The founding editor of 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter, put his cards on the table, so to speak, when he titled the umbrella organization “Artists of Utah” and not Art of Utah. His focus was then, and 25 years later still is, on the community of our artmakers. Among […]
I refuse to accept the notion that artworks are puzzles meant for the audience to decipher, especially when it is assumed there is only one right answer. Ideally, an encounter with a work of art is more like a collaboration in which the artist and a viewer come […]
Gregg Deal’s music is full of piss and vinegar, righteous anger delivered with a hot blade of wit and invective. “I’m not a very good Indian,” he announces in “Bad Indian,” one of the songs he performs as frontman for the punk band Dead Pioneers. “My cheekbones aren’t […]
When Stephen Trimble published The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin in 1989, the metaphor of his title seemed almost inevitable. Sagebrush blanketed nearly half of the Great Basin, the enormous sweep of basin and range country extending from Utah across Nevada and into California […]
In October, you could walk a few blocks through downtown Salt Lake City and encounter a woman accused of witchcraft, a closeted Mormon man’s grieving parents, a telekinetic teenager covered in blood and a family watching the Great Salt Lake disappear. Salt Lake’s stages are having a dark […]
If you’re new to Utah’s art world, right now the work of Anna Campbell Bliss may feel like one of those odd vocabulary words you’ve only just learned and suddenly hear everywhere. Her geometric compositions, built from color and repetition and carrying a glowing, mesmeric power, have been […]
While the celebrated playwright George Bernard Shaw’s maxim, “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches,” might be droll, it is not accurate. Artists Who Teach, at the Bountiful Davis Art Center through November 23, brings together ten educators whose work ranges widely in medium and subject, while […]
A good book can be hard to enter. It is often written at a frequency the mind rejects. That resistance is also where the chance of being changed lives. There is a rarer kind of book that asks you to retune first, so you can digest what is […]
As a child, Liza Doran fell in love with the souks of Arabia. As a young woman, she fell for the textile traditions of Belgium. Then she was seduced by photographs of a beat-up stone building in Bluff, Utah. For the next 40 years, she learned what […]
An old, turquoise-legged ironing board topped with a plank of unfinished wood stands in the middle of Finch Lane’s West Gallery. On it are five oval platters, their rims crimped like pie crusts, their centers glazed white, soft gray and pale blue. One carries a ladder-like motif drawn […]
“We focus on the Spirit of the West,” says Shalee Cooper, gallery director and curator of Under Open Skies, a group exhibition of contemporary landscape art at Modern West Fine Art through November 6. “We really support established and emerging artists.” Demonstrating an abundance of creativity across painting, […]
When we last checked in with Utah Poet Laureate Lisa Bickmore’s mobile micro-press, the project had published 19 chapbooks. That number has nearly doubled. Bickmore conceived Moon in the Rye as her signature project as Utah Poet Laureate, working directly with writers to develop small editions of […]
SALT LAKE CITY NAMES JOEL LONG ITS FIRST POET LAUREATE Salt Lake City has named Joel Long its first Poet Laureate, establishing a new civic position intended to bring poetry into public spaces and city events. Long, selected through a competitive review by literary professionals, educators and community […]
Looms sit threaded and incomplete, the shuttles hanging in a cross overhead. Threads drape off cacti and railings and a nearby tree; shirts hang as if in your closet, runners and shawls ready for an evening with family at the dining room table. Shawls hang like ancestors on […]
Among the countless artists I met in the 1970s and ’80s who employed glass as a primary medium, “stained plastic” was about as derogatory a term as was likely to be heard. Stained glass is conventionally handmade from materials of the highest quality, incorporating both accidental and intentional […]
Trent Alvey has been around for a bit. When she first appeared in the pages of 15 Bytes in 2003, she was already an established artist. (But if you’ve known Alvey long enough, you can imagine her interjecting: an artist should never be established, she would say. […]
In a 2006 interview, Robert Enright described the works of contemporary painter Peter Doig as being “fixed in a sort of drift,” embodying a seemingly contradictory in-between zone that holds tightly to both stasis and movement. Carried into the current exhibition at ‘A’ Gallery is this same tension, […]
Imagine if Salt Lake City gave $4.4 million in artist grants every year. And if you really want to get crazy, imagine all of it going to just two artists. A pipe dream, certainly. But on a per-capita basis, that’s roughly what happens in Boulder, Utah. For the […]
I was just a few chapters into my reading of Eli McCann’s debut novel, Stitched, when I paused and asked myself, “I wonder if my mother would like this book?” I often pass on what I’ve read to my mother. Though only about one in seven pass the […]
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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