Installation view of Celebrating Women Bold and Beautiful at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center in West Valley City. Image by Geoff Wichert.

For much of the 20th century, painting and photography felt like mortal enemies. Any history of Modernism will explain how the camera forced artists into the varieties of Abstraction, among other things. That the schism has now healed is shown by Maggie Davis in her “Windowpane Poppies,” a view that could only have come about after the absorption of the photograph’s capacity to select focal lengths. Before that lesson, the eye swept through the scene, refocusing each object to give the mind a sharp image of its entirety, while painting followed suit.

The Pilar Pobil Celebration Gallery at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center can be divided into many flexible spaces that curator Michael Christensen generates anew with each exhibition, giving individual works and small ensembles their own visual spaces. Works effectively face each other within those spaces, providing opportunities to scan the diversity that characterizes art today. It helps to keep in mind that, like the photo and the canvas, the academy and all things “academic” were treated as the enemy during the century of Modernism, from about 1875 to 1975, that celebrated replacing the past by putting old subjects into new media. Celebrating Women Bold and Beautiful would be remiss if it didn’t somehow bring that history into view.

One such work could be described either as a naive image of rural life or an example of sophisticated, up-to-date artistic synchronicity. Holly Hooper’s “Gettin’ Lost in the Milky Way at Night” could be taken for an amateur’s entry in a weekend arts festival. But Hooper is a long-time fixture on the Utah art scene: a wife and mother who has studied and shown more than many professionals. The other way of looking at “Gettin’ Lost” is that it’s a painterly equivalent of autofiction, the literary school that builds a fictionalized story around the author’s personal memories. Hooper’s figures, in serape and jacket accessorized with wide-brimmed hats, sit by a fire on a ridge and watch the night sky over distant mountains, sharing the view with wild animals, including a bear that seems to join them in admiring the stars. It’s way too deliberate to be the casual work it resembles so successfully.

Facing it, Kairee Cardoso’s “Floral Harmony” boasts the “Janet Bunger Award for Best Art Depicting Women in Leadership.” In a technical coup, the portrait displays its own, artistic leadership by emerging from a geometric array of relief materials that fall somewhere between origami and 3-D puzzle making. All art profits from being seen in person, but in this case doing so allows the portrait to come alive and work some dimensional magic: like Tamia Wardle’s “Renewal,” Cardoso’s portrait changes, in this case posture and expression, as the viewer walks past.

Some of the other techniques here have become familiar over a few short years, but their ornamental power remains undiminished. Textile works by Sheryl Gillilan, Dian Levi, Carol Biddle, Contessa Ott, Jeanne Hansen, Lily Havey, Lucy Watkins, Debbi Sigg, Paulette Schermerhorn, Rosanna Lynne Welter, Sara Neal and Sara Luna display a range of effects that confirms reports from the mainstream that fabric arts are still coming on strong with energy and initiative. Works in glass from Cheryl Peterson and Dana Worley hold their own among surprising ceramics, photographs that capture lives and cultures, and mixed media pieces showing how these older examples of recent additions to the canon continue to prove themselves.

Installation view of Celebrating Women Bold and Beautiful at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center in West Valley City. Image by Geoff Wichert.

Installation view of Celebrating Women Bold and Beautiful at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center in West Valley City. Image by Geoff Wichert.

The fact is, these are not highlights, though they were selected to make a point. There’s a great deal of painting here, much of it not only competent, but startling in advanced effects. In the not-at-all final analysis, it has become clear that the academy has always been the place where history informs and inspires the future. There are no doubt some who hide behind tenure, but these artists are as much a part of today as any group gathered under any other rubric. This year’s show is a little smaller than last year’s: no doubt as the pandemic recedes, the stream of work that emerged in the return to the gallery will slow a bit. All the better for those who will take the time to stop and look. At this time, there are several other shows ranging through the UCCC as well, all of them ready to generously reward time spent.

AAUW Utah Women Artists Exhibition: Celebrating Women Bold and Beautiful, Utah Cultural Celebration Center, West Valley City, through Oct. 16

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.