interaction of technology and culture and their impacts on each other. That she has succeeded in this can be […]
The Natural History Museum of Utah is inviting artists to bring prehistoric creatures to life—and put them on billboards Dinosaurs have changed a lot in the past 150 years. Once imagined as lumbering, oversized lizards dragging their tails across the ground, they’ve since become fleet-footed predators, feathered creatures […]
It seems logical to assume that the more artists and their works are included in an exhibition, the more variety can be expected. What’s to be made, then, of 70 works by 70 artists, musicians, writers, and activists, all of which are limited to black and white and […]
Alison Spencer never thought turkey vultures were particularly attractive. She knew they were important, and recognized that the king vulture is striking, but our local turkey vultures were, as she puts it, “common and plain, even ugly or scary to a lot of people.” Then she spent four […]
Madeline Rupard’s 2002 Subaru Forester foregrounds an episode from her actual life. Considering that UMOCA, where these fewer than two dozen identically formatted acrylic paintings are now showing, is publishing them as a book they will offer in their gift shop alongside her previous collection, it might make […]
It’s probably safe to assume that it’s a coincidence: that what will likely be among the last great shows in the splendid, large gallery at UMOCA, where so much current or contemporary art has met the collective gaze, should take time as one of its thematic examples of […]
“Jones and Elsner have been exhibited together before,” says Steven Salabsky, a fine art consultant at Phillips; and it is easy to see why. Their signature mediums might have been different, but they sang the same song: form, balance, value, and the skillful manipulation of light—on the subject […]
Imagine a microwave. Now imagine an art gallery about that size, filled with an assortment of ghostly hybrid creatures. Got the picture? It might look something like Hello Darkness, the latest show at Meanwhile Park’s MINIMO Contemporary Gallery, where a compact space makes unlikely room for the macabre. […]
By the time Becky Bloom landed in Utah, she had already worked at New York’s Rubin Museum of Art, studied at Yale and the University of Michigan, and spent summers conducting research in the western Himalayas. Museums were the career she had been building toward for years. She […]
The founding editor of 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter, put his cards on the table, so to speak, when he titled the umbrella organization “Artists of Utah” and not Art of Utah. His focus was then, and 25 years later still is, on the community of our artmakers. Among […]
I refuse to accept the notion that artworks are puzzles meant for the audience to decipher, especially when it is assumed there is only one right answer. Ideally, an encounter with a work of art is more like a collaboration in which the artist and a viewer come […]
Gregg Deal’s music is full of piss and vinegar, righteous anger delivered with a hot blade of wit and invective. “I’m not a very good Indian,” he announces in “Bad Indian,” one of the songs he performs as frontman for the punk band Dead Pioneers. “My cheekbones aren’t […]
When Stephen Trimble published The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin in 1989, the metaphor of his title seemed almost inevitable. Sagebrush blanketed nearly half of the Great Basin, the enormous sweep of basin and range country extending from Utah across Nevada and into California […]
If you’re new to Utah’s art world, right now the work of Anna Campbell Bliss may feel like one of those odd vocabulary words you’ve only just learned and suddenly hear everywhere. Her geometric compositions, built from color and repetition and carrying a glowing, mesmeric power, have been […]
