Installation view of UT ’25 at the Southern Utah Museum of Art.

Time and time again in these pages, Geoff Wichert has proven the exception so often that one might think it has become the rule, but from my perspective group exhibitions are still the hardest to write about. Not so much the curated exhibition, centered around a theme—those have a center, something around which to hang any individual work or commentary—but the open-call show, such as the Spring Salon—which at 15 Bytes we don’t even try to tackle as a whole, but approach from many tight angles—or the newly introduced Emerging Artist exhibition, now up at BDAC, or, in the case here, Utah Arts & Museum’s annual juried exhibition—these shows prove to be daunting challenges.

A writer must consider: Do I write about every piece? Or no piece specifically, but maybe search for trends caught up in the broad trawling of an open call? How does one thread together a dozen or two or three or five or ten works of art and still say something both coherent and meaningful? (A good editor might come up with some working rules, such as: you need to mention at least a third of the works by name but not all; but if you mention more than three-quarters of the artists you need to include everyone, lest the omissions sting). There is always, of course, the option to pivot and write the meta article, the process piece.

Utah Arts & Museum’s exhibit in Cedar City, which closes soon, looks really good. Which is, in a way, to say something about the individual works—they are visually rich and stimulating, good material to work with—but more so to say something about the curation of the exhibit as a whole. Which in the case of an exhibit like a statewide annual is no easy task.

An exhibit like the Statewide Annual issues a wide open call, even if establishing certain parameters (in this case: Utah artists, works made in the past three years, restricted to the mediums of painting and sculpture—though, as the exhibit shows, that is not much of a restriction). Next, works are selected by a body of jurors (in the case of UA&M, two jurors from outside the state—a practice that has its roots in art community squabbles dating back to mid-century). The jurors might view the works in person—as they do at Springville’s Salon—or online. (Each option has its pros and cons.) In the case of UT ’25, curator Nancy Zastudil, from New Mexico, and artist Marela Zacarías, from New York and Mexico, examined close to 500 works through Submittable’s online portal. From these, they have selected fewer than ten percent for exhibition. Jurors may choose works solely based on individual merit, in which case they may create a wholly heterogeneous show; but they may also be thinking about how the show will look as a whole, or at least how certain works might be in dialogue with each other, so that in the case of two equally fine works, they might ask: which would work best in this show? They might also ask questions regarding feasibility and space—the works here range from the length of entire walls to something that could be held in the palm of your hand—because all this must be put together, adapted to the individual venue.

A view of several of the paintings in UT ’25. From left to right, McGarren Flack, Clinton Whiting, Alexis Rausch, Cara Jean Hall and Laura Hope Mason.

Staff at the Southern Utah Museum of Art have hung the work expertly, giving each piece its due while arranging them to create resonances and visual pairings—creams, earth reds, and umbers predominate, offset by touches of lime, teal, and pink—along with complementary textures and forms. Thematic and formal connections are also woven throughout, so that from any vantage point the exhibition feels unified, the rightness of the whole emerging from the sum of its parts.

From one angle, the Mars red at the base of Iaisi Rabe’s “White Vaulted Vase” carries forward along the sightline into the earth tones of Eugene Tapahe’s eight sand portals, which fill an entire wall, their dust spilling onto the floor below. Tapahe’s piece is flanked by two draping fabric pieces in shades of white: Andre Hoggan’s sculptural garment, woven from pandanus and barkcloth, unfolding in flowing, organic layers; and Kelly Tapia-Chuning’s dismantled Mexican serape, reconfigured with salt crystals, a found coyote jaw, and copper nails to confront colonial erasure and honor ancestral knowledge. Step to the far side of the wall behind Rabe’s vase, and the teal in Tapia-Chuning’s serape reappears in Laura Mason’s minimal painting of the Salt Flats. Turn again and the original Mars red returns in Aziza Abdieva’s “Stress Flesh”—a long wall of objects that resemble slabs of rare mineral but are in fact spongy forms—you’re invited to touch—created during the pandemic through a collaboration between the artist and a psychologist, transforming recorded stress levels and skin textures of participants into tactile sculptures.

