“This is not safe,” is a caution we should attend to, but might feel we can overlook. “This is not safe, and it can’t be made safe” is another matter. A threat that cannot be neutralized is a threat indeed. In 1940, during the lull in the storm […]
Looking ahead to retirement some years down the road (her husband’s, that is; artists just don’t), Trent Alvey knew that the office building the couple had invested in near West High in Salt Lake City’s Marmalade District would go on the market and the massive amount of her […]
The title piece of Taylor Wright’s collection of ten paintings at Bountiful Davis Art Center is The Bell That Never Rings, a verbal paradox that labels a visual riddle. To be sure, there is a heavy brass bell, its shiny surface reflecting the view out a window where […]
The role the Art Barn has played in nurturing contemporary art in Utah cannot be overstated. Now known as the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, which is celebrating its 90th anniversary with a retrospective exhibition in its Street Level Gallery, the community-driven organization was created during the Great […]
There was a pleasant pervasive hum throughout Ballet West in the Garden at Red Butte Garden Amphitheater last Friday evening. Not from the bees that earlier menaced the company’s onstage mark-through, but rather the audience sprawled across the lawn, emboldened in commentary and conversational asides by the open […]
“The medium is the message.” First coined by the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan in 1964, this pithy phrase has dramatically shaped our understanding of postmodern theory, language and aesthetics. For artists like Vik Muniz, however, it is both a creed to uphold and an ideology to subvert. In […]
Sweetheart, because your letters make me feel “that certain way” please don’t fail to write them often ‘cause I love them The above is from a hand-written love letter that Sue Bradford used as the background for a solarplate relief and chine colle print, titled “Sweetheart,” of a […]
For centuries, “installing” art meant screwing a painting to the wall or a sculpture to a block of stone. Installation wasn’t art, or even something unique to art. Then Marcel Duchamp hung a lot of art high on the walls of a pitch-black room full of ladders and […]
As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, Salt Lake City is concentrated with artistic animation — it seems everyone is perpetually on the move. In times of dramatic change and transition, artists have found ways to keep dancing; performing companies such as Repertory Dance Theater strive to embrace […]
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 […]
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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