Gina Cavallo has been a curator, registrar, and executive director in museums for over 35 years. She spent many years as an art critic for publications in Phoenix. She began her career at the Phoenix Art Museum and the Heard Museum, was a founding curator at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, spent two terms managing exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and was the Executive Director at the Mission Inn Foundation & Museum in Riverside, California. Her current role is Director of Development for Taproot Theatre Company in Seattle where she also serves as the curator of the Kendall Center Exhibition Series. She moved to Orem in 2024 with her husband, a theatre faculty member at UVU.
By the time Becky Bloom landed in Utah, she had already worked at New York’s Rubin Museum of Art, studied at Yale and the University of Michigan, and spent summers conducting research in the western Himalayas. Museums were the career she had been building toward for years. She […]
The warm, inviting style of 1930s Spanish Colonial architecture is one of many elements that makes the Springville Museum of Art distinctive. The focus on Utah artists, on the surrounding community, and on educational outreach—all critical to the museum’s mission and history—are others. But it’s the people that […]
Myth and memory can be both very personal and very universal. In The Stories We Hold: Journey through Myth and Memory, at the UVU Museum of Art, six artists display more than five dozen works that boil down to one thing: myth and memory unite us. Even the […]
Roland Thompson breathes color into minimalism with exceptionally crafted painted aluminum works. The paintings are non-pictorial — no image, no story attached. Their straightforward outer shapes hold a spot on the wall that begs close examination. Their bold colors and patterns are at once reminiscent of something […]
Miri Kim recognizes the influence of Seventeen magazine in her art history trajectory. It was in the pages of the teen magazine that the BYU Museum of Art curator first heard of Rice University, which she left Utah for as a college freshman. At a preview week in […]
“It is so strange that simply placing two objects next to each other helps you to see each of them better. Sometimes it is what they have in common that is most striking, but I have always been drawn to the contrasts because they remind me of my […]
Envisioned as a 5-year long exhibition that updates the permanent American Art collection galleries, BYU Museum of Art’s latest iteration is a significant re-conceptualization not just of the collection, but of the way the institution views historical perspectives and artists’ roles in history. But instead of presenting a […]
Mimi Chen Ting believed movement could be made visible. In paintings filled with looping lines, rhythmic geometries, and figures that seem to pulse across the canvas, the artist transformed dance, migration, memory, and music into visual form. In a downstairs gallery at the BYU Museum of Art, Make […]
The April offerings at downtown Provo’s Compass Gallery represent well their mission of celebrating symbolism, storytelling, and spirituality. With three one-person shows and a group exhibition all together in the space, the art covers the gamut of spiritual and symbolic representations. In The Greatest Act of Love, numerous […]
Imagination sits at the center of creativity. It also fuels our dreams. Utah-based artist Melissa Tshikamba explores both in her exhibition at the Orem Library Hall Gallery. With a BFA from BYU, Tshikamba—a name that combines two female ancestral names from the Kasai region of the Democratic Republic […]
At a moment when American political rhetoric once again toys with territorial ambition and “friendly takeovers,” Ogden Contemporary Arts presents an exhibition that reminds viewers that the last age of U.S. imperial expansion never truly ended. In Reclamation at Ogden Contemporary Arts, three Filipine artists explore the legacy […]
Coming back to Utah after the pandemic allowed Emily Hawkins to embark on a new path—an MFA at Brigham Young University. Twenty years after receiving a BFA in photography from the University of Utah, the mother of four has found her voice and broadened her media to incorporate printmaking, […]
With university faculty art exhibitions, there is rarely a throughline—a main theme or narrative that ties all the disparate works by different artists together—and the UMFA’s Relative Truths, seems, at first, to be no exception. There are several stated themes—isolation, division, contested histories, cultural anxiety, dismantling of human […]
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts opened its newly relocated, reimagined, and redesigned Mexican and Central & South American Galleries to crowds of visitors on Saturday, October 18 with the Nuestro pasado es presente /Our Past is Present celebration featuring live music and performance, art-making workshops and food […]
In the latest iteration of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts’ salt series, Brooklyn-based artist Adama Delphine Fawundu continues the program’s mission of bringing emerging voices in contemporary art to Utah. Known for her work in video and photography as well as layered textile assemblages, Fawundu weaves together […]
Cutting and baling hay is an indescribably difficult task. It requires every muscle and every ounce of endurance in your body. Stacking bales in a hot barn is like no other weightlifting activity. The deep exhaustion of this work is standard daily life on a ranch or farm. […]
For a gallery that only recently opened, Border & Square, just south of downtown Provo, feels like a classic gallery space. Set in the large open area between a small framing showroom and the back frame shop, the gallery has a comfortable, welcoming atmosphere, big white walls, and […]
Video art has been around for a long time. Performance art even longer. The exhibition (Im)posibilidades, at Ogden Contemporary Arts, is at the center of the Venn diagram of the two. And it’s an interesting place to be. Performance art is in person, live, and ephemeral. Not theatre, […]
With an exhibition title that riffs on Andy Warhol’s 1966-1967 Exploding Plastic Inevitable—which featured a series of multimedia events that extended the exhibition beyond the gallery—Exploding Native Inevitable is, similarly, both multimedia and a reference to life beyond the gallery. Curated by artist Brad Kahlhamer and now-retired Director […]
