Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
Seen across David Ericson’s luminously sunlit gallery, Clay Wagstaff’s “Light on the Rock,” a landscape of two trees that join at their crowns so the space between them forms an arch, clearly reveals a vertical line that is not part of the image, but appears to divide the […]
An artist who complained that everyone he drew ended up looking like him was told, “That’s what makes it art.” Every true work of art is a self-portrait, someone said. It’s not the worst definition of what distinguishes art from other uses of the same materials and techniques. […]
Paintings and drawings by Andrew Alba travel with you. Even his signature leaves an echo in your head: a pale white loop-the-loop signature, alba all lower-case and cursive, no letter superior to another in size or emphasis or speed. Eyes, in his paintings, are blobs-of-darkness, curiously suggesting blindness, […]
Before it became Utah’s contemporary art museum, UMOCA was known as the Salt Lake Art Center. Art centers became a thing around the country in the late 20th century, possibly beginning in the 1970s, when an art center in Portland, Oregon, became the first such facility to secure […]
It looks like a blanket, though it might be a flag. There’s an image on it, taken from the most famous work of Josiah Wedgwood, the English potter, entrepreneur and abolitionist who founded the Wedgwood pottery works, with its signature cameo effect, in 1759. In 1787, he made […]
Have you ever wanted to get a taste of Burning Man, but weren’t so sure about the sand and the heat? Drop into the Gallivan Center in downtown Salt Lake City this month and you can experience a version of one of the installations from the most recent […]
The title of a not-to-be-missed exhibition that opened in December at the Kimball and will extend through 2023, “Between Life and Land,” could be interpreted at least two ways. On the one hand, plants and animals could be seen as playing out their lives on whatever land they […]
There’s a novel waiting to be written in the basement of the Harold B. Lee Library. Or — considering the visuals — maybe a film or limited series for the small screen. The essential treatment is ripe for development. At the start of the 20th century, two young […]
Museums, hikes, restaurants — parents expose their children to a variety of experiences, never knowing what might stick. Shauntel Clements’ parents couldn’t have known that, when they stopped to tour the Maynard Dixon home, the experience would remain with their 10 year-old daughter, and inspire her artistic career. […]
The first real art Dennis Stott encountered was a drawing he discovered as a young boy while rummaging through an old, roll-top desk. That small artifact set him on a path that took him first to Butte College then CSUC in northern California. It was at Chico State […]
We could say that art of the landscape is always concerned with scale. Land art was so revolutionary precisely because it brought us out of the gallery and restored us to the immense scale of the actual landscape. But we make a distinction between Land and landscape art […]
A pair of photographs give an idea of the large size and high quality of the homestead. “Casa” captures several buildings, a large tree, and a couple of late-model cars parked in a yard. Another, “Second Floor,” looks out into a central courtyard bounded by stairs rising to […]
I began by asking myself, “When was the last time I walked into a gallery and immediately burst out laughing?” The conclusion I finally arrived at was, “Never happened before.” There are rare times when we all laugh on emerging from a gallery, unable to believe what we’ve […]
At present, the main space at Modern West is devoted to a single artist, the Diné master Shonto Begay, whose primarily acrylic-on-canvas paintings have a unique way of showing the interconnection between, on one side, people who live their lives in complete partnership with the land and, on […]
Can anyone be an artist? Harold D. (“Pete”) Petersen seemed to believe so. In 1993 he and son Mark founded the Petersen Art Center in Sugar House to nurture and shape artistic dexterity. The new Dictionary of Utah Fine Artists describes him as, “a talented watercolorist and art […]
So light and airy, transparent even, is Claudia Casarino’s “El Otro Abrazo,” you might miss it, tucked away in the corner of the BYU Museum of Art’s exhibition Monumental Matters. A tulle blouse scaled up to fit an individual who would be several stories tall, it has been […]
Esther Hi’ilani Candari’s pro-tip for 2023: “If you want to have a lot of amazing projects on your desk, tell yourself that you are going to slow down. It seems like that is when they always come out of the woodwork.” The Hawai’i native now living in Utah […]
