Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
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 […]
When Gilmore Scott got in trouble at school, he had to help the teachers explain his misdeeds to his mother. The youngest of six children, Scott grew up in Blanding, Utah, where his mother raised the family on her own and worked as a cook for the San […]
While the celebrated playwright George Bernard Shaw’s maxim, “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches,” might be droll, it is not accurate. Artists Who Teach, at the Bountiful Davis Art Center through November 23, brings together ten educators whose work ranges widely in medium and subject, while […]
As a child, Liza Doran fell in love with the souks of Arabia. As a young woman, she fell for the textile traditions of Belgium. Then she was seduced by photographs of a beat-up stone building in Bluff, Utah. For the next 40 years, she learned what […]
An old, turquoise-legged ironing board topped with a plank of unfinished wood stands in the middle of Finch Lane’s West Gallery. On it are five oval platters, their rims crimped like pie crusts, their centers glazed white, soft gray and pale blue. One carries a ladder-like motif drawn […]
Growing up in Flagstaff, Arizona, Kate Aitchison had a father who could tell her what everything was. A naturalist and photographer, he knew the plants of the Southwest—which were native, which were invasive, what belonged where. His daughter wasn’t particularly interested. “Now I wish that I could record […]
“We focus on the Spirit of the West,” says Shalee Cooper, gallery director and curator of Under Open Skies, a group exhibition of contemporary landscape art at Modern West Fine Art through November 6. “We really support established and emerging artists.” Demonstrating an abundance of creativity across painting, […]
Looms sit threaded and incomplete, the shuttles hanging in a cross overhead. Threads drape off cacti and railings and a nearby tree; shirts hang as if in your closet, runners and shawls ready for an evening with family at the dining room table. Shawls hang like ancestors on […]
Among the countless artists I met in the 1970s and ’80s who employed glass as a primary medium, “stained plastic” was about as derogatory a term as was likely to be heard. Stained glass is conventionally handmade from materials of the highest quality, incorporating both accidental and intentional […]
Trent Alvey has been around for a bit. When she first appeared in the pages of 15 Bytes in 2003, she was already an established artist. (But if you’ve known Alvey long enough, you can imagine her interjecting: an artist should never be established, she would say. […]
In a 2006 interview, Robert Enright described the works of contemporary painter Peter Doig as being “fixed in a sort of drift,” embodying a seemingly contradictory in-between zone that holds tightly to both stasis and movement. Carried into the current exhibition at ‘A’ Gallery is this same tension, […]
Imagine if Salt Lake City gave $4.4 million in artist grants every year. And if you really want to get crazy, imagine all of it going to just two artists. A pipe dream, certainly. But on a per-capita basis, that’s roughly what happens in Boulder, Utah. For the […]
A few days before his wife, Lori, died, Russell Wrankle applied for Family and Medical Leave from his teaching position at Southern Utah University. Emergency room visits had become too frequent for him to continue teaching, though the couple still hoped a new drug might extend her life. […]
“I saw my darkness, I saw my light, I saw everything in between, and now I’m a new human being,” says Aziza Abdieva. “I’m a Phoenix rising.” Fear is a darkness that is hard to climb out of, but Abdieva has made her artistic career by welcoming it. […]
The warm, inviting style of 1930s Spanish Colonial architecture is one of many elements that makes the Springville Museum of Art distinctive. The focus on Utah artists, on the surrounding community, and on educational outreach—all critical to the museum’s mission and history—are others. But it’s the people that […]
Twenty-five years ago this month, Sunnie Bybee was a young artist fresh out of BYU when her work appeared in In and Out of Habit, the six-person exhibition reviewed in the very first issue of 15 Bytes. A quarter century later, Bybee is still making art—and still interested […]
