![\"\"](\"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/fine-arts-building.jpg\")
<\/a>University of Utah Fine Arts & Architecture Complex in the snow at sunset. Image by Hannah McBeth.<\/p><\/div>\n
I learned the feeling of modernism\u2014before I could define it\u2014by walking the Fine Arts & Architecture complex at the University of Utah. Designed around 1970 by Edwards & Daniels Associates, the complex rises in stacked planes and shadowed seams, a 140,000-square-foot maze of studios and galleries where every surface feels purposeful, guided by light, proportion, and clarity. I arrived there from West High on an academic scholarship, and those halls became my first real encounter with modernist form as something lived rather than studied.<\/p>\n
I spent long evenings studying in the building\u2019s corridors and studios, walking the terraces before finals, the building\u2019s hard edges throwing shadows that made the campus feel both monumental and strangely quiet. The complex behaved like a modernist sculpture in the American postwar sense\u2014an environment built on honest materials, structural clarity, and the idea that meaning could emerge without ornament.<\/h4>\n
That late-modernist language runs through the campus. The J. Willard Marriott Library\u2014completed in 1968 and spanning more than 600,000 square feet\u2014shares the same architectural convictions: clean geometry, open interiors, long sightlines, and reading rooms shaped by natural light. Together, these buildings formed the atmosphere of the university: a campus grounded in the belief that form and learning could reinforce one another.<\/h4>\nBeat Lines, Drafting Lines
\nFor me, that concrete also carried a family echo. My grandfather, Jeffry Cloward McBeth, came out of the same era of Utah modernism that produced these buildings, and as a Fine Arts student at the University of Utah studying to become an architect, his life was threaded so tightly through the campus that it is hard to tell where the architecture ends and the family stories begin.<\/h4>\nHe met my grandmother on the University of Utah hillsides in the late \u201950s\u2014she still remembers him pedaling up Elizabeth Street to pick her up for dates. The stories I grew up with are full of postwar optimism and newly poured concrete: new campuses, new programs, new forms of art and architecture stretching along the Wasatch Front. His older brother, my great-uncle James \u201cJim\u201d MacBeth (he changed his name to reflect a more Scottish or Irish spelling), pushed the impulse into sculpture; two of the three McBeth boys becoming professional artists.<\/h4>\nAfter my grandparents finished their art degrees, they did what many young artists of the time hoped to do: they left Utah for San Francisco. Both had been raised in strict, traditional households; moving to Haight-Ashbury in the early \u201960s felt like stepping sideways into a wider, more permissive world.<\/h4>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/wnp14.3113.jpg\")
<\/a>Historic view of San Francisco\u2019s Financial District.<\/p><\/div>\n
\nFrom 1962 to 1963\u2014those hinge years when the city was shifting from Beat quiet to full counterculture bloom\u2014they chased the post-graduate art life they\u2019d imagined from afar. Jeff worked as an architectural draftsman in the Financial District, drawing elevations and facades with the same instinctive love of straight lines and structural clarity that shaped him from childhood.<\/h4>\nEven in a city crowded with ornament, his precision never felt rigid. It read as a worldview, a belief that clarity, discipline and restraint could carry their own kind of beauty. They returned to Utah in 1964 with their first child, my mom Kristin, and brought back the openness and confidence they had gathered during that short San Francisco chapter.<\/h4>\nSculpture in the Civic Grain
\nThat impulse toward structure ran through the family in different ways. Jim followed a parallel artistic path north to Ogden, where he became a sculptor and later the Head of the Art Department at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah.<\/p>\n
His work entered Utah\u2019s public landscape at a moment when cities across the state were embracing modernism in their civic spaces\u2014treating sculpture and architecture as a shared visual language. MacBeth\u2019s best-documented works appear across Northern Utah, including “Utah Sandscape” (1996), an abstract desert-inspired installation created from tinted mortar on the pedestrian bridge at Salt Lake City\u2019s Gallivan Center, and “Connections” (1998), a 2,000-pound stainless-steel sculpture mounted above the main east entrance of Weber State\u2019s Shepherd Union Building.<\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Utah-Sandscape-B-James-McBeth-2048x1365-1-1200x800.jpg\")
<\/a>“Utah Sandscape” by James McBeth.<\/p><\/div>\n
