Daily posts on happenings in Utah’s visual arts community.
A number of Utah artists are delighted with Andrew Ehninger for recently curating, as an Adobe team member, entries to the “Utah Artists & Adobe” show that opened Jan. 15 in Lehi. Born and raised in Salt Lake City and now living in Finlandia, Utah, the artist graduated […]
SUNDAY BLOG READ is your glimpse into the working minds and hearts of Utah’s literary writers. Each month, 15 Bytes offers works-in-progress and / or recently published work by some of the state’s most celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary non-fiction and memoir. Today poet Jesse […]
Jeffrey Hale is a dedicated family man. His charming young son and daughter can be found at his second-floor Artspace studio nearly as often as his models. And in 2016, he and his wife are expecting another child. That is, of course, a very big deal. “My work,” […]
15 Bytes Literary Editor David Pace first saw a need for a book award program specific to Utah four years ago when the Utah Book Award went on hiatus for a year. Since then the 15 Bytes Book Award has steadily sought out the best and brightest of […]
Rob Adamson, a professor of art at Salt Lake Community College, began painting nocturne cityscapes of New York City, Salt Lake City and elsewhere in 1997 when he discovered the work of the late, well-known San Francisco painter James Jeffrey Stagg. He painted both day and night scenes, […]
Hadley Anne Rampton works at Phillips Gallery. The question is: WHEN, exactly, does she do that? I mean, her lovely watercolors and sketches hail from Slovenia, Santiago, Santa Margherita, Kosovo, Macedonia, Armenia, Budapest . . . she is everywhere on the planet. And she is collected everywhere, it […]
If you went to the Utah Museum of Fine Art’s we’re-about-to-close-for-a-year-come-take-a-look-at-the-collection party this weekend, you won’t have seen one of Walead Beshty’s Fedex boxes, a series of sculptural works in glass or copper shipped via FedEx so the shipping process becomes part of the work—they haven’t been on […]
Thinking about my favorite piece in the UMFA collection, I am overwhelmed with memories. I was the collection photographer for the museum from 2006-2014, and I saw every piece in the 20,000+ collection—from a giant stained-glass dragon sculpture with interior lights and incense burners in the nostrils, to […]
Alexander Hraefn Morris has a thing for ravens – they are a sort of totem, a recurrent, though abstracted figure in many of his paintings. It’s not surprising, then, that “Hraefn” translates to “raven” from the Old English and that Yorkshire, England, is where Morris recently moved and […]
A pair of marble lions from 15th-century Italy flanks a wide opening between two of the UMFA’s European art galleries. Modestly scaled, these little-noticed figures are each barely 2 feet long and less than 10 inches high. The lion on the right is calm but alert; on the […]
by Christine Baczek America’s West is full of lonely roads and desolate countryside where a paper map and spare tire are more important than a cell phone. These roads set the stage for Passing Through, in which author and photojournalist Richard Menzies recounts the “existential wonderland of a […]
Small and unassuming, Dirck Hals’ pair of “Merry Company” images embodies a morally potent message about the fragility of life. Both works depict a boisterous gathering of individuals, who through their interaction provide a glorious snapshot of 17th-century Holland. As a master’s student in art history, I studied […]
“The activity of actually making the painting, its successes and defeats, frequently is the most important factor we feel in the work, not simply how it ended up.” —Tony Smith I must have been among the last tourists to encounter the UMFA collection in its previous home, just […]
Most local audiences know Daniel Charon as the new Artistic Director of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company (his recent work for the company has been reviewed on 15 Bytes here and here). What they may not know is that his dancing identity not only includes artistic direction and choreography but also a […]
To start out 2016 we checked in with some Utah artists to see what they are up to in the New Year. We’ll be running these short features throughout the month. When you think “Connie Borup” you think “nature” and often “trees,” though that theme has morphed in […]
Each fall and spring semester, I accompany my upper division art history students from Westminster College to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts so they have the experience of viewing global art in person, resulting in a research paper. After a tour of the galleries, I steal away […]
In August, Southwest Art named Tyler Swain one of “21 Under 31” artists to watch in 2015 (he’s all of 26 as of Dec. 31). He told them he’s been playing drums since he was 10 and “thought that being a professional musician would be pretty awesome.” He […]
On January 18th, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts will be closing its galleries to upgrade the vapor barrier system in the Marcia and John Price Museum Building on the University of Utah campus. The project is expected to take a year, with the galleries expected to be […]
