Photo by Simon Blundell

To someone accustomed to being awakened in the middle of the night with reports of shootings or other serious incidents, the job of Executive Director of the Salt Lake City Arts Council can seem relatively tame. “I couldn’t believe it when my staff said there weren’t any ‘drunk and disorderlies’ to report after the first day of the Living Traditions Festival,” says Karen Krieger, who took over at the Arts Council in March. “I thought they were just protecting me so I wouldn’t have to worry about it.”

Krieger comes to the Arts Council after 18 years with Utah State Parks, the last three of which she spent as Deputy Director. This is when she got phone calls and emails in the middle of the night if something went wrong. “Five million people visits state parks every year, so that’s a lot of people playing in the water, hiking, and using ATV’s or snowmobiles. With that many people outdoors, accidents happen. Dealing with the accidents was always the most challenging part of my job, though luckily we had well-trained personnel on the ground as first responders.”

The accident ratio may be less, but in her new role Krieger still has a lot to tackle. The Arts Council oversees the City Arts Grants, Finch Lane Gallery, Public Arts Programs, and Guest Writers Series. They also put on live events like the Living Traditions Festival, Brown Bag Concert Series and Twilight Concert Series. Krieger comes well-prepared for her new role, not only from her years at Utah State Parks, but also early years in Nebraska, when her cultural curiosity and activism began.

Krieger was trained in both resource management and storytelling. She received her undergraduate degree at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, in outdoor recreation, and in 1992, she received her master’s in folklore from Utah State University. Prior to coming to Utah, she had worked at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming with the Whitney Gallery of Western Art — a gallery dedicated to encouraging visitors to make connections across culture and time through views of the land, people, and wildlife of the West. She also did a stint as an administrative assistant at the Visual Art Center in Anchorage, Alaska.

When Krieger began at Utah State Parks in 1993 she accepted the newly created role of Heritage Resources Coordinator. “The State was starting to realize they didn’t really have the knowledge or resources available to manage museums from a cultural perspective in a natural resource setting. I was essentially hired to combine art and history into a comprehensive form of storytelling.”

Her portfolio as Hertiage Resources Coordinator, which took her across the entire state, included seven historic state parks and museums (Camp Floyd; Freemont Indian; Edge of the Cedars; Anasazi; Territorial Statehouse; Utah Field House of Natural History; and Frontier Homestead in Cedar City) as well as Antelope Island and the Huber Farm in Heber Valley. Krieger was responsible for overseeing the archeological resources as well as the built resources and the arts and cultural programming. “Archeological sites abound in Utah,” she says, “and most of the sites have cultural resources we need to protect, too.”

As an example, Krieger cites the extensive planning that went into making the Garr Ranch on Antelope Island accessible to the public in the mid-1990’s. The ranch is located on the largest spring on the island and was built in 1848 at the behest of Brigham Young for the purpose of managing the LDS Church’s tithing herds (there is evidence, however, that Native Americans and wildlife were using the area for hundreds of years prior to the arrival of Fielding Garr).

Krieger’s job was to ensure the historic preservation of the ranch structure, while planning ways to make the area “come alive” for visitors through interpretive exhibits and programming. She helped the park staff find performers and storytellers who could re-create the ranch’s recent Mormon history as well as the older Native American history. Folk artists were also invited to the ranch, and sometimes cowboy-related activities were held there, all with the goal of connecting visitors with different kinds of history associated with the same place.

Krieger traces her interest in folklore to growing up in Nebraska. “I lived on a farm and rode my horse to a cemetery by my house that was neglected and covered with weeds. I would read the epitaphs on stones and make up stories about the people because I wondered about their history. I was also really interested in the carvings on the stones, some of which were done by itinerant carvers. They were beautiful, but they were symbolic, too.” When she noticed there were lots of deaths in 1919, she learned about the flu epidemic. “That made history relevant for me, and I was really happy to discover later in life that I could actually make a living through learning and sharing people’s stories.”

After 15 years of working with heritage resources, Krieger moved to the administrative arm of State Parks and became the Deputy Director. She helped manage the $30 million budget and worked with legislators to keep the interests of the parks protected. She says, “You know an organization really well when you know their budget. I had a whole new perspective on the park system and I could see what it cost to manage everything. If I was confused, I would dig, dig, dig into the financials, and then I would think, ‘This is cool! Now I get it.’”

Although Krieger was primarily occupied with administrative duties the last few years, she made considerable effort to maintain her ties to the local arts community. For six years she served on the Salt Lake County Center for the Arts board, which oversees Abravanel Hall, Capitol Theatre, and Rose Wagner. She says this is where she got to know the demands of the performing arts and how they work. “It’s much more complex than visual arts,” she says. “You have to know the different kinds of floors, acoustics and sound systems, and backstage accommodations in addition to tech crews and performers.”

Krieger was also part of the Utah Cultural Alliance in the early days, where she met other arts champions like Vicki Bourns, Cynthia Buckingham, Cary Stevens Jones, and Nancy Boskoff, former director of the Salt Lake City Arts Council. “We put in a lot of hours together at the Legislature,” says Krieger. “We’d be up there on the last night rooting for each other’s bills and commiserating with each other when the bills didn’t make it through the session.”

It was Krieger’s friendship with Nancy Boskoff that prompted her to first think about the director position at the Arts Council. When Boskoff first said she was retiring Krieger didn’t feel ready to leave Parks. “I loved working for our director and still felt I had a lot to offer.” Over the next couple of months, however, Krieger’s boss ended up retiring, and the Arts Council was unable to find a qualified candidate, so the Executive Director position was reopened. “I started thinking about it again and figured that if I were ever going to change jobs, this might be the time to do it.” She adds with a laugh, “I realized that the Arts Council job hadn’t been open for 25 years, so I had better grab it!”

Krieger left her successful tenure at Utah State Parks in February 2012 with a one-year park pass as a going away gift. “The law enforcement officers get to take their weapons with them when they leave,” she jokes, “and since my weapon was my computer, I opted for the pass.”

Krieger has been the Executive Director of the Arts Council now for just four months. She says the first few weeks were difficult because everything was new. “You know, I sat at the same desk and in the same chair for 18 years and I didn’t even think about it. Then when I got to my office at the Arts Council, I couldn’t get the chair adjusted right, I couldn’t figure out how to print from my computer, and I didn’t know any of the procedures. I’d go home exhausted every night.”

Krieger expects to spend the rest of her first year trying to see how things work. She spends most of her time listening and learning – and trying to keep herself organized. She laughs, “I’ve already reorganized myself several times as I see what I need to know, what I need to be informed about, and who I need to talk to.” She’s also trying to assess what she can do to help the staff do their jobs, determine what else the Arts Council can do to engage the community, and navigate her way through a new set of political personas. “Luckily,” she adds, “I have really good staff and I have a lot of respect for what they’ve done all these years.”

When she’s not working, Krieger says she enjoys exploring the outdoors through camping, gardening, and hiking. She also has a “lovely” cat and a husband who likes to cook dinner for her at the end of each day. “Overall, I’m pretty lucky,” she says with a smile.

Sheryl Gillilan

received her B.A. in Psychology from Lewis and Clark College, and Masters in both Social Services and Law and Social Policy from Bryn Mawr College. She is an award-winning quilt artist and the Executive Director for the Holladay Arts Council.