“I love Pablo Neruda’s big-hearted exuberance, especially his odes,” says former Utah poet laureate (2012 – 2017) Lance Larsen. “Linguistically and metaphorically, ‘Ode to My Socks,’ goes everywhere. Neruda the man was a collector of antiques, maritime flotsam and jetsam, glassware, seashells, figureheads of ships. In 2019 I […]
Sunni Brown Wilkinson says Joseph Stroud’s Of This World is one of the best poetry collections she has ever read. “Joseph Stroud is a remarkable but less well-known poet, mainly because he purposely shuns the spotlight,” Wilkinson says. “He lives part of the year in a cabin in […]
In their citation for the 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry, the jurors of the 2018 prize wrote: In her brilliant new collection, “The Worrier,” Nancy Takacs has presented her readers with her most finely nuanced and psychologically sophisticated collection of poetry to date. Each piece is an […]
During this month of April, 2021, we return to Poets in Pajamas, an audio series celebrating National Poetry Month launched last year at the beginning of the pandemic. In this series, we ask Utah poets to read one of their own works, as well as a work by […]
Gray is known for crumpling paper into balls and throwing them behind him. The papers contain love notes or apologies. “I have fallen in love and apologized so often,” he says. We are proud to present four of his poems here.
In the second of a series of three audio interviews on art making during the pandemic, Halie Bahr discusses the ongoing work of Queer Spectra, an arts festival in Salt Lake City. Bahr speaks with the festival’s founders and organizing committee: Aileen Norris, Max Barnewitz, Emma Sargent and […]
Turtles are homed wherever they go. But the desert turtle is also subject to the particular rigors of its environs: water is tight, the vistas are endless, and the temperatures, dramatic. Mitsu Salmon’s recent Butoh workshop, held virtually through Rogers Art Loft in Las Vegas, led participants through […]
One Hundred Years Hence was a production of Deseret Experimental Opera (DEXO, currently helmed by Peter C. Larsen and Carly Schaub), with a libretto by Max Barnewitz. The opera follows the lives of M, living in the present day in the Marmalade neighborhood of Salt Lake City, and […]
“Out of characters struggling between religious convictions and emotional contradictions, Peterson manages to create an intense vision of Mormon life in the Mormon West.” —Page Stegner In the 19th century, Utah communities collaborated to send their most promising artists to Europe to be trained to the standards of […]
As a previous student under the direction of Srilatha Singh, the director of Chitrakaavya Dance, it was an honor to be able to view their new production, Aabhaaram. Precise, direct pathways of arms, combined with their vibrantly clear hasta mudras, or hand positions, are signature expressions of their […]
The Utah Shakespeare Festival has announced the hiring of Derek Charles Livingston as director of new play development/artistic associate. In this newly-created position, Livingston will be responsible for re-envisioning and overseeing the Festival’s new play program, Words Cubed, as well as other artistic and senior staff duties. “I […]
An embracing couple is captured in front of a narrowing, leaf-covered path. Slightly off-center in the composition, we see one figure’s back, while the other figure is facing us, gazing confidently in our direction, one arm cradling the lower back of her partner, while the other hand just […]
The combinations seem perverse, unholy — Claude Monet’s “Poppy Field at Giverny” and a plastic manufacturing plant; a delightful landscape painting by LeConte Stewart and a decomissioned chemical agent disposal facility in Tooele; a Georgia O’Keefe and the Facebook Data Center in Eagle Mountain. But the results are somehow mesmerizing.
The drawings pictured here, on the desk in Alison Neville’s studio, are only days or weeks old, but they belong to a stack of small, quick work spanning almost fifteen years. “Initially they started as a low-anxiety response to keeping a daily sketchbook which I could sketch or doodle on during lunch or other downtime,” the artist says. “The newest problem I’m taking baby steps towards addressing is my fear of using color. Cue sharpies, looking at retro ’60s floral sheets, and slightly bigger paper. I imagine I’ll continue to add to the pile until a conceptual piece gets my attention again but I will always return to drawing as a sort of home base (forgive the sports metaphor, please).”
“My work is an exploration of my spiritual beliefs through a biological lens,” says Emily Quinn Loughlin, a Park City native who earned her B.F.A. in Fibers from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She uses reclaimed materials from local businesses in her fine art pieces. “I begin by developing an element to use as a building block, and then I find unique ways of combining said elements to develop unique, strange, and beautiful objects … Using recycled material is a conscious effort to support the healthy digestion of material goods in our high-throughput consumer society.”
For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13:12) “Coming Through” represents a familiar Asian face, close up, one of nine small portraits of Buddha […]
Lenka Konopasek is always blowing things up or burning them down. Her beguiling works in paint or sculpted paper, now in a solo show at Nox Contemporary, make manifest that disaster is her thing, her oeuvre — but why is that? We arranged to meet at Nox to […]
“Planning for the stitches is always a challenge because I have to compose, paint, and then assemble this kind of jigsaw puzzle that never fully comes together as I expect. This process limits a lot of the play that exists in traditional painting because of the inherent need to consider more sculptural issues like gravity and how the various components are not only aesthetic but also have to be considered within a functional framework. For example, I might want to add a component into something for visual balance but I also have to consider how I attach it and if it can bear weight.”
Salt Lake City artist Lis Pardoe says has been listening to the audiobook Getting Unstuck by Pema Chodron. “It is all about meditation in hard times. Through a recent difficult family event, I have also recognized the importance of being still enough to let life move through you, no matter how difficult it may be, and that rest is releasing.”
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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