15 Bytes, Utah’s Art Magazine

This spring, we received grants from two foundations that have long been pillars of Utah's arts ecosystem — the Diane and Sam Stewart Family Foundation and the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation. Their support extends across a wide range of organizations and disciplines, and we are honored to be among those they invest in. For 15 Bytes and Artists of Utah, grants like these — alongside individual donations from our readers — are what have kept us going for 25 years, fueling everything we do: arts criticism and artist profiles, the Utah Art Map, 35x35, Utah's 15, and our newly launched 15 Bytes Discovery Award in partnership with the Springville Museum of Art. If you haven't yet, consider joining our Spring Fundraiser — link in bio. 🙏 Thank you for investing in Utah's visual arts community.

Sugar House has been arguing about itself for more than a decade. What should this neighborhood be? How tall is too tall? What belongs next to the park? From the long-empty lot at 1100 East and 2100 South to rejected towers and a recently denied hotel, the debate hasn’t slowed. But one decision slipped through with less friction: Monument Plaza—a stretch of reclaimed space meant to give the neighborhood a center. The question since has been whether it could actually be one. Sometimes it has. Sometimes it hasn’t. This weekend, it might. The 12th annual Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival arrives at the plaza May 8–9, bringing with it something the space has always needed: people willing to gather, linger, and engage. For founder @kristina_s_lenzi , it’s also a return—her ties to Sugar House run deep, and after years at the downtown library (and a temporary stop at City Academy), the festival is finding its way back into the open, into the flow of everyday life. “This festival is operating on small donations…Artists will not be paid this time,” Lenzi says. And yet they’re coming anyway. A plaza still figuring itself out. A neighborhood still asking what it wants to be. This might be exactly the kind of moment that answers both. 📍 Monument Plaza, Sugar House 📅 May 8–9 🎭 Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival: kristinalenzi.com/slcpaf

“Besides my children, this has been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. I would have done all this for free.” Lesly Allen isn’t being sentimental. She’s talking about South Salt Lake’s Mural Fest—now in its ninth year, and grown from a scrappy experiment into Utah’s largest mural festival. What started in 2018 as a “how hard can it be?” idea—big blank walls, a handful of artists, and a lot of belief—has become something much bigger: an international draw, a citywide transformation, and a case study in what happens when artists are trusted to make work for a community. There were early signs. In 2019, muralist ARCY drove across the country, slept in his car, and painted a massive train mural in two and a half days. “I just had this moment,” Allen says, “where I was like, wow, this is big.” Since then, the festival has scaled up in every way—more artists, more support, more visibility. But Allen insists the real story isn’t just the murals. “For me, what has been so special is seeing the social capital that’s built through the process.” @southsaltlakearts Mural Fest 2026 Saturday, May 9 2–8 PM South Salt Lake images: 1)Naomi Haverland’s mural on the side of Element Ring Co., 2890 S Main St, South Salt Lake, is part of Mural Fest 2026 2)Lesly Allen with mural artist Mantra in front of his mural at 2400 S. Main in 2024. 3)Katie Green’s mural in progress outside Material Gallery, 2970 S. West Temple. You’ll find her easel work inside the gallery through May 22. 4)Sign painter Shley’s mural going up at 2720 S W Temple St, South Salt Lake. #15Bytes #UtahArt #MuralFest #PublicArt #SouthSaltLake #StreetArt #UtahEvents #ArtCommunity

“I don’t want my kids to do my legacy.” In Offense of Legacy, Wood turns photography into something fractured, physical, and deeply personal—images built from inherited materials and dismantled expectations. What begins with his grandfather’s wartime negatives and darkroom tools becomes something else entirely: a push against what gets handed down, and what refuses to stay intact. “Children are not vessels for the past. They are their own.” Layered, collaged, and now literally textured into sculptural surfaces, Wood’s recent works move beyond the photograph—toward something you have to sit with, piece together, and question. There’s more here: about family, faith, queerness, and the uneasy weight of inheritance. Read the full profile by @shawnrossiterart on 15 Bytes. Greggory Wood: Offense of Legacy Center for Arts & Media, Salt Lake Community College Salt Lake City 🗓 Through May 22

Fifty years in one studio is something worth celebrating. For half a century, Randall Lake has worked in the upper floors of Guthrie Studios—making luminous still lifes, searching portraits, atmospheric landscapes, and later, deeply personal works marked by grief, reckoning, and grace. Those rooms have been more than a workspace: salon, sanctuary, witness, and collaborator. Now, before closing this chapter for good and moving full-time to Spring City, Lake is opening the doors one last time. 🥂 Randall Lake: The Final Toast 📍 Guthrie Studios, 3rd Floor 🗓 May 1–3, 2026 Reception Friday, May 1 | 5–9 PM Open Studio Saturday, May 2 | 10 AM–6 PM Sunday, May 3 | 10 AM–6 PM Image: Randall Lake’s Guthrie’s studio, 2013, by @portiasnowstudio #RandallLake #SaltLakeCityArt #UtahArt #OpenStudio #GuthrieStudios 15Bytes ArtistsOfUtah UtahArtists ArtOpening SpringCity

“A painting is never a photograph.” That’s Brent Godfrey’s wager—and across 60 new works at A Gallery, he makes the case again and again. Working from snapshots, memory, and thousands of photographs, Godfrey doesn’t reproduce what the camera saw—he wrestles it into something stranger, deeper, and more intimate. Faces blur into feeling. Animals become soulful witnesses. Abstraction becomes another language for time itself. As @geoff.the.wordsmith writes: “He is one of the most innovative, visionary artists we have.” #15Bytes #UtahArt #BrentGodfrey #Painting #ContemporaryArt #SaltLakeCityArts #UtahArtists #AGallery

