The exhibition of John Hafen’s work at the Springville Museum of Art is quietly beautiful: pastoral landscapes float in soft tonal harmonies; fields, trees, and distant hills seem to belong to a quieter century. The paintings are assured and accomplished, the work of an artist clearly in command […]
Those of us of a certain generation will be familiar with this refrain (and may have repeated it ourselves so often that it feels like a truism): Utah supports the performing arts much more than it does the visual arts. There are historical reasons for that belief: Unlike […]
When Jo Roper came to Utah in the early 1960s, she was already an accomplished sculptor. Trained at Southwest Missouri State College and at Cranbrook Academy of Art, she had spent more than a decade teaching, exhibiting, and working across the Southwest, particularly in New Mexico, where she […]
Park City, September 2, 1963. Labor Day. The mines are quiet—most of them permanently so. The brand-new chairlifts at the Treasure Mountain Resort are also still, the engineers testing them enjoying the holiday off. The midday air remains pleasantly cool as hundreds of locals gather at the “blue […]
The 2025 session of the Utah Legislature opened last week. While every legislative session holds significance for Utah’s art community (see Utah Cultural Alliance’s priorities for the current session here), none may have been as important as the session held 126 years ago, the state’s third, which created […]
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 […]
Early in her career, Grayce Cutler painted traditional landscapes and floral works. At the end of it, with a nudge from Hans Hofman, she produced water scenes in forceful, expressionistic modes. In between, when the Utah art world was experimenting with new and often controversial idioms, she painted […]
When she returned after the war, Elaine Michelsen brought home some strange ideas. Unknown, foreign, from outside. Ideas suggested in pictorial form, alluded to in spoken word. Gathered from somewhere in the the wide world, she brought them to her Rocky Mountain home in Salt Lake City, Utah. […]
In Utah, modernism was welcomed with open arms by only a belated minority. Three decades after New York’s Armory Show — when the various isms of modern art developed in Europe were revealed to the American public — artists in the state of Utah were still struggling with skeptical peers and a bewildered if not belligerent public — a public that often chose not simply to ignore the new isms, as they might with artistic trends today; they attacked, or at the very least, mocked them. Modern artists, to much of the Utah public, were considered incompetent or deranged, seen as hucksters and commies.
Mrs. Wallen could not understand why more Americans did not own fine art. “In Sweden,” she said, “a family of modest means will save for years to purchase a good painting or an exquisite piece of furniture.” (Salt Lake Telegram, 15 May, 1950, p. 16) Vera (if we’re […]
Gail Martin had one of the better retorts to the modern art skeptics of his day: “Strange is it not, that the man who demands the latest models in motor cars, who would not be found dead in a 1929 Ford, that the women, who wears only the […]
Though they might be lazy or imprecise, we’ll use them, if only because they are the categories Utah’s mid-century art community used: the modernists and the conservatives — two camps, engaged after the conclusion of the Second World War in a battle for what little attention, prestige or […]
Maybe it seemed to come to him in a flash of divine inspiration. Or maybe it was simply a mundanely obvious solution to the task at hand. When Anthony Velonis joined the Work Progress Administration’s poster division during the Great Depression, he became one of scores of artists making […]
Artists of Utah is excited to announce the launch of a new program, Before Now. In more than one sense, it’s an old program. What we are gathering together under the rubric “Before Now” has existed in various preliminary forms throughout our twenty-year history: most prominently in the […]
