Diana Alberghini told her bosses it was time to get rid of the prints. “We have really elevated furniture in here, so we need elevated art,” she told them. And that’s how Forsey’s Fine Furniture, a family-owned business that’s been around since 1951, became a gallery space. Forsey’s […]
Most of “The Sound of Many Books” is taken up by the wall of tomes: going on five shelves of them, no two the same, the gaps between them like missing teeth that testify to regular use. This is an avid reader’s library. Who that reader may be […]
If there isn’t a narrative illustrated by “Flight of the Oculus,” viewers can be excused for inventing one. The appropriately highest panel on the wall depicts something that earlier generations would have pegged as science fiction: a drone floating in air on four spinning propellers. To the side, […]
There will always be artists who start out by looking closely at the world, then by copying it in one way or another. Doing so makes sense, after all, since appearances are often where knowledge begins. Later, it may become necessary to look beneath the surface, to the […]
A stroll to FICE Gallery and Boutique offers the observant visitor a live experience of historical Utah, albeit not so much the “Wild West” of fantasy as the gritty, urban jungle of black-and-white Noir films from the 1930s. This downtown neighborhood is a rare survivor of a lost […]
His show now up at Fice is not the one Chuck Landvatter wanted to hang. There were technical glitches — evasive studs, hardware failures, a broken TV — so that the piece he was most proud of, a video collaboration with Eric Overton, ended up precariously propped on […]
Can I Say Yes to That Dress is a brand new play, written in two exceptional creative bursts ten years apart, which Salt Lake audiences are fortunate to have premiered at a moment in time when love and laughter are welcome distractions. While it sprints through five hundred […]
If air is colorless, how is the sky blue? During the pandemic, faced with isolation, some people turned to television for companionship, while others got a dog. Artists tend to be loners, a useful skill for the solitary hours they must put in, but even their survival skills […]
At the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, response to Nobody Likes It Here, the installation by Alexis Rausch in the Projects Gallery (near the entrance), has been spilling over into the adjacent Street Gallery, where the Utah Division of Arts and Museum’s Statewide Annual is on display. It’s […]
Here’s a question each of us should ask ourselves: what is my legacy likely to be? Lately, each generation or era gets assigned an identity — the Greatest, the Boomers, the Millennials — each of which might signify something. But what is the relation between a generational impact […]
On a bookshelf a few feet from where I’m writing this sits a volume that claims to contain “the complete paintings of Vincent van Gogh”—(it should say “surviving,” his mother having burned half his work when she became discouraged). It’s a large and rather heavy book. Nearby, a […]
Explosive colors surround Elisa Gomez. From blues so deep they almost look black to rich yellows and bright scarlet reds. Gomez’s works reach out, inviting their viewers to step closer and take in the stirring colors, compositions, and textures found on their canvases. Like her works, Gomez’s life […]
Any art is at its best when it’s new, when there are no rules as yet and everything waits to be done, rather than everything having been done already. Whether that is also true of the career of the artist is another matter. David Raleigh, whose Push and […]
As a general rule, masks are intended to conceal the wearer’s identity. Why, then, does Hakeem Olayinka routinely conceal the faces of his Nigerian subjects from view? Nigeria is a country that has seen its environment destroyed by outsiders seeking petroleum, even as its own government murders citizens […]
These must be some of the least iconic images of Utah ever to grace the walls of the State Capitol building. In place of, say, that monument to eons of slow erosion, Delicate Arch, an isolated monolith standing in a virtual sea of bare red rock, “Azure Stream” […]
In an overheard conversation prior to our interview, a passerby who knows the artist exclaims, “You made your earrings?!” Instead of a simple yes, Heather Rison opts for, “I make a lot of things,” followed by a smirk. A seemingly simple statement was an apt introduction to this […]
As remarkable as the fiber art works of Judith Scott are in person, it adds another dimension to see her at work in the short film, Judith Scott in the Studio, that plays in rotation with five other short films in the Kimball galleries video space. Here there […]
With an unknown number works of art accepted, the Spring Salon at the Springville Museum of Art — far and away the exemplary annual show, at the definitive repository of homegrown Utah art and artists — defies imagination. Because it occupies almost the entire main floor, flowing from […]
“I could not do this in my head,” Jerrin Wagstaff says as he passes an open palm over “Ultrascape #21,” the latest of his new paintings. This is a man who has spent half his life doing something most people rarely do, which is to create pictures of […]