At the entrance to Saltgrass Printmakers’ Salt Lake City studio, a sinuous form winds across the wall. The dozens of two-foot-square woodcuts, each carved by a different artist and fitted edge to edge, form the Year of the Snake Exquisite Corpse, a sprawling, collaborative print project conceived by […]
Twenty years ago, two recently graduated art students from the University of Utah were loath to give up the university experience. It was partly about the loss of facilities, which in the case of printmakers can be particularly burdensome and expensive to recreate in a home studio. But […]
If air is colorless, how is the sky blue? During the pandemic, faced with isolation, some people turned to television for companionship, while others got a dog. Artists tend to be loners, a useful skill for the solitary hours they must put in, but even their survival skills […]
Despite appearances to the contrary, group exhibitions of art are the norm, and should be. A theme, familiar or exotic, or a location, a medium, even a gender can provide the opportunity to compare how different artists handle the same materials: physical, emotional, contextual. From landscapes featuring Mt. […]
I’m still here.
Like I had anywhere to go.
In May, working at Saltgrass Printmakers, no one else around, I was listening to the New York Times’ “Sugar Calling” podcast with Cheryl Strayed. Strayed was interviewing author Alice Walker. Snippets of that interview have stayed with me since:
Stefanie Dykes has a busy fall. She has curated Poesis, a group exhibition of printmakers at Art Access (see our review) timed to coincide with the Rocky Mountain Printmaking Alliance Symposium (Oct. 9 – 12); and her work appears in In Good Company, an exhibition at the Simmons Pioneer Memorial Theatre’s […]
What are prints? In a way, they’re coinage: capable of being drawn, or pulled, as printmakers say, from a belabored crucially important original art surface, in potentially endless number. Unlike coins, a print has a stated and limited run. And a good printmaker does an almost horrific thing […]
One of the greatest connections in the history of the United States was made when the golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah, joined the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads and united a continent. Train Tracts, a project conceived by writer Amie Tullius (with support from printmaker Stefanie Dykes) to […]
Ansel Adams, the first photographer to insist that photographs are artworks, blurred another boundary when he compared the making of a photograph to the composition of music. The negative, he said, was like a score, and the print was like a performance. Marcel Duchamp, the pioneering gender-bender who […]
A co-founder of Saltgrass Printmakers in Sugar House who teaches printmaking and drawing at the U, Stefanie Dykes tells us that she has been learning how to make ceramic bowls and tiles (courtesy of Stacy Phillips) between semesters. The tiles are for Hikmet Loe’s show A Measure of […]
A successful printmaker and key figure among local artists, Stefanie Dykes insists she doesn’t like to question appearances. Instead of digging in search of concealed causes, she prefers the commonsense approach: assume things are largely as they seem and try to see them clearly. That’s probably why her prints have […]
One of the more accessible yet intimate places to encounter new and innovative art is the adamantly casual, dependably irregular gallery that winds among the workspaces and between the furniture at Saltgrass Printmakers. On Friday, May 8, with live music during the Sugarhouse Gallery Stroll, and again Saturday afternoon, […]
Two years ago, in an exhibition at the Central Utah Art Center (see September 2006), Stefanie Dykes showed a pair of architectural fantasies: ornamental woodblock prints combining the flat perspective of diagrams with animated details and figures cavorting in space. Standing before these large prints (each 3 feet high and 2 […]
Printmaker Stefanie Dykes, whose mostly black-and-white relief prints dating from 2002 till 2005 are on exhibit at the Central Utah Art Center until October 3, apparently finds the present (pun intended) easier to swallow when it’s dressed up to look deceptively like the past. One of the more […]
A meandering in the thoughts and life of a 15 Bytes editor, including a coda, glossary and pronunciation guide and mention of artists as varied and talented as Brad Slaugh, John Erickson, Marjorie Mclure, Sandy Brunvand, Stefanie Dykes, Bob Kleinschmidt, Ed Bateman, and Amedeo Modigliani. An art police. […]
Three statewide exhibitions are hanging along the Wasatch Front this month: the Utah Arts Council’s Statewide Annual (Painting and Sculpture), the UVSC Woodbury Gallery’s Statewide Open and the Bountiful Davis’ Statewide Competition. Step into any of your neighborhood statewides and you will see, in some respects, the same […]
Stefanie Dykes is a Salt Lake City printmaker of intricate, classically inspired designs and co-founder of Saltgrass Printmakers.
