The warm, inviting style of 1930s Spanish Colonial architecture is one of many elements that makes the Springville Museum of Art distinctive. The focus on Utah artists, on the surrounding community, and on educational outreach—all critical to the museum’s mission and history—are others. But it’s the people that […]
Each year since 1924, the Springville Museum of Art has hosted a contemporary art competition called the Spring Salon. Artists from around the country, including John Carlsen, Norman Rockwell, Emile Gruppe, and Maynard Dixon have participated. The contest still receives submissions from all over; but, the majority are […]
For years, the Springville Museum of Art’s Spring Salon has served as a place where we at 15 Bytes both discover new artists and take stock of what those we already know are doing.The 15 Bytes Discovery Award, inaugurated this year in partnership with the Springville Museum of […]
The exhibition of John Hafen’s work at the Springville Museum of Art is quietly beautiful: pastoral landscapes float in soft tonal harmonies; fields, trees, and distant hills seem to belong to a simpler century. The paintings are assured and accomplished, the work of an artist clearly in command […]
For Springville Museum of Art director Emily Larsen creating exhibitions is about forging connections between people and the larger human experience. It’s a philosophy rooted in a life-changing moment at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. As an LDS-missionary facing a mental health crisis, Larsen made the difficult decision […]
The exhilarating, devastating, and undeniable truth at the center of the art world is that everybody’s taste is different. In many cases, what is good or even great to one viewer barely registers with another, regardless of any of a thousand distinguishing factors between each artwork and each […]
Given the fundamental motivating role of religion in cultural and artistic expression all over the world, it’s not surprising that the first art work to employ the renaissance discovery of accurate visual perspective was such a work — Masaccio’s “Holy Trinity,” which depicts the three-persons-in-one-God enumerated by Christian […]
There are not a whole lot of Fairbanks in Utah today; at least not in the art world. But for a period in the early 20th century that surname dominated the state’s art community. Both painters and sculptors, the Fairbanks were adept practitioners of that blend of naturalism […]
For a couple of magic years during her adolescence, I drove my step-daughter to and from school five days a week. During those shared moments, one of her favorite things was to tell me her dreams. Eventually I realized her narratives went on far too long for her to be remembering them: that she had, in fact, returned to the dream state and was telling me the dream as she witnesses it continuing. The literary novelist, Robert Olin Butler, describes the process of artistic creation just so, as dreaming while awake, and I realized that I’d had the rare privilege of witnessing that process in play.
That description comes close to accounting for the art of Trent Alvey, in that her works are rooted in abstractions and resist ascribing them to subject matter.
The Springville Museum of Art’s Spring Salon is the largest annual exhibition of work by Utah artists in the state. More than 1000 works are entered for consideration each year. From these, the museum manages to hang several hundred on their ground floor galleries. The Salon is too […]
It’s 11 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, and the third bus parks at the Springville Museum of Art. A high school field trip to an art museum could be made up of expressionless bodies who boarded the bus because it means an excused absence in science or math […]
With an unknown number works of art accepted, the Spring Salon at the Springville Museum of Art — far and away the exemplary annual show, at the definitive repository of homegrown Utah art and artists — defies imagination. Because it occupies almost the entire main floor, flowing from […]
Visiting the Springville Museum of Art always presents an opportunity to experience an eclectic presentation of talent, insight, and creativity within the walls of a unique structure. The building itself, with its tiled floors, arched doorways, and courtyards, prepares you upon entry for a dramatic shift from the […]
Racism and discrimination have played far too important a role in the formation of American society. The treatment of minorities in this country has been a history of violence and oppression, filled with stories many would wish to forget, but cannot. Though many great strides have been made […]
What do a rusty sewer grate, “Llama Crossing” street sign, rabbit, and a metal screen door have in common? On the surface, not much. Aside from the llama-crossing sign, these are all ordinary things anyone might see in a neighborhood or while out for a drive in the […]
The six prominent Utah artists now on exhibit in the Springville Museum of Art’s (SMOFA) Here, There, and Everywhere have each developed a personal style that is immediately recognizable as well as adept at evoking a sense of place. The exhibit is an examination of how ”spaces” become ”places,“ the […]
Glass, like painting, sculpture, or any other art medium, flourishes in a variety of techniques. Just as an artist can paint in oil, acrylic, watercolor, with spray paint and stencils, or any number of other innovations, and just as a sculptor can build up clay to be cast […]
A passage can be something literal, a tangible progression from one place to another, or it can represent something metaphorical, a life journey of gained personal experience, and the personal development it manifests. Utah artist Fahimeh Amiri, who is one of the featured artists in the Springville Museum […]
Narrative painting, in the form of history painting, was once the pinnacle of Western art, the zenith of Alberti’s 15th-century treatise on painting, and a prerequisite for anyone seeking access to prestigious academies in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the advent of modernism, narrative’s importance waned, while […]
