With university faculty art exhibitions, there is rarely a throughline—a main theme or narrative that ties all the disparate works by different artists together—and the UMFA’s Relative Truths, seems, at first, to be no exception. There are several stated themes—isolation, division, contested histories, cultural anxiety, dismantling of human […]
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts opened its newly relocated, reimagined, and redesigned Mexican and Central & South American Galleries to crowds of visitors on Saturday, October 18 with the Nuestro pasado es presente /Our Past is Present celebration featuring live music and performance, art-making workshops and food […]
The visual cultures of the Himalayas are the rock-and-roll of Buddhist art. Wrathful deities wear flaming hair and skull garlands. Tantric divinities intertwine their limbs in sexual embrace. The searing mineral brilliance of cinnabar and azurite compete for the viewer’s attention. And ritual cups made of human craniums […]
In 2007, I learned that a former writing student of mine was actually a visual arts major. I learned this when Karen Sorenson unexpectedly produced the most remarkable work of art that anyone, student or faculty, would exhibit in my decade at Snow College. While No One is […]
On first sight, the painting rings like a chime that echoes through the memory of art. The presence nearby of two more works from the same time and place confirms that the painter surely knew of and appreciated the great Mexican muralists, including Diego Rivera (once Mexico’s foremost […]
The early 20th century was a period of rapid innovation in Western art, with artists seeking to break free from the representational shackles of the past. In the scrum of early modern painting that was Paris, Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973) was one of the few Americans who stood out, […]
As you probably are aware, the place currently called Utah represents a large and diverse landscape. With its arbitrarily drawn borders, this almost-a-rectangle state in the middle of the American West encompasses a remarkably diverse geography. From Rich, Cache, and Box Elder counties in the north to Washington, […]
When visitors enter the UMFA’s newest exhibition, Tatau: Marks of Polynesia, what appears to be a survey of Samoan tattoos quickly reveals itself to be an exploration of Fa’asāmoa — the Samoan way of life. This is because the two are inextricably linked. As recently as a generation […]
When, in the 19th century, French and English painters figured out how to make the impact of light on paper permanent, they invented photography. But that wasn’t the beginning of the search for a way to accelerate the labor of drawing. They and other artists had been playing […]
Because exhibitions are scheduled months, if not years, in advance, it may be a while before we see the curatorial hand of the Utah Museum of Fine Art’s new senior curator. But, with the goals she has set, Alisa McCusker has plenty to keep herself busy behind the […]
In her opening remarks on Friday, October 7, 2022, UMFA executive director Gretchen Dietrich stated that Air (on display until Dec. 11) is an intentionally diverse exhibit. Former UMFA curator Whitney Tassie’s artist selections range from local artists like Virginia Cathrall highlighting the air quality issues experienced here […]
We expect art to do a lot of things: be visually stunning, yes, please; express something meaningful, hopefully; teach us something important, possibly. We also hope art can change the world. And the world needs a lot of changing: institutional inequities, catastrophic climate change, terrorism and torture, the […]
Stories, history, and culture weave themselves into the quilts currently on display at the UMFA’s Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts. Organized by Luke Kelly, the museum’s associate curator of collections, and Katie Seastrand, coordinator of school and teacher programs, the exhibition of 18 quilts, comprising early traditional […]
Four rows of colossal ceramic heads line the right wall of the gallery, arranged in an inverted pyramid shape. While each has been crafted from the same model, every head is conferred with a distinctive color or adorned stenciled designs, ranging in patterns and words. The various symbols […]
On July 3, 2020, The New York Times reported that the Black Lives Matter protests in response to the May 25th death of George Floyd likely constituted the largest in United States history, garnering a half-million participants in over 500 locations at their peak. The magnitude of these […]
Minneapolis Institute of Art shares with Utah Museum of Fine Arts the advantages that come with not being located in Paris, London, New York, or other locales requiring a presence on the international art scene. Instead of always keeping one eye on their competitors, MIA and UMFA can […]
The moniker “power couples” implies two individuals who, while successful in their own right, bring even greater meaning or influence when considered in the context of each other. When applied to art, this expression is even more intriguing: what might an object in the context of another bring to […]
