The works that enter public collections carry a particular kind of weight. More than purchases, they are selections, each one a small argument about what matters, what endures, and who belongs in the story of a community’s artistic life. Once acquired, these works take on a life that individual studio pieces rarely do: they appear in permanent collection exhibitions, travel in loan shows, anchor catalog essays, and get reproduced in the publications that eventually become the record. Over time, they come to represent not just a single artist’s vision but also a moment in a place, a set of values a community chose to preserve. No acquisition tells the whole story, of course. Collections are partial, shaped by budgets and tastes and the accidents of what becomes available. But the works that get chosen tend to be the ones that, for better or worse, art history remembers.

With that in mind, here are some of the works recently added to important public collections.

Salt Lake County Visual Art Collection

Salt Lake County owns an extensive art collection divided into two categories: the Percent-for-Art Collection, made up of site-specific commissions, and the Visual Art Collection, a permanent collection of paintings, photographs, mixed media, and sculpture selected by a panel of community members. Between the two, it constitutes the largest government art collection on display in the state. The Percent-for-Art program, which allows up to one percent of money spent on new government buildings to go toward public art, was adopted by the County in May of 1982. The Visual Art Collection has grown to more than 700 pieces, all unified by a single requirement: every artist represented has lived or worked in Utah, and all works must be on public display at county facilities. That last condition gives the collection an unusual character — it is not a warehouse but a living presence, distributed across county buildings where people encounter it in the course of daily life.

The newly acquired works below are currently on view are displayed at the Government Center, South Building (first floor), where they will remain for one year before staff begin preparing the collection for the County’s move to its new center at the former Overstock.com building in Midvale.

Inspired by the 2025 NCECA conference—which brought more than 6,000 ceramic artists and collectors to Salt Lake City—this past year the County acquired two ceramic works alongside a broader group of pieces that expand both the medium and the cultural range of the collection.

Antra Sinha | Wave
Wood-fired ceramics, 5 × 3 × 2.5 in. each, set of 19 pieces, 2023. Photo credit: artist.

Antra Sinha’s Wave consists of 19 ceramic pieces installed in a flowing line—but the work is, by design, never quite the same twice. The set contains more pieces than any single installation will show, and which pieces appear, in what sequence, in what space, determines the particular ebb and flow of that version of the wave. Sinha describes being amazed at how the work is able to embrace each site and its specificity.

The surfaces of the individual forms are equally unrepeatable. Sinha fires the work in a wood kiln, and the ash deposits that give each piece its distinctive coloration and texture are determined in part by where the piece sits in the chamber—a variable no artist can fully control and no process can duplicate. The forms themselves begin on a computer: Sinha designed the tetrarc geometry digitally and cut plaster molds using a CNC machine before casting and firing the ceramic forms. The result sits at a productive tension—precise geometry made singular by fire.

The County acquisition is not Sinha’s first entry into a public collection; a work entered the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park Museum in Japan in 2008, and others have followed since. She lives and works in Logan, where she is also an educator and a member of the International Academy of Ceramics.

Amanda Smith | Dark Money
Ceramic, oil paint, gold leaf, and rhinestones, 12.5 × 12 × 1 in., 2014. Photo credit: artist.

Amanda Smith made “Dark Money” in 2014, and she will be the first to tell you the world has not improved its argument. “I feel like I’ve seen dark money erode democracy and the social order at what feels like exponential speed over the life of the piece,” she says. The work was a comment on how corrupting dark money is to democracy—on how bribes, incentives, and backroom deals can be irresistibly alluring, especially when generational wealth creation is on offer for those who already have power.

Look at the piece and the argument is immediate. A young woman stands in an enchanted forest while disembodied hands extend from the trees, offering a crown on a velvet cushion, a key, a jeweled purse. A treasure chest glints from a stone grotto at the edge of the frame. The fairy-tale vocabulary is entirely intentional—seduction framed as gift, corruption dressed as wonder. And the surface itself participates: the ceramic relief, the gold leaf, the rhinestones are all genuinely beautiful.

Smith describes herself as someone who does not hold strong convictions easily, but who becomes “like a bulldog” when she does. Politics is one of those things. “It occupies so much of my brain because it has an enormous impact on my life and on the people I love,” she says. “I don’t know how it couldn’t be central to anyone’s agenda.”

She is particularly glad this piece found its way into a local government collection. “I hope it means that Salt Lake County is aware of the dangers posed by dark money in politics,” she says, “and that wherever the piece is displayed it can serve as a reminder.”

Kelly Tapia-Chuning | self-portrait as serape; a study of halves
Dismantled serape, copper nails, 2023.

Kelly Tapia-Chuning finds vintage serapes and takes them apart, one row at a time. The warp—the structural threads that run the length of the textile, what she calls the bones inside—is left exposed as the weft, the threads that create the pattern and color, are removed. What remains is a work caught between what it was and what it has become.

