The ancient Romans liked to build gardens next to their homes to open up space and provide vistas. Where that proved impractical, as in urban Rome, they painted those gardens on the walls instead. Even today, the House of Livia — wife of Augustus, the first emperor — […]
A mola is a hand-assembled textile conceived and made by the Guna people of Panama, in Central America, and Colombia, in South America. These vividly colorful, highly geometric, stylized plant and animal portraits are a popular trade item, and discerning travelers to the Guna’s homelands study, purchase, collect, […]
A drive — or better yet, a stroll — through the South Salt Lake City neighborhood just south of downtown, along Main Street, will treat the observant eye to mural after mural from one building to the next. Natural scenery has returned to this commercial district in the […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Decades before the Covid pandemic, when Climate Change was a theory only scientists and those who value their work accepted as truth, artists were already calling themselves “canaries in the coal mine.” There were past centuries, when little was understood about air quality and the effects of gasses like carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide on the atmosphere and beyond, when miners took caged canaries down with them. Even if the miners felt fine, if the far more sensitive canary lost consciousness, it meant the air was bad and those digging were in danger.
Sometime in the 1980s, an edition of Douglas H. Thayer’s Summer Fire was published bearing a jacket blurb, written by Orson Scott Card, reading, “I have never read a better Mormon novel.” His calling it a “Mormon novel” makes Summer Fire a problem for a critic like me, […]
Sixteen months ago, art galleries were among the social venues that shut down in the face of the Covid pandemic. Now they’re successfully reopening, primarily for small or solo shows. More challenging is a survey, like Face of Utah Sculpture, now in its 17th edition, which presents logistic […]
Aside from Greg Ragland’s many outdoor installations in several states is a series of intimate, hyperrealistic portraits of animals, many but not all of them birds. He depicts them among highly abstracted fragments of their natural environments that may initially appear as gestural, almost calligraphic swirls of rich […]
Not every artist gets to see herself become the solo subject of a television documentary, let alone one that takes a retrospective look over her art and its critical reception by one of the nation’s best-known and most-cited journalist-critics. But then Jean Lowe is not just any artist, […]
Heresies of Nature, Margaret Blair Young’s 2002 novel about a Mormon family gripped by a chronic, unpredictable illness, begins with a bit of authorial slight-of-hand. A narrator’s voice and an author’s voice are easy to confuse, and Young takes advantage of it by starting out as herself, speaking […]
The semicircular handle of a wicker basket frames the angelic face of a young woman, which is doubled by reflection from the silvery surface of its contents. A pair of blue-gloved hands supports the basket’s bowl, while concentric pink ovals of satin and roses, a pink lace bow […]
News that one of the world’s most exciting landscape painters has moved to Utah, adding the Rockies and Wasatch mountains to an already stunning resumé, sounds a little like saying another ship full of coal has arrived in Newcastle. After all, no other paintable subject is more popular […]
