In order to enter Material Issues, the pieces of which can be seen from above, spread invitingly across the ground level gallery of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, you must cross the familiar steel bridge and descend the switchbacks of the staircase, first walking away, into the […]
I’m working on art that is constantly making me cry. It’s cathartic. It also helps me ignore (forget, block out?) all the shock from this pandemic, this summer’s social unrest, and the election. Of course, I morally can’t block all of that out, but I have somewhere I can go that helps. I am lucky to have an amazing studio at the Bogue Foundry. It gives me a place to go that isn’t home. I escape. I think about art or music or just clear my head. I can safely chat with fellow artists and still feel like a member of Utah’s great arts community. It is a little place of sanctuary.
It’s surreal to think back to early March when I flew home from San Antonio after a combination day-job/writing trip — the elbow bump greetings with clients and the quiet eeriness of a barely attended AWP writers conference. At the time, I had no notion that Covid-19 would stretch through the end of this year and beyond. My family and I have been fortunate in many ways, some of us able to work from home and maintain our incomes, while others have been fraught with intense anxiety and struggling to get by financially.
If you’ve been to the state Capitol recently, say for marches about the election or Black Lives Matter, you may have spotted a sculptural commemoration of inequality at another time in our history: the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19 th Amendment that gave many women the right to vote […]
Artists of Utah is excited to announce the finalists for this year’s 15 Bytes Book Award for Fiction. For the past eigth years Artists of Utah has celebrated excellence in published works by a Utah author or with a Utah connection with the 15 Bytes Book Awards. The […]
I am the dullest person I know. This pandemic, a bat virus’s game of solitaire with every one of us on earth, can make one duller still, with fright. I try not to fall into deepest/darkest dullness.
I make tomato soup.
I have not seen (this version of) Nine Sinatra Songs by Ballet West and have no plans to review it. In this show, which was given locally at the Capitol Theatre, Ballet West ignores that more than one in one hundred people in Utah have COVID-19 and they refuse […]
On Friday night, I went to the theater. I even went inside the theater. Ballet West’s Nine Sinatra Songs is a return to the stage, but not a return to normal — and that’s a good thing. The mixed repertoire of three works is the company’s first live […]
My wife and I have both been working our day jobs at home for several years and were already leaning well into our own hermitism, so when COVID hit with that first alarming blow last March we didn’t panic too much.
With our “Still Here” series, we are checking in with members of Utah’s art community to see what the past several months have meant for them. Paul Reynolds was born in Salt Lake City in 1950 and raised there. He studied at the University of California, Irvine, and graduated […]
Like for many, the events of 2020 have caused considerable disruption, heartache, and stress in my life. As I look back on this tumultuous time, I could easily dwell on the canceled: travel plans, artist residency, exhibitions, conferences, kids summer camp, and school, as well as the loss of friends and family members. Instead, I would like to focus on the positives.
On Monday night, November 2, the eve of these historic 2020 elections, I stepped into the interactive theatrical experience The Carousel by SONDERimmersive at Dreamscapes, at the Gateway in downtown Salt Lake City. Prior to entry, we received our instructions on mask-wearing, appropriate social distancing from fellow spectators […]
As disorienting, sad, and stressful as the pandemic has been, it would have been a lot worse without art. I’m an introvert and can be quite happy alone for long periods. Just lock me up with my art supplies and I’ll be fine.
Petersen’s dialogue is fast; his descriptions are succinct. Chapter 1 of The Prayer of St. Francis adds another worthy addition to the library of READ LOCAL First.
Internationally celebrated playwright Catherine Filloux has always had a penchant for traveling to haunted places filled with hunted people and then writing eloquently about their plight so that the rest of us can wake up to what is really going on in our world. White Savior, the play she is […]
The primary requisite of an artist is the ability to remain in one place. Once it was in front of an easel; today it might be a computer terminal. So let’s just call it the studio. To succeed, an artist must stick to that spot against temptation, against distraction, and most of all, against loneliness and self-doubt, until the task is done. Here for the artist is whatever form the studio takes on a given day, and for an artist to say I am still here is to say I am still an artist.
When the pandemic hit, Utah Chamber Artists’ artistic director Dr. Barlow Bradford resisted pivoting to virtual concerts. Large groups of people singing live in enclosed spaces was definitely out. But recording separate individuals singing in their own homes? Where in that process, he thought, was the art? But […]
Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World collects fifteen personal essays written by Jennifer Sinor over about that many years. The collection opens with “Headwaters,” an account linking a family death and a coincidental birth, one life ending and another continuing in its place. By comparison […]
As COVID hit and unraveled several plans for travel, exhibits and presentations, my wife and I did what a lot of people did that were stuck at home: We began cleaning and organizing around the house. As a result my wife finally got to a project she had been wanting to do for years — to photograph all of our children’s artwork that we had stored for over 30 years. In the process she came across a series of drawings our youngest son did when he was three (he’s now 26) that had an uncanny likeness to the shape of the coronavirus.
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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