Utah Art Professional Spotlights published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s art magazine, including profiles of gallery and art center directors, curators and more.
There’s a whole menagerie of people who work behind the scenes in Utah’s art community, doing both the heavy lifting and the heavy paperwork to get shows up, receding into the background to give the limelight to the artists being featured. Since 2017, James Walton has been the […]
Katie Lee-Koven, executive director and chief curator of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (NEHMA), recently marked her tenth anniversary with the museum. Reflecting on her tenure, she noted her mission to transform NEHMA from a “hidden gem” into a leading academic and regional art institution. “On […]
We feel everything she needed to know she learned as a writer for 15 Bytes (from 2018 to 2019), but there’s a chance Brigham Young University Museum of Art’s new Curator of Religious Art picked up a thing or two in other places. Like in Heather Belnap’s Women […]
There was no headline-grabbing announcement when Laurel Cannon Alder decided to leave the Utah Division of Arts & Museums. As grants manager, she wasn’t the public face of the division but rather one of the many art professionals who work in the community behind the scenes. And not […]
If you plan on scheduling a tour of the Salt Lake County art collection, be prepared. Kate Ithurralde’s enthusiasm for the largest publicly available collection of Utah art is infectious. She can dive deep into an individual work or range comfortably across the expanse of the collection, knitting […]
Karilee Park was frustrated with teaching art. Everything in the field seemed to be lacking: funding, engagement from students, respect from peers, personal enjoyment. All of which made her career choice unsatisfying—a career she hadn’t even planned on entering. Becoming a teacher was a matter of necessity for […]
“I see curation as a very collaborative process,” says Emily Lawhead, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts’ Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Off the bat, it’s clear that Lawhead’s approach to curation is abundantly refreshing and crystal clear. To Lawhead, curation is a communal practice, enlisting […]
Hikmet Sidney Loe left in the summer of 2021. Left Utah, that is. Moved her residence 385 miles south to Nevada, where she now teaches in the art history department at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Left Salt Lake City, where she had lived for decades, working […]
Because exhibitions are scheduled months, if not years, in advance, it may be a while before we see the curatorial hand of the Utah Museum of Fine Art’s new senior curator. But, with the goals she has set, Alisa McCusker has plenty to keep herself busy behind the […]
Born in Mexico City, Nancy Rivera is a Salt Lake City-based artist, curator, and arts administrator. An interdisciplinary artist, she utilizes photography, video, sculpture, and installation to explore themes of dual cultural identity and its effects, such as code-switching, cultural assimilation, and displacement. Her work has been selected […]
Raised by a single mother in Clearfield, Taylor Knuth, new assistant director of the Salt Lake City Arts Council, says, “Art saved my life, being a young gay kid in Utah.” When asked flat out what he wants people to know about him, he adds, “We should be […]
Ann Poore grew up an army brat — her late father, she jokes, would have emphasized the latter part — who spent her formative years in northern California in the late ‘60s. She came to Salt Lake City to finish college, which she did at the age of20, […]
In 2016, gallerist Brad Kramer decided to display a painting by J. Kirk Richards depicting the biblical Eve as African. The ensuing controversy came from an unexpected source. Not from the prudish, objecting to the depiction of her naked breasts (Kramer’s gallery is in Provo and his audience […]
Photo by Zoe Rodriguez Long a big deal in Utah’s arts community, Victoria Panella Bourns has just been named director of the Utah Division of Arts & Museums – a very big deal, indeed. She’s one of those maddeningly brilliant right brain and left brain people who readily switches from […]
“I focus on the aspect of art that is the mechanism,” says Anne Cummings. “The mechanism of art can be a transformation, a transcendence, and through that transformative process is healing,” she says. “Through channeling different memories — the process of creating art — there is opportunity […]
Laura Hurtado, who curated the Plural and Partial show at the Rio this month (see left column), says she might throw into the mix a work of her own: a performance piece. The exhibit is about intergenerational relationships, so it seems appropriate that Hurtado is due to give birth […]
Felicia Baca, who has succeeded Laura Durham as manager of the Visual Arts Program of Utah’s Museum and Arts division, is happy and excited to be a public servant. In fact, that’s one of the things she finds most intriguing and challenging about the position she’s held since […]
