Hannah McBeth

Some of the most visible arts experiences in Salt Lake City—the SLC White Party, the Urban Arts Festival, and Dreamscapes: Salt Lake City’s Immersive Art Experience—share more than spectacle or scale. They are part of a longer arc of creative entrepreneurship shaped by Derek Dyer, whose work has consistently focused on building events and spaces that support artists not just aesthetically, but materially. Dyer’s approach has always been deliberately glamorous, aimed at an artistic crowd that values atmosphere, ambition, and polish.

Ryan Harrington has lived in Utah long enough to watch its creative landscape reshape itself—slowly, unevenly, and often through the efforts of people working quietly in the background. Over the past two decades, he has become one of those people. His art blends the clarity of design with the energy of urban visual culture: his marker and acrylic works are built from clean lines, calibrated color interactions, balloon-lettering structures, and a long-running block-head character.

Dan Evans’ work begins with the question of what remains once an image has been pared to its essentials. “I’ve always been drawn to systems where clarity matters,” he says, “where you pare things down until the lack of recognition engages the viewer and holds itself.” It’s a clarity rooted not in what the image depicts, but in the structure left behind after everything recognizable has been reduced. His new exhibition, Peripheral Dependencies, at Finch Lane Gallery through December 26.

Rios’s path to MFA printmaker sharpened her focus on how women learn to see themselves, and her new exhibition uses collage, text, and the uncanny to press into that quiet examination. Her silhouetted collages and cropped bodies form a fragmented visual language that mirrors those inherited pressures and expectations. The show invites a slower kind of looking, where the familiar turns strange just long enough to reveal how deeply those expectations shape us.

Completed in 1890 for Salt Lake City’s first Jewish congregation, the B’nai Israel Temple carries a depth of cultural memory rare among the city’s remaining historic buildings. Its survival is uncommon in a city where progress has a habit of erasing the physical traces of its own past. Restoring the temple and establishing the Salt Lake Art Museum (SLAM) within it brings into view a narrative that has long remained at the margins of the city’s broader historical accounts.

Utah is home to an art scene that stretches across the state, with subversive art pockets in unlikely places, but sometimes, Salt Lake City’s presence eclipses work and communities in smaller towns. Just outside of Moab is one such unassuming town, sandwiched between the prismatic Book Cliffs and the dusty railroad tracks—Green River. With a population of just under 1,000, Green River hosts the arts organization Epicenter, whose founders worked as AmeriCorps volunteers.

Like colorful ensos or organic ouroboros unfurling around black centers, David Rios Ferreira’s collages are circular and dynamic forms, what he calls “imagined gateways, objects through which we may connect with those we cannot reach on this plane.” Accompanied by writing, photographs, and video by Denae Shanidiin, a Diné and Korean artist, the exhibition is the pair’s collaboration inspired by missing and murdered Indigenous people.

Tales about the founding of the artist collective Meow Wolf—an interactive entertainment-arts company—are as legendary as the company’s mind-bending art installations. Meow Wolf’s name came out of a hat, and some of the artist collective’s initial investment came from George R. R. Martin (of Game of Thrones fame). Meow Wolf’s newest art experience is a 52,000-square-foot, otherworldly shopping excursion called Omega Mart.