{"id":100202,"date":"2025-12-09T11:12:58","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T18:12:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=100202"},"modified":"2025-12-11T15:33:36","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T22:33:36","slug":"park-citys-first-art-exhibit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/park-citys-first-art-exhibit\/","title":{"rendered":"Park City’s First Art Exhibit"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This pen and ink sketch by Barbara Gogins was part of the first art exhibit in Park City.<\/p><\/div>\n

Park City, September 2, 1963. Labor Day.<\/h4>\n

The mines are quiet\u2014most 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 \u201cblue church\u201d on Park Avenue. It is the opening day of Park City\u2019s first art exhibit.<\/h4>\n

David Chaplin is there. A young graduate from the University of Utah and Colorado State, he\u2019s a frothy abstract expressionist, interested in color and texture. He\u2019s also an avid telemark skier, and though he teaches at the SL Art Center and Hillside Junior High in Salt Lake City, he\u2019s moved to Park City, eagerly anticipating the opening of the Treasure Mountain Ski Resort. He\u2019ll teach skiing there for more than a decade.<\/h4>\n

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\u2014Best 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.<\/h4>\n

And presiding over it all is Joan Woodbury. After all, the church is hers.<\/h4>\n
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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.<\/p><\/div>\n

Joan and her husband, Charles, moved to Park City in 1956, shortly after she joined the University of Utah\u2019s 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\u2014Woodbury would remain close to many of these artists for the rest of her life.<\/h4>\n

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.<\/h4>\n

It was at the July meeting of the town\u2019s 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\u2014what 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\u2019s history and character while announcing a new chapter.<\/h4>\n

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 \u201cThe Dead Cities of Utah,\u201d featuring paintings of Park City and Bingham. Gogins\u2014energetic, ambitious, and known for experimenting with innovative gallery formats\u2014was asked to invite artists for the Park City event. She selected twenty.\u00a0Their only restriction: each work must depict the town.<\/h4>\n
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Watercolor painting of the Silver King Mine by H. Francis Sellers. Courtesy of a private collector.<\/p><\/div>\n

Opening day was a triumph. An estimated 1,000 people attended\u2014this in a town of perhaps 1,200 residents, half the size it had been a decade earlier. The Summit County Bee claimed it was \u201cone of the largest crowds ever to attend an art exhibit on opening day in the State of Utah.\u201d Over the next five days, another thousand visitors arrived from Wasatch Back communities and from the larger population centers along the Wasatch Front.<\/h4>\n

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.<\/h4>\n

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.<\/h4>\n

In total, twenty artists showed sixty-two works; eighteen pieces sold. There were a few oils and some abstract or \u201cmodern\u201d works, but most were traditional pen-and-ink and watercolor depictions of the town\u2019s buildings and streets\u2014by artists such as Harold Peterson, Milton Swensen and Nina Kingston. \u201cThe ghosts of the lusty old mining days lived again,\u201d wrote the Summit County Bee on September 12, \u201cand the beauty of our little town nestled in the Treasure Mountains was there for all to see.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Writing in The Salt Lake Tribune, critic George Dibble highlighted Zimbeaux\u2019s pen-and-ink drawing of \u201ca typical western cemetery,\u201d interpreting it as a statement about frontier cities: \u201cPark City is not dead\u201d was the title. Zimbeaux would make that claim again and again in his work\u2014scores 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.<\/h4>\n
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Park City works by Francis Zimbeaux<\/p><\/div>\n