Our country is increasingly becoming a place of hyphenated identities, in which we speak of ourselves in relation to the countries or continents our ancestors came from — African-American, Italian-American, Korean-American. This increased focus on cultural and ethnic identity is double-edged: the hyphen acts as both a bond, […]
Aesthetic theory has always been a subset of Philosophy, a body of human thought that modern science has essentially rendered obsolete. The problem is that philosophers, be they Plato or Kant, want to legislate reality: to say, not Is this beautiful? but rather, What is beauty? The process […]
It’s hard to predict what thoughts and experiences will affect an artist’s work, but major life changes — birth, death, marriage, divorce — almost always surface in the work of creative individuals, whether explicitly or implicitly. One such example can be found this month at the Sweet Branch […]
A new residency program in northeastern Nevada, just miles from the Sun Tunnels, offers artists an opportunity for work and reflection in a remote desert setting.
The gallery titles this show Round Trip, a reference to life’s having taken Haworth from western America to Britain and back. Aside from the two bracelets and “Jewels and Ring,” a freestanding set of fabric jewels, Haworth, if she chose to follow Cindy Sherman’s example, might well call most of the works “film stills.”
Today’s column is on a subject that I encountered years ago and was recently reminded of — avoiding the cartoon look in a painting. This may seem like a weird thing to write about, but it is a look I happened upon once or twice out in the […]
There’s a whirlwind of artistic activity along the Wasatch Back this year: a large metal piece called “Urban Tornado” by Salt Lake City’s Lenka Konopasek has been installed at the Summit County Building in Kimball Junction and Riverton artist Tim Little’s assemblage “Fly Utah” is in front of […]
While most fans agree “The Empire Strikes Back” is the best film in the original Star Wars trilogy, few of them would suggest watching the film in isolation. It would be like attending only Part Two of Shakespeare’s trio of plays on Henry V: a middle with no […]
Perhaps the most important question that should be asked of any new work of art is this: So What? A work can do all sorts of things, some of them even unprecedented, but unless doing so serves a purpose, the accomplishment may be no more than a stunt. […]
Though you won’t expect to find the owner of a Harley, custom-finished with devilish skulls, running in similar circles as the owner of a delicately rendered redrock landscape, they both may be getting their art from the same source: Brian Lindley. After a decade working as an […]
Just as one would not wisely attend Shakespeare’s Henry V as a primer for an exam on franco-anglo relations in the 15th-century, do not come to Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, on stage this summer at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, to better understand the life of a favorite classical composer. […]
by Will Thompson It was terrifically hot, but so were the bands; the fountains were cool, as was the jazz, and the evening air refreshing – if you lasted that long with the sun beating down at this year’s Utah Arts Festival. Still, artist and gallery owner Karen […]
When gallery director Susan Meyer tells you Meyer Gallery is celebrating its golden anniversary, it’s hard to believe. Fifty years ago, the ski resort designed to rejuvenate what was a declining mining town was barely a year old, tourists were only beginning to trickle in and […]
In bringing a cross section of performance to a broad public, the Utah Arts Festival fulfills an important role each summer. Dance is often accused of being one of the more insulated art forms, as audiences find difficulty in analyzing nonverbal ideas and, more specifically, doing so at […]
SUNDAY BLOG READ is your glimpse into the working minds and hearts of Utah’s literary writers. Each month, 15 Bytes offers works-in-progress and / or recently published work by some of the state’s most celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary non-fiction and memoir. Today, 15 Bytes features […]
A dash of two rather obscure (mostly) twentieth-century Danish composers, mixed with the still most–prominent one, along with a peak from a young German composer’s early romanticism. What makes for a superb chamber music concert? The right performers for the repertoire and compelling performances of course.
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts has a new curator of European, American and Regional Art. Gretchen Dietrich, UMFA executive director, says Leslie Anderson-Perkins will be “invaluable as she brings a fresh eye to these important collections and plans new ways of presenting them to our visitors.” Formerly […]
Stephen Brown, or SB as he is known, has created a local following based on the premise that his work is different in its engagement of adult sensibilities and its challenge to the presumed insulation of concert dance. Audiences have come not just to expect but to desire […]
The art world is full of strange processes, from the rituals artists use to give themselves ideas, to the crafts they employ in bringing these inspirations into being, and so on to the necessary habits and innovations employed by audiences in sorting out the results. One of the […]
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