{"id":102499,"date":"2026-04-07T08:33:46","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T15:33:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=102499"},"modified":"2026-04-15T08:55:39","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T15:55:39","slug":"making-space-for-art-frank-mcentire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/making-space-for-art-frank-mcentire\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Space for Art: Frank McEntire"},"content":{"rendered":"

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To be sure, some parts of the job of making art can be challenging. But there is much to admire and covet in the life of an artist. You get to largely invent yourself and have the freedom to choose your work each day. And where most bosses tell their employees where they have to be while they work, an artist\u2019s studio can be anywhere that encourages their work. Speaking of the studio, one of the things AI may be changing forever is that often-expensive and demanding requirement. For increasing numbers of artists, \u201cstudio\u201d now means a software program that can be loaded into a laptop, tucked into a book bag or under an arm, and carried anywhere the urge takes them. With that possible\u2014even probable\u2014future acknowledged, there is still a role to be played by the traditional workspace, and before such luxuries disappear, we may as well check out some of them.<\/h4>\n

A good example of an artist who chooses his studio on a weekly\u2014almost a daily\u2014basis, is Brian Kershisnik, who, though he has workspaces in Provo and Salt Lake, still travels regularly to central Utah to work in the studio he made when he was just beginning to paint, in the pioneer-built communal hall in Kanosh. His father had been a petroleum engineer, and young Brian was raised in places all over the world, few if any of which harbored any kind of historical, Mormon connection. Kanosh\u2014not Kanab, as many of his enthusiasts reveal their confusion when they ask him about it\u2014connected him for perhaps the first time with the visual essence of historical Utah, while the antique structure that houses his studio, with its enormous rooms and tent-like roof, gives him the kind of room to swing a brush that most studios can\u2019t.<\/h4>\n
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A dense arrangement of found objects and devotional imagery lines the studio wall, where relic, curiosity, and raw material blur into one another.<\/p><\/div>\n

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A salvaged yoke and a crown of thorns are bound together in a spare, symbolic composition that draws on both labor and devotion.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Encased in glass, a small figurine becomes both magnified and obscured\u2014transformed by enclosure into something simultaneously comic and uncanny.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the Salt Lake region, meanwhile, the covetable studio space that in time has taken on the stature of myth is Frank McEntire\u2019s salvaged slice of the military-industrial complex in Taylorsville. When he found it, at the beginning of the millennium, it was marginal at best. For one thing, the roads around it were unpaved, and when it rained (which it did in those days) they turned into the kind of mud a vehicle risked disappearing into. There was a giant, roll-up steel door that he, like most of his neighbors, found useless. It took a vision of what this huge, empty box with neither plumbing nor code-worthy electrical wiring could be and a lot of labor allocated over time and as needed to make it work.<\/h4>\n

There are at least four parts to the ideal studio, but when McEntire moved in, this one had the architecture of a giant shoebox. His current studio\u2014nearly twice the size of the one he first occupied in the complex before relocating in 2017\u2014has allowed those functions to fully unfold. There was another entry, what\u2019s called a “man door,” behind which he walled off a space for a gallery to exhibit his work where it can be properly seen and contemplated away from the distractions of the workshop. Up a flight of stairs he built with the help of colleagues, there\u2019s a room that every studio should have, but which has no generic name. Part office, part living room, it boasts comfy places for guests to sit, shelves full of books, a small sampling of the art made downstairs, and in a corner, a desk and computer. It probably should be styled the studio\u2019s \u201cnerve center.\u201d<\/h4>\n