For this episode of the podcast, we bring you a recording of our READ LOCAL Onsite event held at Finch Lane Gallery Thursday, Feb. 27. The evening brought together Salt Lake City writers Shauna Brock and Ranjan Adiga, who read from their works, followed by a discussion that explored writers block, fan fiction, coming out, family relationships, being a literary ambassador for an entire country and climbing mountains.

4:22 Shauna Brock reads from “Eskhára”
27:19 Ranjan Adiga reads from “Climbing Mountains in Nepal”
39:22 Discussion

Ranjan Adiga
Ranjan Adiga, Associate Professor at Westminster College, grew up in Nepal. His fiction focuses on South Asian immigrants, as well as his homeland. His writing has appeared in Story Quarterly, Belmont Review, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His story, “Bombay Curry Kitchen,” took second place in the 60th Annual Utah Original Writing Competition.

Shauna Brock
Shauna Brock, second-place winner of the 2017 Utah Original Writing Competition for novels, is a self-described “bisexual, Polyam dyke.” Brock co-founded Utah’s 1 to 5 Club in 2005. For the past decade, she’s organized the Salt Lake City Writers Group. In 2019, the Utah Pride Center and 1 to 5 Club gifted her the Shauna Brock B+ Community Unicorn Award.

READ LOCAL Onsite is curated by 15 Bytes Literary Editor Calvin Jolley.

READ LOCAL is presented in conjunction with Salt Lake City Arts Council and support from Utah Humanities.

You’ll find our podcast feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArtistsOfUtahs15Bytes

The 1-5-B

The 1-5-B is 15 Bytes weekly(ish) podcast on the Utah art community, featuring interviews with artists, writers, performers and curators.

Interesting things happen when you bring two writers together, which is why every quarter Artists of Utah, in conjunction with Salt Lake City Arts Council, brings two Utah writers together for a reading and discussion. On Thursday, April 11, READ LOCAL featured poets Trish Hopkinson and Jennifer Tonge. Hopkinson’s poems have been published in Tinderbox, The Penn Review, and elsewhere. Her third chapbook Footnote was published by Lithic Press in 2017. She is co-founder of Rock Canyon Poets and Editor-in-Chief of the group’s annual
anthology, Orogeny. Tonge’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including the New England Review. Most recently, her work has appeared as part of the Visible Poetry Project and been featured on Zoetic Press’s podcast The Literary Whip.

Jennifer Tonge reads: 1:30
Trish Hopkinson reads: 24:35
Discussion: 53:20

READ LOCAL is presented in conjunction with Salt Lake City Arts Council and support from Utah Humanities.

You’ll find our podcast feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArtistsOfUtahs15Bytes

The 1-5-B

The 1-5-B is 15 Bytes weekly(ish) podcast on the Utah art community, featuring interviews with artists, writers, performers and curators.

Interesting things happen when you bring two writers together, which is why every quarter Artists of Utah, in conjunction with Salt Lake City Arts Council, brings two Utah writers together for a reading and discussion. On Thursday, September 27, READ LOCAL featured fiction writers Tim Glenn and Todd Robert Petersen. Glenn won first place in the 2017 Utah Original Writing competition for Fiction and Petersen, a professor at Southern Utah University, is the author of three novels including It Needs To Look Like We Tried, published by Counterpoint in 2018. With paintings by Paul Reynolds as a backdrop (see our review here), Glenn reads from his award-winning manuscript, set in Green River and Glen Canyon while Petersen shares a chapter from his novel as well as a work-in-progress.

Tim Glenn reads: 5:08
Todd Robert Petersen reads: 26:08
Discussion: 47:13

READ LOCAL is presented in conjunction with Salt Lake City Arts Council and support from Utah Humanities.

You’ll find our podcast feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArtistsOfUtahs15Bytes

The 1-5-B

The 1-5-B is 15 Bytes weekly(ish) podcast on the Utah art community, featuring interviews with artists, writers, performers and curators.

Interesting things happen when you bring two writers together, which is why every quarter Artists of Utah, in conjunction with Salt Lake City Arts Council, brings two Utah writers together for a reading and discussion. On Thursday, January 25, READ LOCAL featured poets Natalie Taylor and Paisley Rekdal. Taylor won first place in the 2016 Utah Original Writing competition for Poetry and Rekdal, Utah’s Poet Laureate, was the winner of the 2017 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry. The writers share an interest in mythology, especially the story of the Minotaur, and form — both read from ekphrastic works. Take a listen to their wonderful readings and the discussion that follows.

Natalie Taylor reads: 4:00
Paisley Rekdal reads: 23:00
Discussion: 44:30

READ LOCAL is presented in conjunction with Salt Lake City Arts Council and support from Utah Humanities.

You’ll find our podcast feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArtistsOfUtahs15Bytes

The 1-5-B

The 1-5-B is 15 Bytes weekly(ish) podcast on the Utah art community, featuring interviews with artists, writers, performers and curators.

Donna Poulton at the podium, with Paul Davis, Tony Smith, David Dornan and John Erickson.

The 1-5-B, Episode 9: Square One – Helper Artists of Utah

For a while, seemed like everyone was painting still lifes. Images of vintage toys and figurines (maybe some marbles and matchbooks as well) viewed straight on and placed in nondescript settings popped up everywhere. It was turn of the century. Salt Lake City area. Not always easy to tell the artists apart. The Utah landscape was also ubiquitous — carved out in dominant planes, executed with smooth paint and crisp accent strokes, all showing a family resemblance. This genetic similarity was the undeniable influence of Paul Davis and David Dornan, University of Utah art professors who stressed the fundamentals of painting and drawing, and whose traits, like an ancestor’s red hair or hooked nose, could be easily identified in many of their students. When Dornan and Davis left their university jobs (1999 and 2002 respectively), the students followed — to Helper, a Carbon County coal-mining town that had seen better times, where Davis and Dornan took advantage of cheap real estate and a dearth of distractions to create an artistic oasis.

