3/6 Salt Lake City Weekly: 180-page portrait collection featuring over 500 Pride participants to benefit Utah Pride Center
A new portrait project celebrating Utah’s LGBTQ+ community has grown into a major publication effort: a 180-page book featuring more than 500 participants photographed during Utah Pride celebrations. The project gathers portraits made in a pop-up studio during the festival, where participants were invited to step in front of the camera for a carefully lit portrait that captures the many ways people express identity, community and pride.
The resulting collection brings together images that range from flamboyant drag personas and colorful self-expression to quieter moments of intimacy and solidarity among friends and families. The book aims to reflect the breadth of Utah’s LGBTQ+ community while documenting a moment in the state’s cultural history.
Proceeds from the publication will benefit the Utah Pride Center, which provides advocacy, education and support services for LGBTQ+ individuals across the state. The project underscores how portraiture can function not only as art but also as community documentation and fundraising.
3/5 SLUG Magazine: Materializing Hope and Expression at Material Gallery
Colour Maisch and Jorge Rojas have worked alongside one another for nearly 13 years, sharing studio space before establishing their gallery. After being priced out of a former space in the Granary District, they relocated to South Salt Lake and transformed an aging building into studios and a public exhibition site. As practicing artists, they approached the project with an understanding of structural gaps facing creatives. “Being artists, we had really clear ideas about how to work with other artists and how to support them in a really good way — what that would feel like for us,” Maisch says. “We know great people making great work, and we wanted to show that work.”
That philosophy shapes both the artists they represent and the environment they cultivate. Rojas emphasizes the importance of creative identity, noting that developing a distinct visual language takes years of experimentation. The gallery prioritizes artists whose work demonstrates strong direction and voice while centering cultural diversity within its programming.
The name Material reflects both the physical substances artists work with and the generative possibilities of creative practice. Maisch stresses accessibility as a guiding principle: creating a welcoming space where visitors—regardless of their knowledge of art history—can encounter and enjoy meaningful work.
3/3 The Utah Review: Spiritual exuberance in Utah’s diverse ecosystem: Liberty Blake’s abstract collages at Phillips Gallery
Visiting Liberty Blake’s studio is like stepping into a portal that gives the fortunate visitor a glimpse into the muses and the spiritual journey which the artist traverses. Her workplace and what she surrounds herself with allow visitors to appreciate the foundations of her visual expressive language in the body of abstract collages she creates.
The Ancient Roman augurs marked rectangles in the sky with their lituus, a sacred staff. These rectangles, known as templums, allowed the observer to focus on the flight behavior and patterns of birds while also considering other natural elements—sunlight, clouds, wind, storms and lightning. Blake’s collages echo this process of drawing geometric frames and contemplating the forces contained within them.
Her works, assembled from precisely cut blocks of salvaged and found paper, create abstracted landscapes that highlight striking features of place as well as the artist’s visceral responses to them. The compositions draw from Blake’s encounters with Utah’s landscapes—from the Great Salt Lake and Antelope Island to Zion, Spiral Jetty and the slickrock terrain around Moab.
3/1 Utah Stories: Ben Steele Builds a National Art Career from Helper, Utah
“People don’t buy art during their workday. They buy it when they’re on vacation.” Ben Steele structured his career around that insight, and Helper fits naturally into that pattern. Steele’s gallery, Beg Borrow & Steele Art Co., sits among the brick storefronts of the former coal town, where he has built a career creating paintings that blend Americana, satire and pop culture.
Steele describes his work as “pop realist,” drawing imagery from everyday American objects and cultural references while executing them with meticulous technique. His paintings—often featuring recurring motifs like crayons—combine nostalgia and playful imagery with carefully controlled craftsmanship.
After studying art in Utah and attending workshops in Helper, Steele moved to the Carbon County town in 2003, attracted by its low cost of living and supportive arts community. From that base he has gradually expanded into national gallery markets while maintaining a studio and gallery that remain accessible to locals and visitors alike.
3/1 The Salt Lake Tribune: ‘I have not held back’: In her new book, Utah’s Terry Tempest Williams seeks moments of beauty in a busy world
Utah author and environmentalist Terry Tempest Williams is releasing a new book, The Glorians: Visitations From the Holy Ordinary. In it, she reflects on how small moments of beauty and connection can offer meaning amid the rush and distraction of contemporary life. The book continues Williams’ longstanding practice of blending personal narrative with reflections on landscape, community and spirituality.
Williams has built a national reputation as a writer whose work grows out of the landscapes and environmental concerns of the American West. In interviews around the release of The Glorians, she describes the project as an effort to notice and record fleeting encounters—moments that suggest, in her words, “something larger than ourselves” embedded in everyday experience.
The new collection continues themes that have shaped Williams’ career: attention to place, ecological awareness and the search for meaning through observation of the natural world and the lives around us.
2/8 The Salt Lake Tribune: University of Utah’s president explains why school bought a $4.5 million statue ‘that screams love’
A 12-foot-high version of Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE sculpture has been installed outside the Utah Museum of Fine Arts after the University of Utah purchased the work for $4.5 million. The sculpture—one of the most recognizable works of Pop art—was previously displayed in New York City and is now part of the university’s public art landscape.
University President Taylor Randall said the acquisition reflects the institution’s goal of using art to shape public space and community experience. Speaking at a ceremony marking the sculpture’s installation, he described the work as something that “screams love,” emphasizing the symbolic role art can play on campus and in the broader city.
Visitors quickly gathered to photograph themselves with the sculpture, continuing a tradition that has followed Indiana’s work wherever it appears. With its bold letters and tilted “O,” the sculpture has become one of the most recognizable and widely reproduced images in modern art.
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