This pen and ink sketch by Barbara Gogins was part of the first art exhibit in Park City.

Park City, September 2, 1963. Labor Day.

The mines are quiet—most of them permanently so. The brand-new chairlifts at the Treasure Mountain Resort are also still, the engineers testing them enjoying the holiday off. The midday air remains pleasantly cool as hundreds of locals gather at the “blue church” on Park Avenue. It is the opening day of Park City’s first art exhibit.

David Chaplin is there. A young graduate from the University of Utah and Colorado State, he’s a frothy abstract expressionist, interested in color and texture. He’s also an avid telemark skier, and though he teaches at the SL Art Center and Hillside Junior High in Salt Lake City, he’s moved to Park City, eagerly anticipating the opening of the Treasure Mountain Ski Resort. He’ll teach skiing there for more than a decade.

Francis Zimbeaux is there as well. After a late start as an artist, he had spent the previous decade establishing himself in Salt Lake City, earning top honors at the Utah State Fair—Best of Show in 1960 and Best Professional Oil in 1962. Zimbeaux discovered Park City as a subject in the 1950s and found himself repeatedly drawn to its rustic charm. By 1963 he, too, had made the town his home.

And presiding over it all is Joan Woodbury. After all, the church is hers.

Built in 1899 as the first LDS Chapel in Park City and run by Joan Woodbury as The Tambourine in the mid-1960s, “The Blue Church” is now a boutique lodge.

Joan and her husband, Charles, moved to Park City in 1956, shortly after she joined the University of Utah’s dance faculty. Charles became the principal of Park City High School, and together they made the unused church, the first LDS chapel in Park City, available for the fledgling exhibition. It was an act of generosity and community-mindedness, but also a gesture of friendship—Woodbury would remain close to many of these artists for the rest of her life.

It also made practical sense. Just weeks earlier, in July 1963, Woodbury had launched what she called the Park City School of Creative Art and Dance, soon to be renamed The Tambourine, offering summer workshops in dance. After she and Shirley Ririe founded the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company in 1964, the summer workshops grew rapidly. Up to 150 dancers attended each year, with outdoor classes, evening seminars, picnics, and world-class instruction. A 1964 photograph captures steely-eyed teenagers surrounded by art as dance pioneer Alwin Nikolais observes.

It was at the July meeting of the town’s historical committee that Woodbury offered the building for the art exhibit. Since the late 1940s, after major mine closures, Park City had slipped into steep decline. Only a few mines were still operating. Meanwhile, United Park City Mines Company had begun a $2.6 million construction project—what would become Treasure Mountain Ski Resort, with a two-section gondola then billed as the largest in the world. The resort was not yet open, but locals were already imagining the future. The exhibition would celebrate the town’s history and character while announcing a new chapter.

The idea had precedent. The year before, at the Salt Lake Art Center, Barbara Gogins, George Dibble, George Fox, B. F. Larsen, Sharon Ekberg Street, and Mary Warnock had shown “The Dead Cities of Utah,” featuring paintings of Park City and Bingham. Gogins—energetic, ambitious, and known for experimenting with innovative gallery formats—was asked to invite artists for the Park City event. She selected twenty. Their only restriction: each work must depict the town.

Watercolor painting of the Silver King Mine by H. Francis Sellers. Courtesy of a private collector.

Opening day was a triumph. An estimated 1,000 people attended—this in a town of perhaps 1,200 residents, half the size it had been a decade earlier. The Summit County Bee claimed it was “one of the largest crowds ever to attend an art exhibit on opening day in the State of Utah.” Over the next five days, another thousand visitors arrived from Wasatch Back communities and from the larger population centers along the Wasatch Front.

They came up old U.S. Route 40, the narrow, two-lane highway winding through Parleys Canyon before the construction of I-80. Before skiing, Park City was primarily a summer retreat, a way to escape the valley heat, and Labor Day marked the close of the warm-weather season.

The beau of the ball was H. Francis Sellers. whose work was so well received that organizers asked him to bring additional paintings after opening day. A BYU graduate who had studied with Glen Turner, Sellers would become beloved for his watercolors of the old mining town. The Park City exhibit launched him to his first one-man show at Salt Lake City’s Tower Theatre in October.