Two decades later, Square One, an exhibition at Finch Lane Gallery through February 23, celebrates the influence of the Helper workshops with an exhibit that brings together works from the pair of teachers, their fellow instructors and a score of former students who have forged their own successful careers as artists. The paintings are all mostly square, about the same size (40” x 40”), and simply framed — giving the exhibition a uniform look, like a family portrait where everyone is wearing denim. And the dominant family traits are present: the still lifes — including Dornan’s, with its bravura paintwork, and that of Marilou Kundmueller, Dornan’s wife and a frequently unsung third in the trinity that created the Helper workshops, as well as examples of some of those vintage items simply presented (marbles and toy cars in the case of Kathryn Martinez, an antique typewriter in that of Wendy Chidester); and the landscape — the signature brushwork evident in pieces by Doug Braithwaite and Patty Kimball.But the exhibit offers other tributaries that branch off from the Helper source, from the pop puns of Ben Steele and livestock portraits of Charles Snow, both of whom have made Helper their home, to the figurative work of Lane Bennion and Kate Kilpatrick-Miller and the cityscapes of Aaron Memmott, C.J. Hales, and Rob Adamson.

Prior to the opening reception, Friday, Jan. 19, a packed crowd attended a panel discussion, organized by Janell James and featuring Dornan and Davis, as well as art historian Donna Poulton, and Helper instructors John Erickson and Tony Smith. The following recording, edited slightly for time constraints, features, in order of appearance: Donna Poulton (oo:49), Paul Davis (05:32), David Dornan (15:43), John Erickson (27:22) and Tony Smith (34:10), with some concluding comments by Marilou Kundmueller (39:39). Due to a technical snafu, a slight portion of the beginning of Erickson’s presentation, where he says Helper is not for everyone and, tongue-in-cheek, compares David Dornan to Col. Kurtz of Apocalypse Now, is missing.

It was standing room only during the panel discussion for Square One: Helper Artists of Utah.

 

You’ll find our podcast feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArtistsOfUtahs15Bytes

The 1-5-B

The 1-5-B is 15 Bytes weekly(ish) podcast on the Utah art community, featuring interviews with artists, writers, performers and curators.

The 1-5-B, Episode 5: READ LOCAL with Larry Menlove and Jennifer Sinor

Audio Player
On Thursday, June 29, Utah writers Larry Menlove and Jennifer Sinor came to Salt Lake City’s Finch Lane Gallery as part of READ LOCAL, a collaboration between Salt Lake City Arts Council and 15 Bytes, with financial support from Utah Humanities, in which we pair emerging local writers with established writers for a reading and discussion of their work.

Menlove read his essay “Of the Coming River,” which won first place in the Utah Division of Arts and Museums 2016 Original Writing Contest (Creative Nonfiction Essay). Sinor read two excerpts from recently published books, her memoir Ordinary Trauma and Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe.

The series is introduced and moderated by 15 Bytes literary editor David G. Pace. A discussion involving both the authors and the audience follows the readings.

0:00 Introduction by David G. Pace
2:45 Larry Menlove reads “Of the Coming River”
21:06 Jennifer Sinor reads “The Bucket” from Ordinary Trauma
32:05 Jennifer Sinor reads from Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe
41:55 Discussion

You’ll find our podcast feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArtistsOfUtahs15Bytes

The 1-5-B

The 1-5-B is 15 Bytes weekly(ish) podcast on the Utah art community, featuring interviews with artists, writers, performers and curators.

Can you name five women artists? What about five women scientists? Mathematicians? Poets?
Jann Haworth couldn’t, and in her new community-sourced mural project, the creative director of The Leonardo set out to investigate and celebrate the accomplishments of women in our lives. The 28-foot long mural – a work in progress –  opens this Friday, October 7, in the Street Gallery of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. For our second episode in The 1-5-B podcast, Shawn Rossiter sat down with the artist to discuss the project.

You’ll find our podcast feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArtistsOfUtahs15Bytes

Work in Progress is at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art October 7 – January 14, with an opening reception October 21, 7 pm. Along with the mural, acclaimed photographer Lynn Blodgett has taken portraits of the participants, which will be hung alongside the mural, to recognize those in the community who are active participants in the strive for equality.

The 1-5-B

The 1-5-B is 15 Bytes weekly(ish) podcast on the Utah art community, featuring interviews with artists, writers, performers and curators.

THE 1-5-B: Trent Alvey and the Atomic Sublime

Trent Alvey lived what she calls an idyllic youth in the 1950s, set free in the wilds of the Manti-LaSal National Forest, where her father was a forest ranger. In retrospect, she realizes the thunderstorms that fascinated her as a child might have bathed her in nuclear fallout, and the issues of environmental degradation and range management her father struggled with in the post-war period were just the beginning of what has become a global issue of increasing importance. In a new exhibit curated by Scotti Hill at The Granary called Tourists of the New Sublime, Alvey examines her childhood and its relationship to the issues she now explores as an artist. She sat down to speak with us about the exhibit and her experiences as a child of the forest in this first of our new weekly podcasts, The 1-5-B.

You’ll find our podcast feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArtistsOfUtahs15Bytes

 Tourists of the New Sublime, featuring the work of Trent Alvey and Andrew Rice, is at The Granary Art Center October 5 – January 27, with an arists’ reception Friday, October 7, 6-8 pm.

The 1-5-B

The 1-5-B is 15 Bytes weekly(ish) podcast on the Utah art community, featuring interviews with artists, writers, performers and curators.