Scotti Hill

Southwest Contemporary • 20th March 2026

In Altered States in the Acid West, Psychedelia and Surrealism Subvert Mythologies | Southwest Contemporary

Filled with beauty, tragedy, and oddities, UMOCA’s Altered States in the Acid West encompasses the storied contradictions inherent to the American West. 
“Our existence is an act of resistance,” José Villalobos told me while standing next to one of his large-scale sculptures during the opening reception of Altered States in the Acid West. Composed of tall, intersecting forms, Villalobos’s sculpture embodies a striking visual contradiction—recalling a barren tree while evoking the stylized desig...

Southwest Contemporary • 16th October 2025

Late Artist's Creative Ferocity Fills Her Utah Enclave, and Those Who Still Gather There

Mallorca-born painter Pilar Pobil’s largest artwork was her maximalist Salt Lake City home, a communal hub that still hums nearly a year after her death.
This article is part of our OBSESSION series, a continuation of the ideas explored in Southwest Contemporary Vol. 12.
At the end of a quiet, tree-lined street in Salt Lake City’s historic Avenues neighborhood stands a tall house. Marked by a bright coral facade, it was the residence and creative haven of Pilar Pobil, a visionary artist, communi...

Southwest Contemporary • 5th September 2025

The Medium is their Message: Compulsion and Identity in Zion

Artists Stephanie Leitch, Angela Ellsworth, and Nancy Rivera use materially obsessive processes to reflect on the mythos of Utah—a place shaped by the dominance of the LDS Church.
Utah’s mythos is indelibly marked by both its natural splendors and a cultural fixation with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Mormonism as an influence for me is a backbone structure—[a] skeleton,” says Stephanie Leitch, an artist whose work is coded with influence from her Utah upbringing. She descri...

Southwest Contemporary • 19th September 2024

Mourn the Dead, Fight for the Living: How Should Salt Lake City's Fleet Block Murals Be Commemorated?

The artists and families tied to soon-to-be-demolished Salt Lake City murals depicting people slain by police diverge on how best to preserve their legacy.

 
In the pivotal days and weeks after George Floyd’s May 2020 murder, artists mobilized to erect countless visual reminders of the marinating national trauma unfolding around them. In what would become the largest series of protests in United States history, the Black Lives Matter movement sought a reckoning with America’s systemic racism an...

Southwest Contemporary • 29th March 2024

How Commemorations to the Disenfranchised Have Forced a Reckoning with Utah’s History and Present

The narratives of the many racial and ethnic minorities whose experiences have indelibly shaped both Utah and American history deserve recognition and reckoning.
This article is part of our Living Histories series, a continuation of the ideas explored in  Southwest Contemporary Vol. 9.
The weeks after Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer swept the 96th Academy Awards, nabbing the coveted Best Picture award, the direct legacy of the subject’s work, among other calamities the West has endured this cent...

Southwest Contemporary • 14th November 2023

Work in Progress with Stephanie Leitch

Salt Lake City-based Stephanie Leitch, known for her labor-intensive and mesmerizing installations, continues honing her craft in recent exhibitions that comment on life’s murky truths.

Staring down the length of a long table arranged with seemingly infinite dots, one’s line of sight can detect a partition between wires that hold plastic disks hovering above the table. The effect creates a dizzying visual mirage that entices and dislodges the sense of self.

Indeed, the installations of Stephan

Southwest Contemporary • 19th October 2023

Mestizo Institute of Culture and Arts Unveils New Gallery in a Celebration that Commemorates Past, Present, and Future

The Mestizo Institute of Culture and Arts, a Salt Lake City organization that promotes marginalized artists, aims to revitalize its mission with a new exhibition space centered on community-based programming.

SALT LAKE CITY—The area west of Salt Lake City’s downtown has long been one of the most ethnically diverse in the region—and also one of the most historically and intentionally marginalized.

A train line and a freeway, which divides downtown from Salt Lake’s “Westside,” symbolize a differ

Southwest Contemporary • 2nd October 2023

Russel Albert Daniels Exposes Native Enslavement and Genocide in the Southwest

Photojournalist Russel Albert Daniels posits his family history as a bridge to larger investigations into Indigenous histories and the legacy of colonial violence and displacement in the American Southwest.

