The Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center (138 W Broadway, Salt Lake City) celebrated its 25th anniversary this week with the unveiling of a new mural by Salt Lake City artist Lenka Konopasek. The Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, known locally as “The Rose,” opened in the summer of […]
What would happen if an artist decided to practice her signature by writing it over and over again on a painting that didn’t work out, then forgot to destroy it? Would those signatures, with their aura of the artist’s presence, make up for the work’s rejection? How many […]
Gail Martin had one of the better retorts to the modern art skeptics of his day: “Strange is it not, that the man who demands the latest models in motor cars, who would not be found dead in a 1929 Ford, that the women, who wears only the […]
Bernard Meyers has shown original and evolving approaches to photography at the Alice Gallery and now at UMOCA, but he always has something useful to say about it, as well. At his 2014 exhibition in the Alice, his statement began, “I love ambiguity.” In a medium where most […]
Any art is at its best when it’s new, when there are no rules as yet and everything waits to be done, rather than everything having been done already. Whether that is also true of the career of the artist is another matter. David Raleigh, whose Push and […]
Walking into Ogden Contemporary Arts (OCA) your eyes immediately turn to a large piece at the center of the room. Detailed floral designs wrap and bend, creating pieces of furniture. The top of a chair sticks out at the viewer, its legs disappearing into the solo standing wall. […]
“Here” is always “between there,” just like now is always between then and anyone is between others. Whoever seeks an explanation of what John Sproul’s art says is making a categorical error. It doesn’t render judgments; it illustrates possibilities. Not what is but what could be. Not all […]
To contemplate “Waniya,” or any part of Excess, Kathryn Knudsen’s mixed media show at Bountiful Davis Art Center, is to see clearly just how far art has come since the Abstract Expressionists put America on the world art map in the years following World War II. Then, the […]
Though they might be lazy or imprecise, we’ll use them, if only because they are the categories Utah’s mid-century art community used: the modernists and the conservatives — two camps, engaged after the conclusion of the Second World War in a battle for what little attention, prestige or […]
Tobias Fike has filmed what it feels like … not to die, but a related experience we never have for ourselves. Most of us know what it is like to lose a loved one, a dear friend, or even a stranger we admired above all others. We know […]
We expect art to do a lot of things: be visually stunning, yes, please; express something meaningful, hopefully; teach us something important, possibly. We also hope art can change the world. And the world needs a lot of changing: institutional inequities, catastrophic climate change, terrorism and torture, the […]
Surgeons and airline pilots probably shouldn’t pretend to know more than they do. But is it wrong when an art critic does? After all, what we do is hardly dangerous, or even, for that matter, important. But it may still matter, if for example an artist knows something […]
One thing 15 Bytes editor Shawn Rossiter neglected to mention in his recent and invaluable introduction to the medium of silkscreen was that the highest price ever paid for a 20th-century “painting” — $195 million paid in May for Andy Warhol’s “Shot Blue Marilyn” — was actually paid for […]
To approach the figure portraits of Pamela Beach, on view in the main gallery at Bountiful Davis Art Center until September 10, you must pass a crowded assortment of colorful and often familiar-looking objects drawn from the era of Pop art, which can distract and detain the casual […]
Where mountains stretch across the canvas, clouds roll across the ridgeline, dissipating into whispy streaks of white. A full moon rises through the clouds in the delicate hours before darkness takes over. Filling the foreground of the painting, Great Salt Lake’s blue tones reach out to the viewer, […]
The Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival is back once again to bring the art of theater performance from the fringes of society to the center of downtown Salt Lake City. Shianne Gray and Jay Perry, co-directors of the festival, put together 24 live performances to be enjoyed for […]
Thomas Brewster Kass, 85, “an artist, a friend, a mentor,” according to architect Kenneth R. Pollard, passed away early Tuesday morning, the 26th of July 2022. “He was a brilliant teacher who touched many and made people see the color of the day,” Pollard says Born in Rochester, […]
If there’s such a thing as a leading strategy among Utah artists in the 21st century, it most likely has to do with working in layers: physical, metaphorical, conceptual. For some it’s the traditional array, from primer coat to underpainting and so on through glazing. For others, it’s […]
Twisted and overlapping tendrils cascade through Laura Sharp Wilson’s paintings like a jungle of vegetation and bright plastics. Overall, the painted forms resemble plants, however Wilson revels in intentional ambiguity, where the content of her paintings balances between being identifiable objects, abstracted botanics, and non-representational forms. These knotted […]
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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