Emily Larsen is a Utah-based curator, arts administrator, historian, and artist. She currently works as the Director of the Springville Museum of Art, where she has worked in a variety of positions since 2014. Her research and writing focuses on the Utah art scene c1880-1950. She is passionate about Utah's art and cultural history and loves working with local Utah artists.
Concerned with your health in 2026? Recent research shows the arts can be just as powerful as going to the gym in improving your health and well-being. Consider ditching the dumbbells for your New Year’s resolution this year and adopting one of these three arts-related goals instead: Resolution […]
The holiday season is among us, which means your favorite artists and arts organizations are working overtime to reach their goals before the end of the year. The arts are vitally important in Utah (and everywhere, but since we are here, let us focus on Utah). The Kem […]
Work and Wonder: 200 Years of Latter-day Saint Art—on display now at the Church History Museum and organized by the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts—is touted as the “largest and most comprehensive attempt to show the variety of works by Latter-day Saint artists around the world from the […]
On the site of the old state prison, where developers are promising a city of the future at the point of the mountain, ground was recently broken for the first stage of the development: a grand boulevard named after one of Utah’s more notorious citizens: Porter Rockwell. Called […]
Provo-based artist Havoc Hendricks calls his pattern-based paintings “detailed minimalism.” The often large-scale paintings recreate linear patterns found in nature, line upon line. Lines and patterns are something Hendricks has observed his whole life. From his childhood in Idaho, he remembers being fascinated by his”grandfather’s geode collection, watching […]
In a small building in a Provo business park, Kirk Richards recently opened two sister businesses, the JKR Gallery and JKR Academy. In January, the gallery features work from the academy’s students, showcasing their knowledge and progress after its inaugural semester. Looking around at the variety of art […]
Playing off Virginia Woolf’s classic essay, A Room of One’s Own, the BYU Museum of Art’s exhibition A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists from the MOA Collection, honors women artists represented in the museum’s collection who were able to find that proverbial room, time, space, or means to […]
Florence Ware aimed big. A stalwart of the Utah art community in the 1930s and 1940s, Ware was anywhere you looked. She was the first president of the Associated Utah Artists, taught art at the University of Utah and at venues in the community, showed in galleries from […]
The first generations of female Utah artists, those who worked from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, lived through troubling times including two world wars, the 1918 influenza epidemic and the Great Depression. Times of crisis like these propel people to thoughts […]
Women entrepreneurs were lauded in the Salt Lake Tribune during Women’s Business Week in March of 1935. The paper reported on a national report that read, “These women owners of their own businesses may occasionally be discouraged, but they are never bored. They have found a satisfying medium […]
“Scarce indeed is the smart woman who does not have affiliation with her favorite organization,” Salt Lake Tribune journalist Grace Gether wrote in 1937, reporting on the importance of clubs to the greater Salt Lake City community. Artists were no different, there was “scarce indeed” a Utah woman […]
Utah women artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were formidable: they traveled the world, led art movements and artist societies, and advocated for the importance of artmaking and collecting to a broader Utah public. These women were not wallflowers. They were actively engaged in creating community, meaning and transformation through the visual arts.
