Daily posts on happenings in Utah’s visual arts community.
2020 was undoubtedly tough, but Vincent Mattina remarks that it might have been his most productive year yet. He co-curated his first show, Anthropocene, at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center (UCCC), where, along with works by Grant Fuhst and Chauncey Secrist, his works explored environmental themes, while concurrently […]
With our “Still Here” series, we are checking in with members of Utah’s art community to see what the past several months have meant for them. Emily Larsen is a Utah-based curator and collage artist. She currently works as the Head of Exhibitions and Programs at the Springville […]
47 years of vessel-making took a rather large toll on my body, and resulted in the need for a number of hand surgeries, one earlier this year (a successful thumb repair). Sadly, I still have another surgery pending to fix a painful neurological problem, and with luck I will be a two-handed maker again.
With our “Still Here” series, we are checking in with members of Utah’s art community to see what the past several months have meant for them. Laura Boardman was raised in Utah and lives most of the time in Salt Lake City with her husband, but spends considerable […]
I don’t make New Year’s resolutions because I always break them within weeks, if not days. I made two of them for 2020, however, maybe because the start of a new decade with double 2s called for committed action. Given my track record, the first resolution had a deliberately low threshold for success: Make my own granola—which I am happy to say I’ve done all year and enjoyed immensely with my morning fruit and yogurt.
We’ve faltered. We’ve stumbled. We’ve lain prone, Wishing the dark clouds white. But We’re STILL HERE. It was 8 months ago this week that the foul wind COVID-19 came riding in on slammed the door shut to the Utah art world and upended our community. We were busy […]
I remember sitting on a chair in the middle of my art studio wondering how long I could survive with little or no income. Rent was due in two weeks and I only had enough in savings to last about 2 months.
For weeks I did nothing but eat, sleep, worry, sew cloth face masks and stock up on food. And then it happened. Someone who might have been exposed to Covid hugged me. A really long, emotional, teary hug. I had to quarantine myself in our basement for 14 days.
With our “Still Here” series, we are checking in with members of Utah’s art community to see what the past several months have meant for them. Linnie Brown creates layered artworks with collage, paint, printmaking, and drawing that reference on-going human activity within geographical spaces. She grew up in […]
I’m working on art that is constantly making me cry. It’s cathartic. It also helps me ignore (forget, block out?) all the shock from this pandemic, this summer’s social unrest, and the election. Of course, I morally can’t block all of that out, but I have somewhere I can go that helps. I am lucky to have an amazing studio at the Bogue Foundry. It gives me a place to go that isn’t home. I escape. I think about art or music or just clear my head. I can safely chat with fellow artists and still feel like a member of Utah’s great arts community. It is a little place of sanctuary.
It’s surreal to think back to early March when I flew home from San Antonio after a combination day-job/writing trip — the elbow bump greetings with clients and the quiet eeriness of a barely attended AWP writers conference. At the time, I had no notion that Covid-19 would stretch through the end of this year and beyond. My family and I have been fortunate in many ways, some of us able to work from home and maintain our incomes, while others have been fraught with intense anxiety and struggling to get by financially.
I am the dullest person I know. This pandemic, a bat virus’s game of solitaire with every one of us on earth, can make one duller still, with fright. I try not to fall into deepest/darkest dullness.
I make tomato soup.
My wife and I have both been working our day jobs at home for several years and were already leaning well into our own hermitism, so when COVID hit with that first alarming blow last March we didn’t panic too much.
