Published monthly by Artists of Utah, a non-profit organization
Artist Profile: Salt Lake City The Accidental Artist The life and art of Sam Wilson by Carol Fulton
Sam Wilson has taught at the University of Utah for over thirty years, so his iconic paintings, densely packed with pop and art-historical figures are familiar to most in Utah's art community. In this, our first installment of a video interview as artist profile, Carol Fulton sat down with the wry and engaging artist to discuss his routine, his reasons for raiding the vaults of art history, and what exactly is going on with his paragraph-long titles.
Sam Wilson is exhibiting at Finch Lane Gallery through November 12.
Public Issues Leadership in the Arts Interviews with Gary Herbert and Peter Corroon by Amanda Finlayson
The governor of Utah has direct influence on the state of the arts in Utah, from the appointment of a Utah Arts Council director to state tourism initiatives and arts education funding. I recently met separately with both of Utah’s gubernatorial candidates, Gary Herbert and Peter Corroon, in order to discuss their feelings about arts and culture and their plans to support artistic industries throughout the State. The candidates were kind enough to share with me some of their personal experiences with the arts as well as respond to a series of brief questions.
Because I was not allowed to record one of the interviews, answers are provided in paraphrased form.
I met with
Governor Gary Herbert and his Communications Director, Angie Welling, in the governor's office at the Utah State Capitol Building where paintings by H.L.A. Culmer,
donated to the Utah State Capitol by mining magnate Colonel Edwin F. Holmes in 1916, adorn the walls and books about Utah, including Painters of Utah’s Canyons and Deserts
and Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon, are spread out across the coffee tables.
Herbert says his mother, a self-taught pianist, insisted that he learn to play the piano so that he wouldn’t be just another “dumb jock.” During his high school years he played the trumpet and joined a band that played big band pop music. His wife paints, and the family, which includes an American Idol contestant, loves music and sometimes sings together at events.
Exhibition Review: Park City Positively Pixillated Devorah Sperber at the Kimball Art Center
by Geoff Wichert
Viewed, as one so often must, from a distance in space and time—for instance by reputation and in the media rather than in person—Devorah Sperber's phenomenally popular but largely critically ignored works of art present numerous challenges. From her studio in Woodstock, New York, she has exported dozens of closely related, often similar works, most of them executed on an institutional rather than a domestic scale, using glossy and high-tech materials, each seeming to pull off the same trick in order to make the same point, and that point falling into a chasm somewhere between incompatible realms of science and art. She’s been called—one might say dismissed as—a Postmodernist appropriator, a Feminist, and a popularizer of science, while her works are misread as gimmicks, assemblages, installations, and the lower forms of humor: puns and one-liners.
The truth, as usual, is more subtle, slippery, and complex. For while Sperber doesn’t actually belong to any of the now-exhausted camps that have cluttered the landscape of art for the last half-century, she incorporates the raveled threads of their various narratives into a strand she makes by twisting them together, thereby restoring to art the feeling of a unified purpose such as artists and their audiences shared before it disintegrated under the assault of the permanent avant garde. Sperber displays no need to shock or baffle her audience. Instead, and this may be her greatest challenge in a cynical age, what she wants to do is delight her viewers, and instead of sending us home feeling either superior or alienated, she means us to go home filled with curiosity and thinking in new ways about how seeing becomes knowing.
