Sometime in the 1980s, art world observers began to notice that artists were often among the first entrepreneurs to move into neighborhoods widely considered uninhabitable, where they would jump-start what soon became the gentrification process. It would have been in large, coastal American cities’ industrial and warehouse areas […]
The windows of the Canyon Community Center in Springdale, which is cradled in a redrock canyon just outside Zion National Park, look out on a landscape that visually reverberates with the abstracted canyons and flora on display within. In a hand-in-glove match between venue and artwork, the Center […]
The Gallery at Library Square boasts a unique perspective, allowing its audience to peer from its tidy enclosure over the fourth floor railing and into the towering abyss of the library’s atrium. Yet so quick are we to become inured to experience that this once acrophobia-inducing encounter has, […]
Exhibiting at Modern West Fine Art this month, the traditionally trained painter Ben Steele chooses subjects that hark back to a universal and nostalgic American childhood. From Kennewick, Washington, and educated first at the University of Utah and then at the apprenticeship program in Helper—under the instruction of […]
This chapbook documents a trip from Utah to Argentina in three brief chapters, each with a poem, an essay, a photograph, and epigraphs taken from the work of poet Pablo Neruda. The first section, “Punta Norte,” describes a wildlife preserve on the Península Valdés in Argentina which is […]
From mysterious murals deep inside Paleolithic caves, to movable adornment for Renaissance merchants, art is something malleable, reflective of the space and time in which it exists. Art was one thing when it was made for the magnificent churches of Venice, like San Marco and San Lorenzo, and […]
Some titles, like Many Things Have Happened Since He Died by Elizabeth Dewberry and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, have made me want to read a novel when I know nothing at all about the author and haven’t read a review. The title itself creates a sort of […]
Old age is a terrain most of us have not traveled. We’ve not been there before (and most people think they’ll never get there, either, keeping the reality, as well as the idea, at bay. Except, there are those times when a brush with old age cannot be […]
Mike Lee, an Artist in Residence at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, describes himself as a product of two world cultures, having split his childhood between rural Japan and Utah. His work bridges these two separate geographical and cultural regions with reference to an elusive third: the […]
photos by Simon Blundell Maureen O’Hara Ure shares her truth, however whimsical, however wrenching, in mixed media on panel. The incident in “The Night of the Fire,” which is part of Love & Work, her fascinating solo show at Phillips Gallery through Nov. 11, actually occurred in 1978, when […]
Jimmi Toro’s fluid line work lays itself gracefully across his paintings. Even in moments of disruption, where the ink spatters or skips, the faces and forms of his creating stare back at us, inviting us into their world. While his work uses a variety of techniques, it is […]
With “The Hive Series,” Utah filmmaker Quincy Boardman has created an outlet for his lifelong passion to “document and aggregate thoughts, opinions, ideas, and inspiration on living a more creative life.” He mixes mini-documentary films with other articles and videos “of innovative inspiration.” In his documentaries he mashes […]
Carel Pieter Brest van Kempen is a Utah native who grew up in Emigration Canyon, but his name invokes the Northern Renaissance: the great scientific and artistic era when Carel Fabritius painted “The Goldfinch,” an ornithological study celebrated in a 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel; and Pieter Bruegel the […]
C.C.A. Christensen painted his most important work, the “Mormon Panorama,” in the mid-1870s. Even though as an immigrant he hadn’t witnessed the persecution and violence central to the stories he gave visual form, it was his dramatic images, in which nature herself seemed to recoil in horror, that […]
Can you name five women artists? What about five women scientists? Mathematicians? Poets?
Jann Haworth couldn’t, and in her new community-sourced mural project, the creative director of The Leonardo set out to investigate and celebrate the accomplishments of women in our lives. The 28-foot long mural – a work in progress – opens this Friday, October 7, in the Street Gallery of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. For our second episode in The 1-5-B podcast, Shawn Rossiter sat down with the artist to discuss the project.
Seemingly a bit lost in the 21st century, Joseph Marotta finds a number of things wrong with now; and particularly with here. His photographs explore the concept of time – the way we experience its passing and how that experience now seems to be accelerating. So when […]
In “Dig,” a large and very colorful landscape in a portrait format, a middle-aged man, lean and strong from a lifetime of hard work, leans forward from the waist, his bare torso so shiny with sweat it reflects the sky above him. As he digs, the passion of […]
Michael McLane is the man behind the Utah Book Festival, which this month is bringing authors and book lovers together across the state. But he’s also a writer, and in this companion piece to our podcast on Trent Alvey, Amy Brunvand takes a look at McLane’s Elik Press publication Trace Elements: Mapping the Great Basin and its Peripheries.
Stewart Seidman creates expressive acrylic works on canvas and with recycled FedEx envelopes that once served as his paint palettes, transforming everyday materials into compelling contemporary art.
To discover more artists, visit our Utah Artists Directory
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