This week I took in two very different performances — one viewed online and filmed at the Rose Wagner, the other in-person at a tiny converted storefront. Both showcased emerging local choreographers. RDT’s Emerge: Sounds Familiar took American music from the ’30s and ’40s as its inspiration. A […]
When Claire Tollstrup thinks about influence her first thoughts go to Monet, though Mary Cassatt would be a close second. “Claude Monet showed in his later work how to be free in his paintings. His loose brush strokes give every artist permission to be themselves and to interpret […]
The playbill summarizes Dastak as “a meditation on borders, loss, belonging, home, and liberation. Structured through four elemental journeys — Earth, Water, Fire, and Air — the work traces the knockings (dastak, in Farsi) of global injustices on our hearts, and echoes the subtitle created by writer Sharon […]
Every museum or community art center needs a really big room. At the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, the biggest gallery extends like an atrium up through the floor above, so when they wanted to showcase Salt Lake’s explosive mural art movement, which has decorated buildings of every […]
Located in the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art’s Codec Gallery, Shattering the Pictures in Our Heads uses multiple screens to deconstruct stereotypes of the “Mythic Indian.” Shattering the Pictures in Our Heads is the most sophisticated exhibit currently running at UMOCA, presented in a gallery that uses “codec” […]
For many of us, our first experiences with art come in the form of crayons, markers, or chalk. We would crudely draw stick figures, flowers and animals, which we then displayed, proudly, to friends and family. But this experience is not the case for artist Sara Lynne Lindsay, […]
“What a tremendously hostile world a rat must endure. Yet not only does he survive, he thrives. And the reason for this is because our little foe has an instinct for survival and preservation second to none. And that, Monsieur, is what a Jew shares with a rat.” […]
Those of a certain age may remember the 1997 exhibition of James Castle at the Salt Lake Art Center, back when Ric Collier was the director: small works on cardboard, depicting interior settings and rural scenes, made using the Idaho artist’s spit mixed with soot from the fireplace. […]
Stephen Trimble’s 25th book is called The Mike File. The sound of the word mike trips certain thoughts: a sound-amplifying device; the beginning of the name Michaelangelo; that Mike is a nickname for a boy’s name common around the world. Memories: what-to-name-your-baby books tell new parents the name […]
Sam Forlenza says that whether working as a clinical psychologist or as an artist, “tapping into feelings is critical. I seek to uncover emotions known or unknown, old, or new.” A native of Newark, NJ, Forlenza has an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from Rutgers University (where he […]
It’s a common mistake in the digital age: one opens a browser and takes a look at the month’s gallery offerings, trusting that what looks good on a wall will reveal itself in a thumbnail. Take, for example, Chris Hayman’s Beyond Nature, her new show at Julie Nester […]
In a postscript to an email I sent, in my capacity as editor, to the staff of 15 Bytes at the beginning of this year, I mentioned that my email responses — never arriving at a whiplash pace — might, for a while, be slower than normal: during […]
Four rows of colossal ceramic heads line the right wall of the gallery, arranged in an inverted pyramid shape. While each has been crafted from the same model, every head is conferred with a distinctive color or adorned stenciled designs, ranging in patterns and words. The various symbols […]
Why would a writer like Harvey Fierstein, author of plays like Torchsong Trilogy, La Cage aux Folles, and Kinky Boots, write a one-woman show about the New York politician Bella Abzug? Look at when it was written: 2016, the year Trump was elected president. Fierstein was influenced, he […]
New work by Brian Kershisnik is always eagerly anticipated, and not just in Utah. Increasingly, his collectors fly in from around the country in February, hit the slopes, buy a painting or two, then head back. The art used to wait to follow them until the show was […]
Years ago, Lisa Roullard heard about a fugitive on the run who survived outdoors to elude capture. A year later, she wrote her first fugitive poem. “It never entered my mind that I’d write another, but then, suddenly, that was all I was writing….”
“Drawing is at the center of what I do,” says Suzanne Bybee, a Salt Lake City artist who relocated to Utah after living in Washington, D.C. for many years. “[My] pieces are conversations; my aim is to listen and be a part of the dialogue developing, learning from […]
In Black River, Charles Edward Williams tells a personal story of universal relevance through eloquent physical metaphors. He could have written it down in one of those dubious memoirs that became all the rage a few years ago: how the author fell into addiction or abuse, hurt loved […]
When Richard Taylor scrawls mathematical equations across a canvas, as he does in his 2019 piece “Schwarzschild and all that,” or invokes a German physicist and astronomer in the title, it’s not some form of intellectual posing, an aesthete veering sharply out of his lane. The Salt Lake […]
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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