Utah Visual Arts articles published in 15 Bytes, arranged by category.
An eerie, green glow shrouds numerous faces and figures with painted or printed veils. Bright swirls of colored oils make paths for flying silhouettes of birds. Those same birds are bound to a dark border of black ink, stopping them mid-flight. In her show at Provo’s Writ and […]
As entry into open-ended transgressive thinking via diverse materials and studio habits of mind, art is a way to expand science. As entry into micro worlds, data and diverse possibilities, science informs art. Pretending art and science are like magnets forever turned to repel one another leaves a […]
It’s 11 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, and the third bus parks at the Springville Museum of Art. A high school field trip to an art museum could be made up of expressionless bodies who boarded the bus because it means an excused absence in science or math […]
There’s something unusual about the paintings of Melinda and Joe Ostraff: something that even though never seen before, seems familiar. A work like “Tide Pool #1” isn’t just a bunch of colors arranged in a balanced, dynamic composition. The parts, a folded pink veil with a hole through […]
If you have ever been to an exhibit of (even slightly) heterogeneous works and found yourself wishing the artist had leaned more into one direction rather than another, you know the feeling. It’s a presumptuous one, the desire to tell an artist what direction she should follow, but […]
Look at the titles of her most recent series of paintings and it’s not hard to guess where Nuha Moretz’ heart lies: “Into the Forest,” “Nature,” “Waterscapes.” “I love nature and all its beauty and that is what I want to capture on a canvas,” says the Yemeni-American […]
All our world involves transactional borrowing, or theft. Except our sun, our landlord — who gives us what we have for free (while flames are slowly consuming his own self) — everything’s an extractive bargain, an argument settled by sharing. Earth draws its moisture from the sky, and […]
Clay artist Suzanne Storer has been working on a project inspired, in part, by her grandmother, Hazel, who invited a hobo to dinner each Sunday during the depression of the 1930s. “It feels like my grandmother is here with me as I work sculpting homeless people here in […]
The venue has the vibe of a Zen retreat, seasoned with a pinch of the speakeasy. It’s downstairs at the split level, mid-century modern building across H Street from the Glendinning Mansion. Once home to Alderwood Fine Art, it’s now the headquarters of real estate and interior design […]
The Tom Waits song comes to mind. “What’s he building in there … With that hook light in the stairs/ What’s he building in there?” But it’s not really right, the association. There’s none of the foreboding of the Waits’ song in Steve Dayton’s works, now at Phillips […]
It may be difficult today to understand how important the artist Gordon Matta-Clark was, prior to his premature death 45 years ago. His career coincides with Earth Art, which can be dated to the show of that name held at Cornell University in 1969, when the curator, Willoughby […]
2/24 CHANGES BEHIND THE SCENES AT UMFA Nancy Rivera has announced she’ll be leaving Utah Arts & Museums as of Feb. 24 and will be joining the staff at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. With the Utah Division of Arts & Museum’s two major exhibition spaces — […]
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 […]