Self-portrait as serape; a study of halves is exactly that: half the blanket’s color is removed on one side, leaving it predominantly white—itself unusual within the history of serape design. Tapia-Chuning, who is of mixed European American and Mexican indigenous descent, made the piece as a self-portrait of that division. “I like the idea of playing with which side is the half that I have been divided into,” she says.

The work has generated multiple readings, and Tapia-Chuning welcomes their tension. Many viewers read the denuded, colorless side as the white half of her family. But a friend from Mexico offered a different interpretation: the exposed warp, she suggested, feels more akin to the indigenous peoples of Mexico precisely because they are the foundation—present, structural, and often made invisible by the patterns laid over them. Tapia-Chuning says she loves that reading.

The conceptual underpinning runs deeper still. Mexican identity, she notes, is itself a colonial identity, born out of the colonization of indigenous peoples. The serape—that quintessentially Mexican object—already contains that history before she touches it. In taking it apart and reassembling it, she is not imposing a narrative on the textile; she is uncovering one already there.

Andrew Shaw & Mary Toscano  |  Sequencer/Sampler
Sequencer: organic cotton fabric and thread, wool batting, machine-pieced, hand-quilted; Sampler: sound, 6:44 min., 2025. Photo credit: the artist..

“Sequencer/Sampler” is the first sound-based work to enter the Salt Lake County Visual Art Collection—a distinction the artists note with some satisfaction, since the piece is partly about what happens when mediums that are usually kept separate begin to speak to each other. The project, part of a collaborative series called LFO, draws a parallel between the structural logic of quilts and electronic sound composition. LFO stands for “low frequency oscillator,” a signal that produces repeating wave patterns—squares, triangles, curves—that shape the movement of sound in a synthesizer. Those same geometric patterns appear throughout quilt design. Shaw and Toscano’s collaboration makes that connection visible and audible at once.

The piece also marks the first time the two artists have worked together as equal partners on a body of work, each learning the other’s medium in depth. Shaw, who works in graphic design, photography, music, and sound, contributed the composition; Toscano, who works in drawing, printmaking, bookmaking, and textiles, made the quilt. “Throughout the project, we were able to learn about each other’s mediums in a more in-depth way,” they write.

For both artists, the acquisition matters less as institutional validation than as an invitation to encounter. They believe art should be available to everyone, not only those who seek it out in galleries. “It’s exciting that people in Salt Lake County will encounter this work unexpectedly,” they say, “and hopefully be drawn in for a moment.”

Vicente Romo  |  Hummingbird (Messenger of the Gods 2)

Watercolor, 10 × 8 in., 2023. Photo credit: artist.

The hummingbird has run through Vicente Romo’s work for years — not as motif but as sustained inquiry. He has researched it, painted it repeatedly, and built an entire collection around its presence in Aztec and Maya cosmology. In Aztec mythology, the hummingbird is bound to Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and the sun; in Maya tradition, it was carved from jade by the gods themselves to carry their wishes from one place to another. The bird’s symbolic weight across pre-Columbian cultures is the subject of ongoing study for Romo, and each painting he makes is another layer of that investigation.

But the hummingbird also draws him for reasons closer to the present moment. It is, he notes, a migratory bird that faces survival challenges daily — one that must enter a kind of hibernation each night just to endure until morning, and that manages, despite being among the smallest of birds, to be genuinely strong. “It is a migratory bird that struggles daily to survive, just like many of us,” he says. “I feel that this gives me great strength and inspiration — that despite adversity, one can continue working and building our dreams, especially now in these times of such dehumanization.”

His hope for the piece in its new public context is equally expansive. He wants viewers to move past the surface beauty of the image toward what he sees as its deeper invitation: to contemplate how we coexist with other beings, to take only what is necessary, to respect what we share the world with. “May we be like the hummingbird,” he writes — “noble and strong — making this world our home and a better place.”

Additional works added to the Salt Lake County Collection this year include:

Alise Anderson, “I’d love you even if you loved a horse,” 2025, inkjet color pigment ink, on satin paper

Anna Campbell Bliss (1925-2015), “Echoes II,” 1981, screenprint and oil on canvas, wood framed

Jamie Kyle, “Hold Please…Where Did I Leave My Horse,” 2025, digital collage

Jared Steffensen, “Leftover 41,” 2025, repurposed skateboard deck

Laura Sharp Wilson, “Burrow,” 2016, acrylic on paper on wood panel

Luis Rosado, “NOSTALGIA ISTMEÑA,” 2022, acrylic and sand on canvas

Philip Fisher Barlow, “Blue,” 2000, oil on panel

Springville Museum of Art

Utah’s first museum for the visual arts, the Springville Museum of Art grew from an act of generosity by two of the state’s most significant early artists. In 1903, Cyrus Dallin and John Hafen donated two original works — Dallin’s Paul Revere and Hafen’s Mountain Stream — to Springville High School, seeding what would become one of the most important collections in the region. Students took the collection from there, raising funds through an “Art Queen” festival — each penny donated counted as a vote — and using the proceeds to purchase additional works. They organized a Parisian-style salon beginning in 1922 that has continued annually ever since. By the mid-1930s, the collection’s reputation had grown large enough that the community — with WPA, city, and private support — built a dedicated gallery on the high school campus. That building, dedicated in 1937, is the Springville Museum of Art. It now stewards a permanent collection of more than 2,600 works, with particular strengths in Utah art, American art, and twentieth-century Soviet Realism.

