15 Bytes is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2025 15 Bytes Book Award in Fiction. Presented annually since 2013 by Artists of Utah, the award recognizes outstanding literary achievement by Utah writers or works with significant connections to the state published in the previous year. This […]
Ryan Harrington has lived in Utah long enough to watch its creative landscape reshape itself—slowly, unevenly, and often through the efforts of people working quietly in the background. Over the past two decades, he has become one of those people. His art blends the clarity of design with the energy of urban visual culture: his marker and acrylic works are built from clean lines, calibrated color interactions, balloon-lettering structures, and a long-running block-head character that shifts mood with the smallest change in outline. The work is approachable, polished, and distinctly his. But Harrington’s influence extends far beyond the pieces he makes. Through framing, curating, collecting, teaching, and simply showing up for other artists, he has become a connective thread in Utah’s creative fabric.
Park City, September 2, 1963. Labor Day. The mines are quiet—most of them permanently so. The brand-new chairlifts at the Treasure Mountain Resort are also still, the engineers testing them enjoying the holiday off. The midday air remains pleasantly cool as hundreds of locals gather at the “blue […]
When Nuha Moretz moved to Salt Lake City, she found herself drawn to two paths: in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, she launched an art career that had been simmering for years; and, to build a social circle in a new city, she and her husband joined […]
Rachel White’s poems are strongest when she takes on the role of activist, so it’s appropriate that her chapbook, The Velvet Earth After Rain, begins with a formal sonnet dedicated to Edward Abbey, patron saint of anti-social nature lovers and environmental activists. She has said of her writing, […]
Time and Chance, Katharine Coles’ plucky tenth collection of poems, offers riches to any reader. Elegant elegies to her late parents and a delightfully wicked one to an ex—“Sestina in Prose: Three Dreams” and “Degas Dancers”—and a superb breezy commentary on butterflies, “A Note on the Apparent Lowering […]
Ehren Clark would have loved this show at the Sweet Branch Library—The Domains of the Mystical. The loose, swirling, sometimes turbulent brushwork; the small figures caught up in backgrounds that dissolve into clouds of abstract color fields—all this would have appealed to our late colleague. He might have […]
Dan Evans’ work begins with the question of what remains once an image has been pared to its essentials. “I’ve always been drawn to systems where clarity matters,” he says, “where you pare things down until the lack of recognition engages the viewer and holds itself.” It’s a […]
Is skateboarding an entry drug? To art? In our article last week on Alma Allen—the Utah-born sculptor now working out of Mexico who will represent the United States at the Venice Biennale—we sketched out his teenage years, which began with skateboarding (and hardcore music) and led, eventually, to […]
We’re all about bright ideas. Like that first bright idea, almost 25 YEARS AGO: create an online platform to unite and strengthen Utah’s art community. And the even brighter one: in the face of dwindling coverage in traditional media, create an online magazine about the arts in […]
The holiday season is among us, which means your favorite artists and arts organizations are working overtime to reach their goals before the end of the year. The arts are vitally important in Utah (and everywhere, but since we are here, let us focus on Utah). The Kem […]
“There is a sign in my grandfathers’ workshop that says this: 180 degrees is half a circle, but also a line.” Readers of Lindsey Drager’s new novel, The Avian Hourglass, spend more than a few pages in the front yard of that workshop, and glimpse its contents, workbenches […]
15 Bytes is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2025 15 Bytes Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Presented annually since 2013 by Artists of Utah, the award recognizes outstanding literary achievement by Utah writers or works with significant connections to the state published in the previous year. […]
Brigham City native and Cache Valley enthusiast Ned Young is an artist surrounded by superlatives, the way redwinged blackbirds circle around one of his sublime barns. Although his realism surpasses photography and his disappearing brushwork ranks with that of Vermeer, what may be mentioned first and most often […]
At the entrance to Ogden Contemporary Arts, a large video screen scrolls through 30 candid photos of New Mexico’s Suzanne Sbarge, OCA’s current visiting artist, along with staff assistants, students and visitors to the program. They all appear happy to be there, which is not surprising once viewers […]
With a name like Alma, you knew he had to be Mormon. Not necessarily a Utahn, not necessarily LDS, but definitely Mormon. Anyone who grew up around the culture knows the name is a giveaway—for a man, at least. Alma is the name of two major prophets, father […]
“It just wasn’t a good fit anymore,” says Elpitha Tsoutsounakis, who after a decade and a half as a professor at the University of Utah has resigned her position—to open a bookstore.
On a quiet stretch of Salt Lake City’s historic Film Row, inside a former film-reel vault that once housed Cosmic Aeroplane, Elpitha Tsoutsounakis is hoping to build a new kind of creative space—Books & Supply, an art and design bookstore that doubles as a studio, gallery, classroom, and community hub.
The era of mass incarceration went vogue in the 1970s, when the perceived uptick in crime had the American public and politicians shaking in their britches. Racially-coded theories like the broken windows theory and mandatory minimums disproportionately caught Black people and other people of color in the carceral […]
Sitting down at a homey café at 9th and 9th, my date and I did what any pair on a low-stakes Thursday night outing might do: we tucked ourselves into a small table, exchanged a grin over flickering candlelight, and started scanning the menu. Should we split something? […]
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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