I cannot go out, so I sit in the room. The window that I access the world through is my phone screen, which also confines me. The information I see in it, true and false, floods my world My belief system changes fast as I try to form […]
“Jane’s Casserole” was my mother’s go-to contribution to Boy Scout picnics, neighborhood parties, potlucks, and sometimes even a casual family meal. It was distinctive, a standout in her repertoire. I learned early that it was named for the woman who gave it to my mom; a neighbor so […]
New collective Fem Dance Company began exploring their boundaries with a succinct debut, Home Bass, performed this past week at the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival. Home Bass was a twenty-minute work featuring five female dancers — Ruby Cabbell, Jorji Diaz-Fadel, Christi Harris, Nicole Smith, and Becca Speechley […]
In fair Cedar, where we lay our scene, there is now fully an entire block that is made to conjure up the Bard. You can’t, in truth, escape him. From late June until early October the Utah Shakespeare Festival presents “life-affirming classic and contemporary plays in repertory, with […]
Before I ever saw Dishy Collective’s performance Fine China, I saw their instagram campaign, which was prodigious. I hate social media, but I keep it on my phone because it seems like I need it to keep up with what’s happening. When I started editing this journal (for […]
Utah’s governor made national news when, faced with a historic drought years in the making, dire predictions for the upcoming wildfire season and vastly depleted reservoirs, he asked his fellow citizens to pray for rain. (He did also urge land owners to let their yards and parking strips […]
The return of Pink Floyd helped herald the opening of one of Salt Lake City’s newest multi-use art galleries. Pink Floyd is the iconic pink flamingo that around 2004 escaped from an aviary and made his home at Great Salt Lake. For a number of months several attempts […]
Al Denyer came here from England, a place celebrated for its paradigmatic topography: hills and dales, lakes and rivers, cliffs and footpaths. Since she departed that small country — physically for the expanses of Utah and cognitively for even larger landscapes, like the Amazon rain forest — her […]
Welcome to our August installment of READ LOCAL First—the world’s most extensive repository of Utah-related poets and writers. Today, we are proud to introduce creative nonfiction writer Natalie Hopkins. Originally from Florida, Hopkins now lives in Utah Valley. She fell in love with creative nonfiction while studying for […]
Paige Anderson’s paintings are a trip into high order. All is arranged, undone, arranged again. In “A Map of Salt and Stars” and “Heavens Clothed in Earthly Vestments” pointed star-shapes repeat very, very methodically, but with squinting shimmer-gleam, like the modulated light emanating from a crop of night […]
If ever a group of paintings of trees could bring you close to tears, it might be these paintings by Silas Thompson, in his new show, The Hidden Forest. Thompson, still a young painter, is a sort of forest spy/messenger. One who can be trusted, because he resists […]
I am so grateful that FOR YOU: a works in progress showing occurred last weekend. I didn’t realize how badly I’d been craving live performance and it seemed the rest of the audience felt similarly. Everyone who entered the space appeared genuinely ecstatic to be there – eyes […]
If you’re looking for an at-home dance experience this week, the Salt Lake Film Society is screening Can You Bring It, a new film about Bill T. Jones’ 1989 dance D-Man in the Waters. The film tells two parallel stories. The first is the tale of Jones’ early career, his romantic and […]
Decades before the Covid pandemic, when Climate Change was a theory only scientists and those who value their work accepted as truth, artists were already calling themselves “canaries in the coal mine.” There were past centuries, when little was understood about air quality and the effects of gasses like carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide on the atmosphere and beyond, when miners took caged canaries down with them. Even if the miners felt fine, if the far more sensitive canary lost consciousness, it meant the air was bad and those digging were in danger.
Sometime in the 1980s, an edition of Douglas H. Thayer’s Summer Fire was published bearing a jacket blurb, written by Orson Scott Card, reading, “I have never read a better Mormon novel.” His calling it a “Mormon novel” makes Summer Fire a problem for a critic like me, […]
There is an art to science, and science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole. — Isaac Asimov Collaboration is at the heart of Granary Arts’ current exhibit, Evaporated: Explorations in Art, Science, and Salt. Conceived and executed by visual artist Wendy […]
Chris Peterson (@chrispetersonstudio) is at work on a mural on the south side of the Cameron Wellness Center, which will be visible in all its visual splendor from the parking lot of the United States Post Office at 1953 South 1100 East. The mural features peacocks, which have […]
The puzzle throb in the work by painter Steven Stradley at “A” Gallery is asking for solution, and, at the same time, for no solution but gravity. You feel drop from North to South, continual ambitious crossing from East to West. And back. And, unraveledness, exasperation. Through them […]
Face it, Katherine Indermauer’s chapbook Facing the Mirror says: since mirrors arrived, people, and our world, have never been the same. So powerful are mirrors, says this small spell of a book — an essay which also has, mildly, sometimes, the feel of a scientific/alchemic journal – that […]
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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