Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
When she returned after the war, Elaine Michelsen brought home some strange ideas. Unknown, foreign, from outside. Ideas suggested in pictorial form, alluded to in spoken word. Gathered from somewhere in the the wide world, she brought them to her Rocky Mountain home in Salt Lake City, Utah. […]
Elizabeth Sanchez’s exhibition Así se Acaba el Mundo/This is How the World Ends invites individual reflection toward the constant endings and beginnings of life. Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, Sanchez moved to Utah in 2003 to study painting at Brigham Young University. She received her BFA in Studio Arts […]
On a field of gravel stretching, by all appearances, to the horizon, torn and crumpled $100 bills lie scattered around rusting, broken-bladed iron scissors. It’s not the fun and games we normally associate with the phrase “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” but it is watercolorist Mariko Kowalski’s comment on the […]
Maynard Dixon captured the dry heat of our desert landscape in dusty yellows and browns, but he could also remind us of quieter nights and bright skies with an array of blues and greens. Each painting of earth, sky, or being is a graphic depiction of shapes created […]
“I often wonder if I were the only person on earth, would I still make art?” Russell Wrankle wrote in a recent newsletter to the followers of his online gallery, Shape Theory Collective. “I’m not sure. Would you?” It’s a question many of us confronted during the between […]
In 1982, “New American Nudes,” an exhibition of precedent–breaking figure studies, began its introductory essay with a closeup photograph of a particularly shapely … ear. This bit of anatomy, which few readers probably had thought of that way before, was as nude as it was unexpected in its […]
A gallerist who helped build Salt Lake City’s thriving art scene, Dolores Chase died on April 18, 2023. As her obituary states, Chase was “passionate about poetry, the visual arts, roses, the ocean, and politics.” Chase, who grew up in Berkeley, spent three years in Europe before completing […]
What is identity to an artist? In cosmopolitan Europe, it was often where you came from: Leonardo from Vinci — a village outside Florence. El Greco: “the Greek,” Spain’s most popular painter. Johannes Vermeer of Delft, a successful trading city, eager to show off its luxury goods. In […]
Two decades ago, it seemed as though every artist felt compelled to respond to the events of 9/11. Twenty years later, not so many had something to say about the Covid-19 pandemic. Two locally showing artists who did both used water to represent a shapeshifting threat not just […]
December 31, 2022 marked the last day in my studio space of 20 years. 20 years. Thousands of images created, breeding grounds for over 80 shows, tens of thousands of hours of work, collaborations with curators, gallerist, collectors and friends, hundreds of studio visits and tens of thousands […]
According to a satirical poster by the Guerrilla Girls, the premier advantage of being a woman artist is “Working without the pressure of success.” Down their list a few places comes, “Being reassured that whatever kind of art you make it will be labeled feminine.” That second permission […]
You might have heard a variation of this over Easter dinner (or whatever the matriarch at your table called Sunday’s meal): “The Great Salt Lake has already gone up three feet!” A vague enough statement — three feet from what, you might ask. But the implication is clear: […]
When the late Art Danto, then a leading American philosopher and one of the stars of art criticism, identified the 1990s as “the decade of women artists,” he specifically referred to those who had achieved national or international recognition for what we now call Contemporary Art. The sculptor […]
It’s a worn cliché, the idea that we should think “outside the box.” But sometimes the metaphor rings with the sound of truth, especially when the box is an actual one. Kristina Lenzi was, in her words, “on a rampage” to put performance art on Utah’s map, but […]
When, in the 19th century, French and English painters figured out how to make the impact of light on paper permanent, they invented photography. But that wasn’t the beginning of the search for a way to accelerate the labor of drawing. They and other artists had been playing […]
Disaster is rich fodder for artists, from Aflred Sisley, the French Impressionist who painted the 1876 flood of Port-Marly, to Utah’s Lenka Konopasek, of whom Ann Poore wrote, “Konopasek is always blowing things up or burning them down … disaster is her thing.” So when fire first unveiled […]
Tory Guilfoyle is an artist, curator, and visual arts professional living in Salt Lake City, Utah. She studied photography at Savannah College of Art and Design before transferring to Westminster College where she received a BA in Arts Administration. Tory has spent over 10 years working in the […]
