Hannah McBeth

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.

A Perspective of Nature, now on view at Alpine Art & Frame in Salt Lake City, brings together four artists—Sarah Ashley Peterson, Laura Hope Mason, Jodi Steen, and Matthew Hassing—whose works channel the restorative power of the natural world into the places we live and gather. At a time when the world can feel heavy, these paintings offer an antidote: light, air, and color drawn from quiet horizons and open skies.

Tales about the founding of the artist collective Meow Wolf—now a growing 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 fantasy writer 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, located in Las Vegas’ AREA15.

The sister fields of archaeology and paleontology share the near-impossible aim of putting eons of earth’s time into human perspective. The movement and scale of time are notoriously difficult for people to understand, but facing the physical remnants of plants, animals, and early humans brings millions of years into a more relatable focus. Laura Hope Mason’s mixed-media paintings in her solo show Extinct respond to forms and textures in fossils, stone, and artifacts found at the Natural History Museum of Utah.

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 in Green River 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.

Colorful Venezuelan beet salad, Iraqi beef kebabs and rare, vegan-option mole verde: These are just a few of Spice Kitchen Incubator’s mouth-watering, unique recipes from around the world. Tasting these hard-to-find dishes at Spice Kitchen supports immigrant and refugee chefs getting their restaurant or catering businesses started. With a thorough training program, Spice Kitchen Incubator provides its participants with a roster of business and kitchen skills.