Sheri Gibb and
Jen Lopez understand the value of art accessibility in Utah. Oftentimes, materials, classes and workshops can be financially out of reach for beginners, creating an imbalance between creatives who are able to explore their artistic goals and creatives who are held at bay by differences in income. In 2015, Gibb and Lopez created
Clever Octopus, a “craft thrift store,” along with their
Creative Reuse Centers (
CRC) that run on donations and a waste stream-reduction system to provide affordable and accessible art supplies, classes and community for beginners and tenured artists alike.
“We hope that people will see themselves as artists and creative people who can make small changes that prevent waste from going to the landfill by changing their habits and by extending the life of existing materials,” says Gibb.
Three years into its youthful tenure, Salt Lake City’s
Queer Spectra Arts Festival has danced, swayed and spoken to the strange shifts of our world in more ways than the originators had imagined. Begun by modern dance graduates
Dat Nguyen and
Max Barnewitz and
Aileen Norris, the collective decided that an interdisciplinary space for artists was the next step. Thus, the festival was born, bringing together queer-identified artists from muti-disciplines including dance, performance art, visual art and spoken word among others. “We felt that we needed to be directly in conversation with other art forms,” Sargent says. “We got excited about breaking down the silos between arts communities.” This originating conversion occurred in January 2019, and by May of that year, the first
By developing methods to create tangible memories,
Kyle Ahlstrom uses vibrant and telling colors to shape positive notions with others through photography. They first noticed memories had been missing during the trauma of their gay youth, and that there must be a way to fill the void. “Photography gave me a way of keeping the best moments of light with me,” Ahlstrom says. Today, Ahlstrom is the owner and sole proprietor of Salt Lake City’s
Ahlstrom Photo and provides clients with “light, color, art and notion,” they say.
Kyle Ahlstrom, Shades Brewing, 2020.
Using their father’s 35mm camera perked Ahlstrom’s photography interest in the beginning days, then, aided by a local