installation view of “Box & Litho” at Utah Cultural Celebration Center.

Two of art’s more technically challenging and aesthetically eloquent media are currently getting an unusual level of attention in local galleries. Under the influence of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, nearly every gallery in Utah is showing ceramic art sometime in March, a bounty for which we should all be grateful. Less attention is going to printmaking, but here again the quality is gratifyingly high. Two unexcelled artists, both nationally collected and exhibited, who have known and taught each other, worked side by side over decades, and yet never shown together before are now sharing a gallery for the first time. Wayne Kimball, surely the most admired lithographer in Utah, and his son, Abraham Kimball, who began studying with his father as a child and has mastered art making at a level only possible in someone who began that early, have brought together 75 of their finest works at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center’s Pilar Pobil Gallery.

In centuries past, professional art making often became a family enterprise, passing skills from father to son, but in those days expectations were different. When the sons of the Brueghels took over their fathers’ business, it was largely to copy their most popular, i.e. best selling works. Not so with the three twentieth-century Wyeths: N.C., Andrew, and Jamie; nor with Wayne and Abe Kimball. For some years now, Wayne has made exquisite, jewel-like lithographs that he uses to decorate meticulously complex boxes, while his son may make prints as big as doors. And while Abe, too, is a builder, he tends towards scale models of elaborately imaginary buildings or fanciful machines that inhabit suitcases.

There’s evidence here for the notion that generational differences matter in the arts. Born in the middle of World War Two, Wayne subsequently grew up in an era already dominated by the enormous canvases of Abstract Expressionism. As a member of a new generation, he rejected those in favor of small objects, and in the face of the continuing influence of Impressionism, Expressionism, and all the other fuzzy forms of Modernism, he insisting on precision drawing and fully finishing the work, rather than leaving it for viewers to complete it in their own minds. His works, often collage-like ensembles of nature or Classical statuary—which later came to include the actual collages we see today—largely require the viewer to provide personal meanings based on their own experience.

The Abstract Expressionists painted on entire bolts of canvas and required whole walls for display. While such demands never appealed to Wayne, they seem to have skipped a generation and motivated Abe to often make the largest lithographs he can, limited by the size of the stones and presses available. What may be more interesting about his prints, though, is their anthropological content, which Abe attributes to having grown up amid Utah’s ubiquitous evidence of abandoned human activity—ruins left in places no one had other plans for—and the boundless natural scenery that forms a sympathetic setting. Examples of them together—which he may describe as “forgotten people and their material culture”—form a common experience in his art. Differences in treatment within a single image often calls attention to the way he is restoring the people that would have been missing from the places that inspired him. Born in the heyday of American Pop Art, he seems to like its commercially-inspired clarity, clean outlines, and accessibility, but not its vacuous lack of content. Instead, traveling the world in pursuit of the antiquities he sees in great museums and their sources has provided him with an historical viewpoint that resonates through his incessant drawing, showing up in the lithographs and assemblages that follow.

Both men started as sons and in time became husbands and fathers. For Wayne, finding work aligned with his art led him to become a teacher. His years at BYU are legendary, but he also taught at universities in New Mexico, Wisconsin, California, Texas, and Arizona: the sort of resumé required in the absence of tenure. Abe currently serves as an adjunct at Snow College, but his generation has another option, which is to manage a gallery and curate exhibitions. In his case, it’s the Hub City Art Gallery, in the former Mt Pleasant City Hall, which is handy to his studio.

Finally, there’s the work. So-called Contemporary Art isn’t just art being made today, but is primarily about the present, rather than the Old and New Testaments, other cultures, or historical events that fill the museums. Wayne’s masterful objects invoke an altogether separate style of personal collecting and intimate display, like the fragments of Classical sculpture, scientific specimens, and exquisite time pieces collectors might keep in their homes or offices for their own contemplation. He signals this connection through GrecoRoman busts—almost the only persons he includes—but also by such crafted fixtures as the chairs he so often includes, or the flocks of great birds that are revealed when the boxes are opened. He also makes reference to cultures that share his sense of the worthwhile.

Meanwhile, Abe regularly invokes history, but unlike his antecedents, not to celebrate a successful military campaign or the founding of a nation. His views are of the recent past, the first generations to be captured in photographs. They speak to us about our own past, invoking the brevity of life and the speed with which human achievements replace one another—all the while in the midst of a human condition that changes hardly at all. His models, whether based on a baptismal font, antique buildings, or churches, are empty, lacking the people who reside in his prints, because they’re not narratives, but the stage sets where such stories might occur. In essence, this is where we dwell today: aware of possibilities recollected from the past, but also of their limitations; eager to take our turn, but aware that while physical time is effectively endless, for us it is a flash of knowledge between two vast unknowns.

Neither Wayne nor Abe Kimball sits in judgment of these things. They inhabit them, as their art does our lives, and together they celebrate what they represent.

Box & Litho, Utah Cultural Celebration Center, West Valley City, through April 23.

All images courtesy of the author.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.