There are three levels at work in Bea Hurd’s It Was Their Third Cup of Coffee. At the bottom is physiology: the human body and the human brain, each in competition for the same resources. It’s well known that while the brain makes up only 2% of body […]
Just when I think I understand Ed Bateman’s images he throws a curve and I have to start all over.
You think it’s an original 19th-century studio portrait framed on a photographer’s carte de visite, a nod to the ancestors. Then you look closer and something is very wrong. You trusted the patina, the formality, the tint, the truth that we all assume photographs convey. But you are deceived: The child version of great grandmother Hedy (or is it great-grandfather Fred?) is posed next to a robot dog. It almost seems a travesty but you can’t stop looking at the image. What can you trust?
In addition to chapbooks and incidental publications, poet and Utah Valley University professor Rob Carney has published three volumes of poetry. His fourth and latest book, however, comprises 42 innovative prose chronicles, each suitable for dipping into to nourish and kick-start the imagination. Because the form of expository […]
Queer Spectra Arts Festival returned last weekend to Salt Lake City with both online and in-person performances. The 2022 theme, Tell It Like It Is, invokes the words of social activist bell hooks when she said, “the function of art is to do more than tell it like […]
Melissa Leilani Larson’s new play Mestiza, or Mixed is a work that brings together all of the complicated facets of Larson as a person refracted through her characteristically arresting turns of phrase. It tells the story of Lark, a queer, Asian American filmmaker seeking her big break and […]
In this identity-conscious age, people have found many new ways to identify themselves. You may find yourself in all sorts of cultural activities. Each of the seven artists participating in Modern West Fine Arts’ current exploration of the theme of identity, titled You May Find Yourself, has a […]
This book of essays opens with a memory of a song sung by the writer’s grandmother. “A voice that could make people cry,” the writer writes. Her grandmother was asked to sing a popular song as an emotional blessing or benediction at a celebration of the Boulder (Hoover) […]
Emily Hawkins is rummaging around the flat files at Salt Lake City’s Saltgrass Printmakers. She’s looking for sheets of Mylar. “That’s too thick,” Saltgrass director Stefanie Dykes tells her, though she’s not quite sure what Hawkins is looking for. “We use that one for printing,” she says when […]
Tucked up against the mountains at the south end of Utah Valley with a view of Utah Lake to the northwest, Woodland Hills is a quiet, wooded community with large lots and a secluded feel. And the town of just 1500 has a high concentration of artists, six […]
Author, master printer, multimedia artist and Weber State professor, Susan Makov was among the first artists to sound a warning about the plight of the natural environment, depicting things in her prints like birds beset by the trashy artifacts of human overpopulation. It fact, she arrived so early […]
Nothing’s more full of promise than a prop room in a theater, and that’s what this corner of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art feels like, filled with Mitsu Salmon’s paintings on raw muslin. All six of Salmon’s big paintings (approximately 4 x 5 feet) are happy explosions […]
Welcome, my cool cats and kittens, to the . . . Circus of Death After navigating the Ramp of Doom, you’ll be faced with the Beams of Peril! Survive that and be tested by the Balancing Ball of Fright! Lucky enough to live through that? Well, try making […]
Utah Arts & Museums has announced the 12 recipients of their 2012 Utah Artist Fellowships. The $5,000 unrestricted cash prizes were award to six Utah visual artists and six performing artists. Allison Glenn, a New York-based curator and writer, juried the visual arts fellowships. “Through the jurying process, […]
Think globally, act locally. That’s Carol Sogard. From Detroit, Sogard has been a professor of graphic design at the University of Utah for more than two decades. Her work as a designer, educator and community-engaged artist focuses on the type of contemporary issues that affect the entire globe: […]
“I’m not the artist my family members are, but I write.” What Ashley Marie Farmer almost certainly means is that she never felt the sense of vocation that led her grandmother, mom, and sister to paint, her brother to shape pottery, and her grandfather to build a house […]
Allen Smith’s set for Annie Baker’s play Body Awareness at Pygmalion Theater is a kitchen and a bedroom — as Ikea-perfect as a dollhouse. There is something so orderly about the kitchen it’s startling; it ‘s too precious to be real. It seems it’s still a drawing on […]
The drive to the new Mid-Valley Performing Arts Center involves a turn off Redwood Road to a straight shot down 5400 South’s Flex Lanes – the middle lanes in the road are marked solely with dotted yellow lanes and a light indicating which direction of traffic is allowed […]
Ya La’ford’s artistic practices are as multifaceted as her lived experience, spawning abstract painting, public art, video, sculpture and installation. The child of Jamaican immigrants, La’ford exudes the sort of palpable energy derived from a life of incredible ambition and achievement. While her methods are varied, her work […]
For several years Paul Crow’s art was about the outside world. The Weber State University professor’s work was frequently lens-based, passing through and observing the world, whether it be urban, ex-urban or rural. “Before, during and for a several years after art graduate school [MFA, University of Southern […]
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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