Michelle Pace, David Habben, Intermountain Indian School, Eric Dowdle

By 15 Bytes on February 6, 2025 • ( Leave a comment )

2/5 SLUGMAG: “Where Art and Community Meet”: The Curatorial Ethos of Michelle Pace

Art is a very vulnerable gift,” says Michelle Pace, artist and curator of the Urban Arts Gallery’s 2025 exhibition Shades of Expression. “Art comes with judgement and opinion: positive, negative, whatever.”

For Pace, an artist, curator and mother of three, the emphasis is on the “gift” element. “Artists get fed on knowing why someone liked their piece. [Art] is my mission. [Art] is how I do humanitarianism.”

Working in mediums as diverse as dance and murals, Pace sees art as a means of expression and uplifting. Her artistic history begins when an elementary school teacher entered Pace’s work in a local competition. The piece won third place, and soon she was taking Mrs. Wanzer’s art class alongside fifth graders instead of her second-grade peers.

1/22 CITY WEEKLY: Illustrator David Habben and the Bridget Vanderpuff series

The stereotypical paradigm for visual artists involves a solitary creative existence, one where the artist is alone in a studio with nothing but blank paper or canvas and a personal vision to bring to life. But the reality can be quite different when you’re an illustrator—though according to local artist David Habben, that doesn’t make the work any less fulfilling.

An alumnus of art programs at both the University of Utah and Brigham Young University, Habben traces his artistic origin story to growing up in a home with a mother who was an elementary school librarian. “We always had illustrated books around, and valued writing and that kind of art, so it wasn’t a big jump for me to be an artist,” Habben recalls. “It’s something you do as a kid, but once I got into college and started taking classes, the question wasn’t whether I wanted to, but was it even possible? … I came from a blue-collar family, and the idea that you could make money as an artist, or make a living that way, wasn’t something you could do.”

1/22 SLTRIB: Utah’s Intermountain Indian School was full of murals. Now they are finally going on display.

When Canadian artist Sheila Nadimi first happened upon the abandoned buildings of the former Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City, she felt a gravitational, even emotional, tug toward them.

“It was a vast array of monotonous buildings,” said Nadimi, who lived in Logan in the early ‘90s. “My relationship with the buildings started immediately, really, from my first time seeing them.”

Brigham City and Logan were the first places Nadimi learned to love in the United States. She often would drive past the school buildings on her way home through Sardine Canyon, each time growing more curious about them. One day, she decided to get a closer look, and a groundskeeper let her inside.

1/19 DESERET NEWS: Nobody will look at your art more than in a puzzle. Carving his art into tiny pieces has made all the difference for Eric Dowdle.

He is the creator of the largest wall puzzle in the world (20 feet by 60 feet), he’s produced a puzzle with more pieces (60,000 of them) than any puzzle in history; he’s sold more folk art puzzles (25 million and counting) than any artist living or dead; he’s been in not one but two television series — starring him.

You have to hand it to Eric Dowdle. When he decided it was OK to carve his art into tiny pieces, he didn’t do it halfway.

If the fate of artists is supposed to be, 1. toil in anonymity, 2. starve. and 3. have people say, “Oh, he was very good” after you’re long departed, well, not for Dowdle. It could be argued that more people have spent more time gazing at his paintings than any other artist who ever picked up a brush.