01/23/2026
Salt Lake Art Week: What We Notice When We Slow Down
Some weeks in Salt Lake’s art world arrive with noise—openings stacked on openings, the sense that you have to sprint just to keep up. And this past Friday was certainly that. But the work (and the writing) that surfaced over the past few days is quieter, more patient, and in some ways more demanding. It asks for the one thing our culture is least willing to give: sustained attention.
At Phillips Gallery’s Dibble Gallery, James Charles is showing paintings that don’t perform for you. They’re modest in size, built from squares and rectangles, clean divisions, and deliberate palettes. At first glance they can feel almost severe—simple blocks of color, carefully arranged. But the longer you stay with them, the more they start to feel weighty, intimate, and quietly unsettled. There’s something you’d likely miss if you only encountered them online: the paintings aren’t always a single, unified surface. They’re constructed, assembled, joined—made in a way that leaves seams visible. These paintings don’t resolve into crisp certainty. They hold onto evidence: time, touch, adjustment, quiet correction.
Upstairs at Phillips, Maureen O’Hara Ure offers a different kind of density: a private language of layered mixed media, art-historical fragments, and creatures that feel like they’ve wandered in from a half-remembered medieval imagination. If you’ve followed her work over the years, the new paintings will feel familiar—marks, atmospheres, that lush visual accumulation—but there’s also a subtle shift. The work feels more open to the world outside her head. Without turning into travelogue, the exhibition allows glimpses of sources—sketchbook material, place-based motifs, art history not just absorbed but actively conversed with. You don’t need to catch every reference to feel what’s happening. The paintings suggest an artist revisiting her own archive—memory, museums, notebooks, past work—and letting more of it show.
If those two Phillips exhibitions are meditations on looking—how long it takes, how much it asks—then one of this week’s most satisfying reminders is that “art” isn’t always inside a gallery.
Downtown, the LDS Church Office Building wears two concrete world maps on its base that most people probably read as decorative reliefs: midcentury civic ornament on a corporate tower. But a closer look reveals that they’re not neutral depictions of the planet. They crop. They distort. They omit. They center the world in unexpected ways. What seems like a “world map” starts to feel like something else: a worldview—an image shaped by perspective, belief, and what the maker chooses to place at the center.
From there, the week swings outward—to the giant structures of the American space program, as seen in photographer Roland Miller’s Abandoned in Place at Salt Lake Community College. Miller’s subject is the concrete and metal infrastructure that made the Space Race possible: launch pads, control rooms, engine clusters, the machinery behind the mythology. The photographs work as historical evidence—records of what was built, what existed, what was used—but they also become strangely abstract, full of pattern and geometry and scale that’s hard to comprehend.
Even if you arrive thinking you’re not “a space person,” the show has a way of making the material feel immediate: not the romance of rockets, but the physical residue of ambition, and the speed with which we move on.
And then there’s the media layer of all this—the question of who is paying attention in the first place.
This week's coverage also included a look back at the Salt Lake Tribune’s Sunday arts section in the 1990s, when the arts arrived as a single cultural bundle: theater beside books beside architecture beside visual art. The numbers confirm what many people felt at the time—visual arts coverage was often thin—but the deeper takeaway is more practical than philosophical. Coverage depended on something unglamorous and decisive: beats. When a paper had a visual arts writer, the math changed. When it didn’t, the visual arts all but disappeared from the shared story.
Taken together, this week’s threads feel connected. The paintings ask you to slow down. The maps reveal themselves only to the attentive passerby. The photographs preserve what’s already disappearing. And the newspaper numbers remind us how much culture depends on the simple fact of someone being paid to look carefully—and then tell the rest of us what they saw.
