Jorge Rojas: Making Art and Making a Difference
Jorge Rojas was meant to be an artist. A soothsayer might have predicted it — seen it in the cards, the tea leaves, or, in Rojas’ case, the tortilla marks.
The Camera’s Power: Artists at Alice Gallery, Julie Nester and UMFA Explore the Past, Present and Future of Photography
You don’t take a photograph, you make it. —Ansel Adams In a decade shy of 200 years—since its invention by British artists seeking a faster, easier way to draw from life—photography has joined those two great clichés of human invention, fire and the wheel, as […]
Diving in the Headlines with Sandy Brunvand’s Divisive Landscapes
As our most dynamic organ, the brain is at once remarkably expansive and persistently conservative, constantly aiming to preserve its energy. The ever-increasing pace of social media has nurtured this trend of mental conservation—instead of reading and prioritizing media according to its supposed importance or significance, we often […]
The Face of the Earth: Marilyn Bridges at UMFA
“The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars Imagine life as Leonardo da Vinci: you want to know everything. The land, the sky, how things work, how things within invisible spheres exist, how to make brand new […]
UMFA’s ARTLandish Series: The Greening of Lit
When the Utah Museum of Fine Arts closed its doors January 18th to begin installing a state-of-the-art vapor barrier in the Marcia and John Price Museum Building, many thought its programs might go into hibernation for over a year as well. Not so. An ambitious attempt to continue its […]
Gretchen Dietrich honored as one of “30 Women to Watch”
Gretchen Dietrich, executive director of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA), is being honored this month as one of Utah Business magazine’s 2015 “30 Women to Watch.” The magazine’s annual recognition program spotlights women business leaders who have distinguished themselves across a diverse range of fields, from […]
Duane Linklater at the UMFA
Hard to believe we’re at salt 11 already, but here we are, and Duane Linklater, an Omaskêko Cree from Moose Cree First Nation in present-day Northern Ontario, Canada, is the artist at hand. These semi-annual “salt” exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, showcasing work by emerging […]
Our America: Latino Presence at the UMFA
To consider oneself an American is to acknowledge an inherent lack of cultural homogeny. The nation is comprised of countless national ancestries, cultures, religions and customs. So much so that the traditional and hopeful “melting pot” metaphor has given way to the more realistic “tossed salad.” The Utah […]
Kimball To Move? UMFA To Close?
Last week the Kimball Art Center got tough in its negotiations with Park City over their redesign. After a second design was rejected by the city because it didn’t comply with historic preservation guidelines (see here) the Kimball Board of Directors announced it would look for a new […]
Absence through Visual Representation: Bingham Canyon Mine at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts
How many views does it take to depict the steady, human-formed creation of absence on the land? In the case of Utah Museum of Fine Art’s (UMFA) current exhibition Creation and Erasure: Art of the Bingham Canyon Mine, the answer is over one hundred. This well-researched, historical view of […]
Kate Gilmore at the UMFA
Every year, Friends of Contemporary Art (FoCA) purchase a work by a contemporary artist and donate it to the collection of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA). With the assistance of the UMFA’s curator of modern and contemporary art Whitney Tassie, the work is chosen at an annual […]
Robert Smithson’s Sculpture in Context at UMFA
On March 18th, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) unveiled a work by American artist RobertSmithson (1938-1973), on loan from Dia Art Foundation. The regional partnerships Dia formed in early 2012 with UMFA and Westminster College’s Great Salt Lake Institute regarding Smithson’s monumental earthwork Spiral Jetty finds its first publicly-seen collaborative venture in the loan of Smithson’s sculpture “Leaning […]
On Medium, Narrative, and Great Salt Lake: A Discussion with Matthew Coolidge and Tacita Dean
Shot along the southwest coast of Great Salt Lake, CLUI’s Landscan presents only a fraction of the lake’s landscape, which in its entirety measures approximately 75 miles in length by 25 miles in width. The video, now on exhibit at Utah Museum of Fine Arts, runs 19 minutes and presents […]
Exhibition Review: Martha Wilson at UMFA
The Gaze: glass half-full . . . If you wanted to demonstrate that there is such a thing as a male gaze, different from the way a woman looks at the world, you might assemble pairs of photographs, one in each pair displaying a man’s perspective, one […]
Under Pressure: Contemporary Prints at the UMFA
Under Pressure: it’s the title of a Queen/David Bowie song, whose opening riff was famously not ripped off by Vanilla Ice (aka Robert Van Winkle); it is what we are in this modern world; but most importantly (i.e., most relevant to what you are reading right now), it’s […]
Versions of Motion: Shigeyuki Kihara at UMFA’s salt 8
In 1968, the Scottish-Canadian experimental filmmaker Norman McLaren found a new use for an optical printer, a device that copies motion picture films. Any moving image will consist of a sequence of still images, each briefly flashed before the eye while the mind builds a version of the […]
What’s A Guerl To Do? Guerrilla Girls at the UMFA
by Jann Haworth We sat in the front row Rach, Sarah and me…like groupies at a POP concert. We were early and I expected such established celebrities to be late. Twisting round to check if the auditorium was full about five min. before the scheduled start time — […]
Friends of Utah Western Art in Torrey This Weekend
Sure, the weather we’re having, with its frequent shifts in temperature and sudden downpours, can be a bit tricky, but man does it provide some great visuals — the changing shadows, the saturation of local color, the dramatic clouds draping and transforming our cliffs and mountains. This is […]
UMFA acquisitions, work by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Lawrence Weiner
When Frank Sanguinetti, former director of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, introduced the public to the museum’s new building in 2001, a few scratched their heads. The “guava” color of the walls might take some getting used to, they seemed to mumble. In the upper galleries, where […]