“What if Pope Francis and Pink Floyd and Frida Kahlo all had dinner on the shores of the Great Salt Lake?” In the world of Susan Kirby, such encounters feel entirely plausible. Her paintings collapse time into luminous, eccentric dreamscapes—visions where prehistoric beasts, Mexican saints, rock legends, and Utah icons all inhabit the same shimmering realm of possibility. @g___eve writes about the Finch Lane show, There Is Nothing More Shocking Than Joy, in our latest edition of 15 Bytes.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time…” — F. Scott Fitzgerald What if that tension is where art actually happens? With "In the Shadows of the Giant Mushrooms" at Salt Lake Community College’s Eccles Art Gallery, Vincent Mattina builds a world out of contradiction—familiar objects reworked into something unsettled, slightly off. "They consist almost entirely of new combinations of what are often the most remarkably familiar, even iconic objects," writes @geoff.the.wordsmith for 15 Bytes. A ship made from an old radio, its wooden корпус tilting as if sinking into the table. A Geiger counter tucked into a child’s brass bed. Fragments of everyday life, reassembled into forms that feel both nostalgic and uneasy. Across roughly 25 works, along with video and QR-linked animations, the exhibition moves between past and present, invention and aftermath. #UtahArt #SaltLakeCity #Assemblage #ContemporaryArt #ArtReview #15Bytes #ExhibitionReview #VisualArt

“Her pieces breathe.” In Reliquaries at Finch Lane, Hannah Vaughn builds structures that hover between architecture and memory—kite forms, fish baskets, porcelain, bone. Precision holds them together, but air moves through everything. Sunlight catches the work at golden hour, casting shadows that feel as alive as the objects themselves. Nothing is entirely still. Even the solid—bone, clay, wood—feels on the verge of motion. There’s family here, says @g___eve There’s history. There’s the sense that what holds can also open. #SaltLakeCityArts #FinchLaneGallery #HannahVaughn #UtahArt #ContemporaryArt #Sculpture #ArtReview #15Bytes

“Architecture is the way we commit to a political philosophy," says Van Lewis. What happens when a city block becomes more than a project? At Salt Lake City's Fleet Block, what looks like redevelopment — housing, retail, transit — is actually something more unstable, and more revealing. Memory, protest, finance, and design all pressing against each other at once. “A clean slate is sort of like empty calories," says Lewis. Without history, without friction, a project can drift — “unconstrained and sort of flabby.” Before the RFPs and tax credits, there were murals — uncommissioned, urgent, and temporary. They’re gone now. But the city’s decision to hold onto the land, to require affordable housing, to invite public input — that’s where things shifted. In our latest feature by @shawnrossiterart , we follow Van Lewis as he navigates the machinery behind what gets built — and what almost never does. From tax credit roulette to community benefits agreements, from narrative-driven proposals to the limits of the free market, the story of the Fleet Block asks a bigger question: What does a city choose to stand behind? And what gets lost — or remembered — in the process? There’s much more here: the politics beneath design, the fight over civic space in the American West, and the fragile possibility that this block could become something people actually care about. #SaltLakeCity #UrbanDesign #Architecture #PublicArt #AffordableHousing #GranaryDistrict #CityPlanning #ArtAndPlace #15Bytes

Those who follow Utah’s legislative sessions will have noticed the passage last month of SB 193, a bill that would make Good Friday—or at least four hours of it—a state holiday beginning in 2027. Those in certain social media circles will also have heard the clamor surrounding the bill, including speculation about what it signals. Good Friday and its associated devotional practices have not traditionally held a central place in the worship life of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Rather, they are associated with what Protestants and Mormons have sometimes dismissed as the “pageantry” of Catholicism. Does SB 193 mark a rapprochement between Catholics and Latter-day Saints, or simply reflect a broader consolidation of cultural power among conservative Christians and their desire to make that visible with official recognition of a religious holiday? To complicate things for the conspiratorially minded, David Habben’s "The Way of the Cross," a reinterpretation of the Via Crucis or Stations of the Cross, opened just in time for Holy Week at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art. @shawnrossiterart takes a look in this week's edition of 15 Bytes

Barbed wire and shadowy industrial silhouettes meet quiet aspen groves this month at @phillipsgallery Josanne Glass and Paul Vincent Bernard’s paired exhibition turns on contrast—restlessness against calm, tension against rhythm. “Bernard’s anxious, restless line moves between attentive examinations of the landscape and darker glimpses of a world under strain," writes @g___eve in this week's edition of 15 Bytes. Fields lie fallow; an industrial presence lingers just out of sight. His marks—wobbly, insistent—feel like a kind of reckoning, holding what might otherwise remain hidden. Glass moves in another direction. Her acrylics on paper hum with repetition and restraint: aspen trunks, layered and patterned, their underground connections felt in the steady pulse of the compositions. In At Daybreak and At Sunset, those same structures shift from crisp clarity to softened glow, tracing the arc of a day. “Like stacked stone cairns guiding travelers,” her soft sculptures—wool, silk, and fiber—wrap around the gallery, leading viewers through Bernard’s darker passages and back toward something quieter. Suspended forms sway gently overhead, catching light and air, offering a kind of release. Two artists, two visual languages—meeting somewhere between unease and solace. Phillips Gallery, Salt Lake City Through Apr. 10