SALT LAKE CITY—Russel Albert Daniels recalls hearing stories about his ancestor Rose from an early age. Their shared name was forged by Rose’s marriage to Aaron Eugene Daniels, the white man who trafficked her from a series of abductors, in a harrowing journey from what is now Arizona to pre

Southwest Contemporary • 28th September 2023

A Greater Utah Surveys the Artistic Output of an Entire State

While many of the figures in UMOCA’s A Greater Utah are familiar, the ambitious scope of the project allows for new perspectives outside of the state’s metropolitan center.

Whereas the Utah Museum of Fine Arts serves as the state’s preeminent collecting institution, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art lends credibility to the state’s vibrant artistic output. By providing a critical venue to contextualize Utah artists, UMOCA also legitimizes the state’s place within and acknowledgement of import

Southwest Contemporary • 30th August 2023

Kheng Lim and Colour Maisch Team Up at Bountiful Davis Art Center

Although the thematic connection feels strained, the pairing of works by Kheng Lim and Colour Maisch creates a visually rich and compelling exhibition that invites us to relish process and material.

An artist’s chosen medium reveals much about their artistic philosophy and provides tantalizing clues about the labor and dedication to their chosen craft. While painting carries a storied and culturally rich history, mixed media has in the last century or so challenged preconceived notions of art—n

Southwest Contemporary • 28th August 2023

Work in Progress with Hayley Labrum Morrison

Hayley Labrum Morrison’s eerily provocative work invites viewers to contemplate the formation of identity, gender, and body politics within über-religious patriarchal systems.

Hayley Labrum Morrison grew up in Utah as a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After graduating with her BFA in studio art from Brigham Young University in 2008, she left Utah for Chicago and then Australia before landing in Austin, Texas, where she’s been for the past eight years. Living in

Southwest Contemporary • 23rd June 2023

Eric J. García’s Latest Community Mural and Video Game Allow Players to Interact with Colonial “Aliens”

Ogden Contemporary Arts’s second artist in residence Eric J. García invites us to scrutinize the principles upon which American history and identity are based in a dazzling and multifaceted artistic project.

OGDEN, UT—Ogden’s history as a railroad town sets it apart from the predominantly white settlements promulgated by Mormon pioneers, and continues to be one of the few Utah cities known for its ethnic diversity. It’s here that New Mexico-based artist Eric J. García has developed the multi-fa

Southwest Contemporary • 8th June 2023

Curator Profile: Jessica Kinsey at Southern Utah Museum of Art

Jessica Kinsey heads a small but growing team at the Southern Utah Museum of Art, a Cedar City institution that aims to replace culturally insular stereotypes with a community focus.

The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, located on the University of Oklahoma campus, boasts a 40,000-square-foot exhibition space and a storied global art collection. It’s here where Jessica Kinsey received a hands-on approach to curatorial practice and museum administration, skills she would foray to her current role a

Southwest Contemporary • 26th May 2023

Benjamin Winans: 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now 2023

Albuquerque-based Benjamin Winans’s sculptural works contend with the impact of Christian nationalism within national memory and the artist’s own lived experience.

Benjamin Winans takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore both the personal and the historical implications of his Southern upbringing. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, his scholarly methodology incorporates drawing, sculpture, installation, video, audio, and printmaking to contend with the impact of Christian nationalism within

Southwest Contemporary • 26th May 2023

Ahní Rocheleau: 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now 2023

Ahní Rocheleau is a Santa Fe-based artist whose interdisciplinary work collapses the distance between humans and nature, exhibiting a deep care for the environment that bridges art and activism.

Ahní Rocheleau’s work uses tactile materials to challenge the notion of environment as decidedly separate from human existence. Since 2017, she has used a most interesting and perhaps unconventional medium—the tumbleweed—as a harbinger for ideas of cultural memory, human connectedness to nature, and cli

Southwest Contemporary • 26th May 2023

Karma Henry: 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now 2023

Karma Henry is a Paiute, Italian, and Portuguese artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, whose acrylic paintings consider the landscape as site for both the literal and personal embodiment of place.

Karma Henry is a Paiute, Italian, and Portuguese artist whose acrylic paintings consider the landscape as site for both the literal and personal embodiment of place. Such paintings combine rich color with symmetrical patterns “borrowed from regional architecture, basketry, pottery, geometric landmarks

Southwest Contemporary • 30th March 2023

Jiyoun Lee-Lodge Tackles the Bogeyman of Loneliness in Waterman

Jiyoun Lee-Lodge of Salt Lake City grapples with themes of isolation and belonging—in comic book-style works influenced by Korean folk art—in her ongoing Waterman series.

