Art Professional Spotlight | On the Spot | Visual Arts

James Walton: Pulling the Strings Behind the Scenes at SLCC

A person wearing glasses and a hat posing next to a large, detailed sculpture of a bearded face with exaggerated features.

There’s a whole menagerie of people who work behind the scenes in Utah’s art community, doing both the heavy lifting and the heavy paperwork to get shows up, receding into the background to give the limelight to the artists being featured. Since 2017, James Walton has been the one behind the scenes at Salt Lake Community College (SLCC), where he manages their permanent collection as well as their exhibition spaces, including The George S. & Dolores Doré Eccles Gallery located at the South City campus. But there was a life for Walton before SLCC, one that included unsanctioned street art, nationally-touring music groups and a good deal of puppetry.

After studying art at SLCC and running around dressed like a ninja in the middle of the night painting unsanctioned murals with his hoodlum friends in the late ‘90s, Walton got his first respectable art job in Springdale, Utah, at the Worthington Gallery in 1999. Soon after, he moved to Boulder Colorado where he joined and toured nationally as a keyboard player and composer for the band Ordinary K. He later toured with the “Godfather of Nerdcore Hip Hop,” MC Frontalot. In 2002, he learned the art of puppet building from Cory Gilstrap as an apprentice at Gilstrap’s Denver-based studio where they designed and built large puppets for many stage productions including Little Shop of Horrors. In 2004, he moved to NYC and began a long tenure at Tony Shafrazi Gallery as their in-house graphic designer, photographer and assistant registrar, later joining the team at Paul Kasmin Gallery as assistant preparator. Continuing his passion for puppetry, he joined the Brooklyn-based theater company Drama of Works as designer of their shadow puppet production of Sleepy Hollow and performer in the award-winning WARHOLtm. He founded Exploding Puppet Productions with fellow DOW veteran John Ardolino to create Die Hard the Puppet Musical.

Returning to SLC in 2014 with wife and child in tow, James did freelance art installation and photography for several years at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art until he was hired by SLCC in 2017. James continues to compose strange music at his home studio in West Valley where he lives with his wife, the author Maggie Hawkins, his daughter Charlie, and a naughty cat named Mabel.

A graffiti-style mural on an outdoor wall, featuring cartoon characters, vibrant lettering, and a humorous speech bubble.

Shhh. An unsanctioned mural by Walton, circa 1995.

 

A vibrant, oversized plant prop with red and green details, featuring thorn-like spikes, designed for a stage production of 'Little Shop of Horrors.

Little Shop of Horrors build, 2004.

Is there a piece of art in your house growing up that sticks in your mind?

The piece that immediately comes to mind is a large reproduction my parents had of Alphonse Mucha’s “Daydream.” It was mounted on particle board and adorned with what I believe was gold leaf. It was magnificent! I fell in love with the bold graphic outlines against the elegant shapes, especially her hands and face. I became obsessed with the line quality and would trace the contours of the image endlessly with my eyes. It reminded me somehow of Maurice Sendak’s work, who’s books had an enormous influence on me at an early age. 

What hangs above your mantel?

I don’t have a mantel but flanking my massive 1970s era lava rock fireplace are paintings by local artists Juan Gasca, Krysta Dimick, a hand-painted box by Michael Haswood and a wood-cut print by Tamia Wardle. Nearby hangs a gorgeous wood assemblage by my friend David LeCheminant, a Picasso replica lovingly painted by my friend Mark Pasek, a large acrylic on paper portrait of jazz organ legend Jimmy Smith by John Froelich, and a couple of my works – a collage from the early 2000s and a more recent portrait of the Bride of Frankenstein on canvas that is very much a work in progress but I slapped on the wall for Halloween and forgot to take down. Also, my record shelves that allow me to have a rotating display of my favorite album art. 

If you could choose one person to paint or sculpt your portrait who would it be?

Ron Mueck, who started out building Muppets at the Jim Henson creature shop and went on to create breathtaking sculptures of people, massive in scale, hyper realistic with convincing looking flesh and eyes and pores and painstakingly threaded hairs. They are incredible technical achievements and are also surprisingly rich with deep emotional content. The perfectly still figures feel alive as they seem to vibrate with palpable moods and bigger-than-life feelings.

Also, I had a mind-bending experience many years ago while looking at a portrait by Van Gogh at LACMA that I can only describe as the overwhelming sensation of seeing directly through a portal in time into a person’s soul who lived 150 years ago, so … that guy would be good too.

What are you reading lately?

Making Comics by Linda Barry. She has lovingly created a fully illustrated version of the course curriculum that she developed as an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery where she teaches the art of making comics. I’m reading it with my 11-year-old daughter, and it has marvelous little projects and prompts to get you started making sequential art and thinking about character design and how words and images interact and how to be more creative and think outside the box and just get drawing right now. It’s fantastic and Linda Barry is too good for this world.

What is your favorite building in Utah?
I loved the Zephyr Club downtown and was fortunate to see a lot of great shows there and even play there a handful of times with some of my own bands in the late ‘90s and early 2000’s. It was the perfect music venue. Intimate in size but big enough for a proper crowd, great sound, convenient location, cool architecture, affordable tickets and drinks. It was music-venue-perfection. It makes me so sad that it was left to rot and eventually torn down. Why can’t we have nice things?

 

A musician performing on keyboards during a live concert at Margaritaville, Negril, Jamaica, with a bass player in the background.

Walton playing with Ordinary K in Jamaica, 2004.

Current exhibitions at Salt Lake Community College’s South City Campus: Robert Füerer’s My Old Man and His Mountains: The Trail of Tails, Trials, and Triumphs, through Feb. 7; and The Weird Cartoons, Kitsch & Culture of Low Brow Art through Feb. 21.

Images and biographical paragraph courtesy James Walton.

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3 replies »

  1. James…wonderful story. I miss the Zephyr too! I love that you have done so much with your life and that the artists, like me and Jonna, get the benefit of you for our show at SLCC Eccles Gallery. Our show was a knockout…all because of you. I cannot thank you enough.
    Anne Albaugh

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