In total, twenty artists showed sixty-two works; eighteen pieces sold. There were a few oils and some abstract or “modern” works, but most were traditional pen-and-ink and watercolor depictions of the town’s buildings and streets—by artists such as Harold Peterson, Milton Swensen and Nina Kingston. “The ghosts of the lusty old mining days lived again,” wrote the Summit County Bee on September 12, “and the beauty of our little town nestled in the Treasure Mountains was there for all to see.”

Writing in The Salt Lake Tribune, critic George Dibble highlighted Zimbeaux’s pen-and-ink drawing of “a typical western cemetery,” interpreting it as a statement about frontier cities: “Park City is not dead” was the title. Zimbeaux would make that claim again and again in his work—scores of paintings and ink washes capturing the gritty browns and fragile textures of a mining town sliding toward ghost-town status, and in time, toward rebirth.

Park City works by Francis Zimbeaux

Momentum continued. The following July, Zimbeaux, Chaplin, Roslyn Grose, and David Lund exhibited in a three-week summer show organized by Gogins and Lee Deffebach and hung in conjunction with a chamber-music series. These same artists, along with Deffebach and Gogins, participated in the Labor Day exhibition. Joe Pumphrey, Gaell Lindstrom and Wayne Pratt were other notable additions.

Writing again for the Trib, Dibble noted that the participating artists produced “deeply felt” interpretations of Park City’s “weathered look”—its sagging mine structures, warped beams, and stark mountain setting. What had begun as documentary impulse was becoming a more mature artistic exploration, one that captured both the physical erosion of the town and the emotional resonance embedded in its fading architecture. He suggested expanding the show beyond its strict subject limitations: “Perhaps the event has reached the point when restrictions in subject matter might be relaxed… In view of the cultural significance entertained by planners of Park City’s future, there is reason to believe this phase of expression will be broadened.”

By 1965, the show had begun to evolve beyond its original parameters. Under the direction of Willard Larsen, the exhibition added an amateur division and, for the first time, artists were no longer required to depict Park City itself. The 1965 roster reflects that shift: alongside the familiar pen-and-ink depictions of mine buildings and old boarding houses, artists submitted figure studies, abstractions, and landscapes drawn from beyond Park City’s borders. The exhibit was broadening both in purpose and in scope, transforming from a documentation project into a more expansive regional art event.

That broader vision carried into 1966, when the exhibition swelled to fifty professional artists, including sculptors and potters, with an additional thirty exhibitors in the amateur section. By then the show had become a fixture of the Labor Day weekend and a magnet for artists across the state.

“Park City Barns,” Francis Sellers, 1963. Courtesy of Springville Museum of Art.

At the same time, The Tambourine was reaching its creative peak. The summer workshops brought dancers to Park City from across the country. Under the direction of Alwin Nikolais, they spilled out into the abandoned mining yards, climbing timbered walls, leaping across ore bins, and weaving movement through rusting machinery. The Tribune’s photographs from June 1966 capture the surreal beauty of the moment: dancers suspended mid-air above tumbled rock; a line of performers silhouetted in the mouth of an old tunnel; bodies threading themselves through the remains of ore carts and structural beams. Park City’s decaying industrial past became, for a brief time, the set and partner of avant-garde modern dance.

And then, suddenly, it was over.

The exhibition had depended on the generosity of Joan Woodbury, and it ended when she and Charles moved to Salt Lake City in 1967. With the sale of the church, the venue disappeared, and with it the annual gathering that had briefly placed Park City at the center of Utah’s art world—just before the ski boom transformed the town forever.

Join 15 Bytes at Park City Before the Resort, a pop-up exhibition/sale of works by the late Francis Zimbeaux.
Painted in the 1950s and 1960s, these watercolors and ink washes capture the fading mining town before it became a major skiing destination.

Saturday, Dec. 13, 10am-3 pm
Poor Yorick Studios
126 W. Crystal Ave.
South Salt Lake

Exhibitors at the First Annual Park City Art Exhibit, 1963
RuJean Brunson
David Chaplin
Barbara Gogins
Nina Kingston
Pete Lafon
Beverly Mastrim
Harold Peterson
Roy Purcell
Francis H. Sellers
Roslyn Stewart
Shari Street
Jane L. Swensen
M.E. Swensen
Richard Van Wagoner
Mary Warnock
Sheila Wooley
Faye White Woolston
Harold Woolston
Francis Zimbeaux

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.