SALT LAKE CITY—Invariably, each of us has encountered the acute vulnerability accompanying loss, a life transition, or perhaps self-doubt. One’s identity may falter when pulled apart from the comforts of routine and home, rendering us a stranger among our fellow humans.

For Jiyoun Lee-Lodge, this feeling of isolation—amid bot

Southwest Contemporary • 20th March 2023

The Gallery as Slaughterhouse: Tamara Kostianovsky’s Mesmerizing Flesh at Ogden Contemporary Art

Mesmerizing Flesh, Tamara Kostianovsky’s exhibition of textile sculptures, encapsulates a compelling, if harrowing contradiction between industrial violence and the beauty of corporeal and organic forms.

Tamara Kostianovsky’s exhibition Mesmerizing Flesh employs a spellbinding formal process, provocative fabric re-appropriation, and an unflinching phenomenological experience, to hook both art novice and connoisseur alike.

The Argentinian American multimedia artist uses a dazzling process where

Southwest Contemporary • 3rd March 2023

Between Life and Land: Material at the Kimball Art Center, Park City

Between Life and Land: Material at Kimball Art Center stuns not by virtue of its star artists, but from those that highlight the wonder and horror of our natural world.

The first of a three-part series of exhibitions, Between Life and Land: Material showcases ten artists whose works grapple with a subject at once ubiquitous and integral—land.

While the inclusion of titans Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson reminds viewers of the state’s storied connection to the Land Art movement, the pair’s video

Southwest Contemporary • 3rd March 2023

“Great” Salt Lake No More: How Utah’s Worsening Drought is Inspiring Artistic Reflection and Activism

The depletion of Utah’s Great Salt Lake is a symbol of the state’s worsening water crisis and has, throughout the past few years, inspired a diverse array of artistic responses.

For the estimated forty million inhabitants who rely on the Colorado River, the West’s worsening drought is an existential threat. Elected officials thus far have only managed lip service, not the action necessary to avoid the catastrophic outcomes sure to follow from rampant mismanagement and the establishment of massi

Hyper • 9th February 2023

What Does It Mean to Be a Latina/x Artist?

SALT LAKE CITY — In a small but impactful exhibition at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA), independent curator María del Mar González-González brings together the work of four stylistically divergent Latina/x artists.

Beyond the Margins: An Exploration of Latina Art and Identity succeeds in two critical respects. First, it demonstrates the simple fact that not all Latine artists make work exclusively about their own ethnic experience. Second, identity-based art may seek not simply to

Southwest Contemporary • 3rd February 2023

Utah’s New State Flag, To the Disappointment of Some, Won’t Depict the State Fish Wielding the State Firearm

During the Utah state and Salt Lake City flag competitions, residents fall in love with Grant Miller’s dark-horse design that’s heavy on clowning state symbols and imagery.

SALT LAKE CITY—As Utah’s campaign to select a new state flag nears completion, vexillologists, along with amateur flag artists and state lawmakers, are having a moment.

In recent years, local politicians have initiated two distinct campaigns to refresh the Salt Lake City flag and the Utah state flag. City and state official

Southwest Contemporary • 23rd January 2023

Fate of Utah's Outsider Art Site The Christian School Remains In Flux

Salt Lake City’s Christian School, the brainchild of late artist Ralphael Plescia, is in limbo as an arts organization’s preservation efforts are hampered by the recent sale of the property.

SALT LAKE CITY—Along an inconspicuous stretch of Salt Lake City’s State Street exists a most unusual building, artist Ralphael Plescia’s Christian School. The exterior structure, adorned with low-relief sculptures of religious symbols and a painted panel of Christ, manages to stand out in a city that isn’t

Hyper • 19th January 2023

What Rights Do Artists Have When Their Work Is Destroyed?

SALT LAKE CITY — Once located on the edifice of the Catholic Community Services (CCS) building in downtown Salt Lake City, artist Ruby Chacon’s sprawling and colorful mural was a recognized site, a symbol of remembrance and faith.

The mural, entitled “Hope and Determination” (2007), depicts the Virgin Mary at the center of the composition, flanked by figures whose bodies curve inward to form a circular enclosure. The figures are depicted atop radiant blue with tendril-like plant elements radiat