by Jessica Geddes

Latin art in America today unveils a culture rich in emotion and charged by everyday influences. The art produced in the Latino community reflects the emotional bonds to family and earth. The artwork gives the viewer a glimpse into very personal experiences and unique viewpoints of Latino heritage. All of this is aptly displayed in Arte Latino, the current exhibit at Park City’s Kimball Art Center.

Although there are only a small group of artists of Latino heritage in Utah, their legacy is becoming full of high acclaim and rich with notoriety. Though Utah Latino artists can encounter difficulties in being represented within the arts community, the Latino movement onto the Utah art scene is becoming a reality to many artists who are sharing their stories and appreciation of art itself. There are several vibrant artists who are currently emerging onto the Utah scene and many can be seen at the Kimball exhibit. Most importantly, these artists are giving their audience information and in depth views into their culture and heritage.

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by Christopher Wilson

At the dawn of the 20th century, a revolutionary American art teacher inspired a group of women artists to break from tradition and create art that reflected their lives. Nearly a century later, a new exhibition at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art will bring together, for the first time, the vibrant and diverse art of this group of women artists.

“Thoroughly Modern: The ‘New Women’ Art Students of Robert Henri” , the first-ever exhibition of the women art students of Robert Henri — widely regarded as the most important American art teacher of the era — includes paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture, textiles and furniture by 31 women artists who studied under Henri from the 1890s through the 1920s.

The art created by Henri’s women students demonstrates the wide range of styles, subjects and attitudes that characterized modern art in the early 1900s. Since the 1950s, however, the term “modern art” has become synonymous with abstraction. This narrow definition of modernism excludes the artistic richness and diversity that reflected the dynamism of the early 20th century. The works in this exhibition bring to light the energy and vigor of a group of modern artists who were essentially written out of the movement’s history.

“This landmark exhibition provides a unique opportunity to see work by important American women artists of the early 20th century,” says Janet Wolff, associate dean of the School of Arts at Columbia University. “In recent years, museums and art historians have been reevaluating and rediscovering the work of figurative and realist artists, who were often side-lined by the dominance of abstract and modernist art since the 1950s. This exhibition of work by women students of Robert Henri, the pre-eminent American realist painter, makes clear that it is not only male artists whose reinstatement is overdue.”

Some of the better known artists in this exhibition will include painter and printmaker Isabel Bishop, the first female teacher at the Art Students League in New York and the first woman elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters; painter and illustrator Peggy Bacon, who authored or illustrated more than 70 books; and muralist Minerva Teichert, who was urged by Henri to paint “the great Mormon Story” and placed more than 60 murals in public buildings in Utah and Wyoming during the 1930s alone.