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 […]
In a world where authenticity is prized, we often treat the physical object with much more reverence than its photographic representation. But two exhibits at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (NEHMA) complicate that notion. Repainting the I: The Intermountain Intertribal Indian School Murals presents 11 murals […]
Historically, ceramics have existed on the margins—labeled “craft” or “decorative”—but Katie Lee-Koven says they are increasingly recognized as essential to understanding 20th-century modernism and beyond. This is one reason she was drawn to The Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (NEHMA), where she has been director and chief […]
Katie Lee-Koven, executive director and chief curator of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (NEHMA), recently marked her tenth anniversary with the museum. Reflecting on her tenure, she noted her mission to transform NEHMA from a “hidden gem” into a leading academic and regional art institution. “On […]
In a composition that fills the entire 15 by 15-inch surface with detail, we see a stern-faced man, holding a pistol and festooned with bandoleers, surrounded by a mixture of beautiful women, an intimidating rooster with wings outstretched, and a menacing clown—all rendered in fine, meticulous line work. […]
When June Harwood moved to Los Angeles in the mid 1950s, she found a fertile environment for her own artistic interests in the Hard-Edge movement then taking shape. She became friends with several artists, including Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg, who were developing a new, reduced, classic style […]
Downstairs at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Making a Scene highlights a burgeoning West Coast art scene, charting developments in abstraction and surrealism in the 1940s and 1950s (see our review here). Upstairs, two shows focusing on Los Angeles show us what happened next. Alongside the […]
You’d be forgiven if you didn’t associate these first, heavy paintings in oil with everything else that follows in the Harrison Museum of Art’s retrospective exhibition of Logan artist Jane Catlin. In this small alcove, a half-dozen eerie paintings in thick oil; throughout the rest of the gallery, […]
The growing number of pottery studios in Salt Lake and Utah counties suggests an uptick in ceramics interest in the area. Sadly, an accompanying expansion in venues to enjoy and discover the very best the medium has to offer has yet to manifest—at least not in these locales. […]
The magic of art has much to do with making one material convincingly impersonate another. In skilled hands bronze, marble, paint or paper can simulate something as subtle as flesh. One of the more unlikely magical acts seen in our time and place is that of Pam Gazale, […]
Set against a background of shades of gray, bright, vivid colors and shapes pop. Deep blue circles, squares filled with the colors of a warm red sunset, and sharp triangles fill the canvas. Maude I. Kerns’ “Composition #57” feels very reminiscent of works by Kandinsky. In contrast, on […]
Not every artist gets to see herself become the solo subject of a television documentary, let alone one that takes a retrospective look over her art and its critical reception by one of the nation’s best-known and most-cited journalist-critics. But then Jean Lowe is not just any artist, […]
Museum collection catalogs provide one entrée into a museum’s collections and serve as a resource to highlight important works; they also serve to entice readers to visit the museum to experience art firsthand. With a catalog as beautifully produced as Collecting on the Edge: The Nora Eccles Harrison […]
On a partition amid the downstairs gallery of the Harrison Museum in Logan hang three hand-woven Hopi plaques, or flat dishes. The backwards-F motif of the central disc repeats six times, as if rotating rapidly around its center. To the left, a woven black-and-white pattern suggests a hoop, […]
For three months, from Sept.12 until Dec.12, the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, on the campus of Utah State University in Logan, will be showing more than 50 superb examples of Aboriginal art by 33 artists, who together span the history of indigenous Australian painting. In seven […]
It’s not exactly nostalgia that makes antique scientific paraphernalia attractive. Not usually windows into our personal pasts, these carefully crafted tools and specimens take viewers on a journey into the collective history of exploring and deciphering the only planet we know. Two artists who have mined the aesthetic […]