Nearby, Samantha Killinen’s “Software: An Ode to Baker-Miller Pink”—a large, plush fabric chain that should delight admirers of Utah’s own soft-sculpture pioneer Jann Haworth—hangs over a passageway formed by the exhibition’s movable walls. On one side, its materiality finds resonance in Kaneez Zehra Hassan’s ceramic “Dhamaal,” inspired by the sacred dance performed by South Asian Sufi malangs in trance-like surrender and crafted to resemble fabric. On the other side, the visual playfulness—and darker undercurrent—of “Software” (which the artist frames as a play between compassion and control) finds an echo in Melanie Fischer’s disquieting sculpture: a red telephone, clutched by a sculpted hand, its mouthpiece stuffed with dentures and bound with duct tape, transforming a tool of communication into a symbol of silenced voices and uneasy censorship.

In the foreground, Melanie Fischer’s unsettling red telephone sculpture and Samantha Killinen’s “Software: An Ode to Baker-Miller Pink.” Works by Christopher Lynn and Teri McHale in the rear.

One of the persistent challenges in curating contemporary exhibitions is what to do with new media and video, which can easily dominate a space and distract from neighboring works. That is not the case here. Christopher Lynn’s Chorus (Lynne)—winner of best in show—takes the form of a circle of speakers that isolate and randomize the vowel sounds from his late mother’s 1987/88 Mormon Tabernacle Choir audition, creating an ever-changing composition that recalls a Gregorian chant, swelling and receding without overwhelming the room. Collin Bradford’s Breathing, a projected video accompanied by audio and a hospital bed that mechanically rises and falls, has been given its own enclosed space, which enhances its impact while preventing it from competing with the rest of the exhibition.

The caliber of work in the Statewide Annual is such that each piece feels like an opening gesture—never a conclusion, but an invitation to explore more. Many works stand out strongly enough to suggest a larger body of work waiting to be seen. McGarren’s large-scale painting, for instance, draws from his experience as a paramedic with a woman later diagnosed with schizophrenia, using a mirror to contrast her imagined world of children and nourishment with the stark reality of absence and decay. While powerful on its own, it carried even greater weight when shown as part of a series at the St. George Art Museum a few years ago. The same could be said of several other artists here. For those we have not yet seen in a broader context, this exhibition leaves us hoping for more opportunities in the future.

Peter Hay, visual arts coordinator for Utah Arts & Museums, notes that this is the first time the Statewide Annual has been exhibited this far south. Until the 2020 earthquake rendered its galleries unusable, the Annual was held in UA&M’s Rio Grande Building in Salt Lake City. Without an exhibition space of its own, UA&M has had to stage the Annual in partner venues such as UMOCA and Finch Lane in Salt Lake City, Ogden Contemporary Arts, and now SUMA in Cedar City.

What began as a necessity has become an opportunity, extending the exhibition beyond Salt Lake City and reaching audiences who have fewer chances to engage with this kind of work. The drawback, of course, is accessibility: the majority of Utah’s artgoers live along the Wasatch Front, particularly in Salt Lake City, and traveling south is not always easy. This means, a fortnight before its closing, this excellent show may have gone unnoticed. Go if you can. With cooler days settling in and the Shakespeare Festival still underway, Cedar City offers the perfect backdrop for this excellent show.

A view of the Statewide Annual at SUMA, featuring, from left to right, Aziza Abdieva’s “Stress Flesh,” Kelly Tapia-Chuning’s “reliquary for Coyote/from flesh to dust, an altar for spirt,” Eugene Tapahe’s “Ch’é’étiin (Portals)” and Aziza Abdieva’s “Umbilical Cord.”

Statewide Annual UT ’25: Painting, Sculpture and Installation, Southern Utah Museum of Art, Cedar City, through September 27.

Artist and Juror Reception: Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025, 6-8 p.m. Jurors’ Talks and Awards Presentation at 5 p.m.

All images courtesy of the author.

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.