The works below received Purchase Awards at the museum’s Spring Salon, which continues through July 3.

Ben Steele | Made in Utah
Oil on canvas, 60 × 72 in. Photo credit: artist.

Ben Steele’s “Made in Utah” opens with a gag that earns its keep. Three boxes of art supplies—crayons and pencils—are spread across a white surface scattered with the evidence of use, their labels redesigned as Utah souvenirs: “Naturally Formed in Utah! Giant Crayons. Color Elevated.” “Golden Spike Crayons. Made in Utah.” And at the center, a box of 12 pencils bearing an image of the Manti Temple lifted straight from an Ansel Adams photograph, rebranded as the product of the “Ansel Art Company” at 88 cents.

“I think we live in a pretty fascinating state,” Steele says, “and when I get the chance to reflect that in my artwork, it’s always a buzz.” The painting is at once an affectionate portrait and a wry taxonomy of Utah’s self-image: the epic landscape (Delicate Arch on the crayon box), the founding LDS history (the Manti Temple in Ansel Adams monochrome), and the western expansion story (the Golden Spike joining the transcontinental railroad). Steele notes that Utah figures into national and international conversation in surprisingly varied ways, and that exploring those intersections is where his interest lies.

That the painting has entered the Springville Museum of Art’s permanent collection is, for Steele, a validation—and an invitation. “I love that the conversation can deepen as viewers form their own take on it,” he says.

Deborah Bramall | Chemotherapy
Oil on canvas, 24 × 20 in., 2025. Photo credit: Deborah Bramall.

Deborah Bramall spent years as a tight, controlled painter—photorealistic colored pencil work, precise pen and ink. Teaching herself watercolor and then palette knives was a deliberate loosening, a challenge she set herself eight years after her first cancer diagnosis, when her children were growing up and leaving home and she wanted to learn to relax on the canvas. “For a few years,” she says, “I learned to relax as I used a different medium and method to paint.”

Then came a second diagnosis, surgery, and treatment. And with it, a decision to bring vulnerability into her portfolio. She began a series of still lifes drawn from her cancer journey—flowers as symbols of femininity, paired with representations of scars, implants, and treatment. “Chemotherapy” is part of that series.

“Women diagnosed with breast cancer have to suffer through countless treatments and still put on a brave face to their children, their families, and the world,” Bramall says. “This painting represents that despite the scars, the hair loss, and the unbelievable struggle, we still put on a feminine face.”

Bramall had never wanted her cancer experience to define her. The series is not a capitulation to that fear but something harder to achieve: a choice, made on her own terms, to make the experience visible.

Travis Lovell | Victory Over Time
Platinum/palladium print, framed to 20 × 24 in., 2026. Photo credit: Travis Lovell.

Travis Lovell has watched photography’s slow negotiation with the Springville Museum of Art play out over his career—from the years when the medium wasn’t accepted for submission at all, to the back hallways where photographs were eventually tolerated, to what he sees as a genuine integration throughout the museum in recent years. Being among the very few photographs the museum has collected carries weight for him precisely because of that history.

His own practice runs against another tide. As cameras have grown more capable, Lovell has found himself moving toward processes that require more time, more deliberateness, more physical engagement with the image. Hand-coating a platinum/palladium print is the opposite of automation—it is, as he describes it, an extension of wanting to spend more time with his subject rather than being distracted by equipment. “Almost a barrier,” he says of the modern camera, “that entices me to look at, instead of me looking into my subject.”

“Victory Over Time” grew from a larger project tied to photography’s bicentennial—two hundred years since the first permanent photograph was made. Lovell, who has led a fine art book program at UVU for more than a decade, took the occasion as a prompt to explore the medium’s history with students, visiting locations that have been photographed and painted countless times and asking what it means to add another image to that accumulation. The Impressionists became a touchstone: painters who, faced with photography’s arrival, renegotiated what painting could do and what it needed to say. Lovell is working through a version of the same question from the other side. “Time, perception, and visual certainty,” he writes, were the central concerns — each image negotiating “the space between description and interpretation, asking how much precision is required to convey fact, and how much openness is needed to evoke experience.”

Additional works added to the Salt Lake County Collection this year include:

From the Spring Salon

Joseph Butcher, “…They compassed me about together,” bronze

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