The Stories We Hold: Journey through Myth and Memory at the UVU Museum of Art, with one of Pénélope Lenaerts’ soft sculptures in the foreground.

Myth and memory can be both very personal and very universal. In The Stories We Hold: Journey through Myth and Memory, at the UVU Museum of Art, six artists display more than five dozen works that boil down to one thing: myth and memory unite us. Even the most specific cultural myths find commonalities with others so the sharing of these stories can bring us together rather than separate us as different.

The six artists–Shonto Begay, Eunkang Koh, Lenka Konopasek, Pénélope Lenaerts, Angelica Raquel, and Wren Ross–are presented with short individual panels describing a little of their background but focusing on their approach to their art and its tie to myth and memory. Each individual object label offers the basic identifiers of title, date, media, and credit line without further elaboration. This presents the viewer with a simple jumping-off point and plenty of space to formulate their own ideas and interpretations and connections to what they see.

Shonto Begay’s paintings are reflective of his Diné (Navajo) heritage. His pieces are quiet and warm, rich with light and color, and invite you into their stories without explicitly telling those stories. As the curator notes, his brushwork does the storytelling—“Small, repeated marks build across the canvas like syllables forming words, words forming sentences, until each painting becomes what he describes as ‘a paragraph in a great prayer.’” In works such as “Divine Connecting” and “Pieces of Promise,” Begay brings myth to natural and human forms in a way that is impossible to separate them. Others such as “Awaiting Monsoon,” and “Stands with Light,” bring nature front and center, telling its stories with quiet reverence. All his work makes that connection of myth to reality seamless.

Shonto Begay, “Pieces of Promise”

Eunkang Koh, Primal Urge, an immersive installation of hybrid wolf figures suspended throughout the gallery.

Eunkang Koh’s installations include an intriguing soft sculpture with linocut print eyes called “Watching” and the much larger “Primal Urge,” with Koh’s signature hybrid animals (in this case wolves with human arms and legs). The creatures draw on Min-hwa, the whimsical, satirical folk art tradition of Korea’s working class, and put that same appetite for mockery to work on the viewer — needling at the instincts, appetites, and absurdities most of us would rather keep tucked under our social performance. Koh’s intaglio prints “Two Faced People” and “Run Quail Run,” continue this mix of human and animal with a nice dose of whimsy, but her two relief print artist books, “A Bevy of Quails” and “A Band of Coyotes,” are especially captivating for those of us who love a good artist-designed book.

Lenka Konopasek brings five mixed media paper pieces that are large-scale and bristle with a powerful and unnerving texture that feels both animalistic and botanical, though abstract in form. Like many other works in the show, they look infinitely touchable (thus, all the no touching signs on labels throughout the galleries). The exhibition situates her work in a long tradition of cautionary storytelling—myths about nature’s power that have always offered a way to make sense of forces beyond our control, part warning, part guidance. But Konopasek’s showstopper is the piece “Swarm,” at once fully abstracted shapes that swarm together to suddenly appear as a murmuration of birds. The individual pieces are simple curves alone, but together they tell a completely different story.

Detail of one of Lenka Konopasek’s large-scale mixed media paper works in The Stories We Hold: Journey through Myth and Memory at the UVU Museum of Art.

Pénélope Lenaerts displays soft sculptures that reference her own interpretations of many varied mythological traditions. With works such as “Night Heron” and “Watchful Moon and Two Soft Bays,” the artist’s craftsmanship adds to the overall plush feeling of her mixed media pieces. There’s a childhood-sized scale to the work—the wonder of playing outside, of being small within a vast landscape, translated into soft, huggable objects. The effect is dreamy and comforting almost by design, an open invitation back into that sense of imagination.

Angelica Raquel’s childhood in Laredo, Texas gives her a foundation of cultural traditions and family stories on which to create works in a variety of media. Her multidisciplinary practice—painting, drawing, metal tooling, felting, rug hooking—draws on the rich craft traditions of Latin folk art, and through them she gives physical form to oral tradition. Her many pieces in the show include a wonderful series of five gouache, acrylic, and gold leaf paintings with powerful mythical characters surrounded by frames with icons and symbols to match. “La Bruja Y La Curandera” is a particularly strong example. Her gun-tufted and hand hooked yarn and ribbon wall hangings such as “The Stag’s Dream” and “The Tragedy of La Llorona,” are mesmerizing in their depth, texture, color, and visual presence. But Raquel’s largest piece is also her most stunning work. “From Her Heart She Pulled Memories, From Her Hands She Poured Love” is an larger-than-life crocodile head of pink needle felted wool and polyfibers, embroidered felt, glass beads, polymer clay and acrylic paint. Its open mouth reveals delicately embroidered hands and stars on the tongue within the strangely realistic puffiness of the felted interior of the mouth. It invites you in with its softness and candy color. The exterior almost begins to look like foam insulation until you catch the intense eyes.

An entire room is dedicated to Wren Ross’ mixed media paintings, which are an engaging complement to the other works in the show. Her paintings are full of dreamlike, mythic imagery populated by ghostly or symbolic figures—faces, animals, robed forms—caught somewhere between narrative and abstraction. They evoke myths and stories that seem familiar, but may, perhaps, reflect a broader human story. Whether through layered collage and gestural mark-making or flattened, folk-inflected drawing, her work gives everything the feel of an invented visual language or personal mythology. She works in universal fears, desires, and questions—the urgent need to locate ourselves within a larger story. It’s the oldest reassurance myth offers: that history repeats, that patterns hold, that, as the curators note, “myth offers something close to comfort-the quiet certainty that we already know, in some essential way, how the story goes.”

Rather than asking viewers to learn six different mythologies, the exhibition suggests that myth itself is a shared human instinct—a way of organizing memory, fear, hope, and identity. The exhibition has a clear focus and presents the works of these six artists with an openness that gives some form, but allows for our imagination, memories, and stories of our own to guide us through the galleries.

Wren Ross, Tempest, mixed media on panel, featured in The Stories We Hold: Journey through Myth and Memory at the UVU Museum of Art.

The Stories We Hold: Journey through Myth and Memory, UVU Museum of Art, Orem, through Sept. 5.

Gina Cavallo

Gina Cavallo has been a curator, registrar, and executive director in museums for over 35 years. She spent many years as an art critic for publications in Phoenix. She began her career at the Phoenix Art Museum and the Heard Museum, was a founding curator at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, spent two terms managing exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and was the Executive Director at the Mission Inn Foundation & Museum in Riverside, California. Her current role is Director of Development for Taproot Theatre Company in Seattle where she also serves as the curator of the Kendall Center Exhibition Series. She moved to Orem in 2024 with her husband, a theatre faculty member at UVU.