Chuck Berrett’s mural on the side of Charisma Dance Studio, 245 South State Street, Springville, marks the return of mural-making in “Art City.” Image by Shawn Rossiter.

You know what town has sponsored surprisingly few murals, especially considering it calls itself “Art City?” That’s right, Springville.

Maybe it’s the mural gods holding a grudge—like how rock giants U2 didn’t perform in Salt Lake City for two decades because they got booed off the stage there early in their career (or so the urban legend goes). When the Springville Museum of Art was built in the middle of the Great Depression with help from the federal government,  the regional manager of the WPA, Donald Bear, arranged for a mural to be painted on its side by Salt Lake City artist Gordon Cope. Locals revolted, whether because of the content of the mural, now unknown, or the artist, who urban legend has it was too friendly with the ladies—the struggle of whether to separate the art from the artist being older than the present moment)—and painted over it. To this day, the entire building is covered in generic beige and no one at the museum is sure where the original mural was painted. So, maybe the mural gods were upset with the local philistines and boycotted the place. For several decades. The sculpture gods, on the other hand, love the place—that being the fickle nature of the gods—as you can see in our In Plain Site feature from 2012.

Springville’s long mural hiatus ended a little over a year ago when Charisma Dance Studio commissioned Chuck Berrett to paint the entire length of their south-facing wall in the center of town. If you’ve been watching Utah’s mural scene, you may know Berrett’s work from murals in Murray, SLC, South Salt Lake and elsewhere. He’s known for painting vibrant, stylized flowers, and you’ll find plenty of lavish blooms in this mural, in shades of lavender, violet, and soft teal, mingling with a series of dancers caught mid-motion, their arms outstretched. The size of the mural makes up for lost time: you could probably fit all of the town’s bronze sculptures in front of it.

Springville museum director Emily Larsen says it’s just the first of many upcoming murals for “art city.” They’ll be part of a new public art initiative to create walkable “art loops,” connecting key landmarks throughout “downtown,” with a total of 53 planned installations, including murals, sculptures and performance spaces.

Springville has done remarkably well maintaining its old-school charm even as the ever-expanding urban core of the Wasatch Front has encroached on its periphery. Charming 19th-century homes, with porch swings and old trees, still surround its main drag. But across the tracks, closer to the highway, where new developments are cropping up in empty fields, Springville looks more like Daybreak than Spring City. Meadowbrook Elementary serves the young families finding homes in this area and it sits across from a lovely new park, where, in April Springville Public Art unveiled “Stippled Space.” It’s aluminum, rather than bronze, and abstract rather than figurative—that is, decidedly not like most of the public sculpture in town. A new style for a new part of Springville. It was created by Shelley and Rob Beishline, aka Tooza Design, a creative duo you may be familiar with from their work at Draper’s Kimball Lane TRAX station or Salt Lake City’s Fire Station 14, and was inspired by the experience of driving up Hobble Creek Canyon in the fall.

In the same breath the abundantly busy and productive Larsen mentioned the new mural program and new public art sculpture, she let drop a tease about a possible retrofit/remodel/expansion of the museum. She’s been meeting with architects this week for a feasibility study.  Maybe they’ll uncover the Gordon Cope mural.

Looking through Stippled Space’s sequential arches that guide pedestrians along a new sidewalk in Springville at 700 South 950 West. Image by Shawn Rossiter.

“Stippled Space,” a new public sculpture by Shelley and Rob Beishline (Tooza Design), brings dynamic color and movement to a residential sidewalk in Springville. Image by Shawn Rossiter.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.