About “Utah Sandscape,” Jim said: \u201cI would like (people) to get a feeling of a natural landscape\u2013something that doesn\u2019t happen in the city. It carries people into another environment while still in an urban area.\u201d<\/h4>\nAdditional works appear in Ogden City\u2019s public-art catalog, including installations at Lorin Farr Park. His materials were pragmatic\u2014mortar, steel, colored aggregates. He worked in the abstract modernist belief that form should clarify and enhance space, not decorate it.<\/h4>\nWhere Jeff practiced modernism through drafting tables and elevations, Jim carried it into public sculpture, creating objects that shaped how people moved, paused, and oriented themselves in the built environment.<\/h4>\nLearning to Name Abstraction
\nAs I learned as an undergraduate in Art History at the U, modernism means simplification with intent, structure without apology, and clarity that doesn\u2019t fear silence. The Utah Museum of Fine Arts, just down the hill, reinforced this education through the work of mid-century abstractionists like Ilya Bolotowsky and John D. McLaughlin, whose balanced geometries and disciplined reduction echoed the same values embedded in the buildings outside. Their paintings made abstraction feel less like an artistic choice and more like a way of thinking, shaped entire landscapes, from museum walls to the structural bones of campus.<\/h4>\n
\nFor me, that concrete also carried a family echo. My grandfather, Jeffry Cloward McBeth, came out of the same era of Utah modernism that produced these buildings, and as a Fine Arts student at the University of Utah studying to become an architect, his life was threaded so tightly through the campus that it is hard to tell where the architecture ends and the family stories begin.<\/h4>\n
He met my grandmother on the University of Utah hillsides in the late \u201950s\u2014she still remembers him pedaling up Elizabeth Street to pick her up for dates. The stories I grew up with are full of postwar optimism and newly poured concrete: new campuses, new programs, new forms of art and architecture stretching along the Wasatch Front. His older brother, my great-uncle James \u201cJim\u201d MacBeth (he changed his name to reflect a more Scottish or Irish spelling), pushed the impulse into sculpture; two of the three McBeth boys becoming professional artists.<\/h4>\nAfter my grandparents finished their art degrees, they did what many young artists of the time hoped to do: they left Utah for San Francisco. Both had been raised in strict, traditional households; moving to Haight-Ashbury in the early \u201960s felt like stepping sideways into a wider, more permissive world.<\/h4>\n<\/a>Historic view of San Francisco\u2019s Financial District.<\/p><\/div>\n
\nFrom 1962 to 1963\u2014those hinge years when the city was shifting from Beat quiet to full counterculture bloom\u2014they chased the post-graduate art life they\u2019d imagined from afar. Jeff worked as an architectural draftsman in the Financial District, drawing elevations and facades with the same instinctive love of straight lines and structural clarity that shaped him from childhood.<\/h4>\nEven in a city crowded with ornament, his precision never felt rigid. It read as a worldview, a belief that clarity, discipline and restraint could carry their own kind of beauty. They returned to Utah in 1964 with their first child, my mom Kristin, and brought back the openness and confidence they had gathered during that short San Francisco chapter.<\/h4>\nSculpture in the Civic Grain
\nThat impulse toward structure ran through the family in different ways. Jim followed a parallel artistic path north to Ogden, where he became a sculptor and later the Head of the Art Department at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah.<\/p>\n
His work entered Utah\u2019s public landscape at a moment when cities across the state were embracing modernism in their civic spaces\u2014treating sculpture and architecture as a shared visual language. MacBeth\u2019s best-documented works appear across Northern Utah, including “Utah Sandscape” (1996), an abstract desert-inspired installation created from tinted mortar on the pedestrian bridge at Salt Lake City\u2019s Gallivan Center, and “Connections” (1998), a 2,000-pound stainless-steel sculpture mounted above the main east entrance of Weber State\u2019s Shepherd Union Building.<\/h4>\n
<\/a>“Utah Sandscape” by James McBeth.<\/p><\/div>\n
About “Utah Sandscape,” Jim said: \u201cI would like (people) to get a feeling of a natural landscape\u2013something that doesn\u2019t happen in the city. It carries people into another environment while still in an urban area.\u201d<\/h4>\nAdditional works appear in Ogden City\u2019s public-art catalog, including installations at Lorin Farr Park. His materials were pragmatic\u2014mortar, steel, colored aggregates. He worked in the abstract modernist belief that form should clarify and enhance space, not decorate it.<\/h4>\nWhere Jeff practiced modernism through drafting tables and elevations, Jim carried it into public sculpture, creating objects that shaped how people moved, paused, and oriented themselves in the built environment.<\/h4>\nLearning to Name Abstraction
\nAs I learned as an undergraduate in Art History at the U, modernism means simplification with intent, structure without apology, and clarity that doesn\u2019t fear silence. The Utah Museum of Fine Arts, just down the hill, reinforced this education through the work of mid-century abstractionists like Ilya Bolotowsky and John D. McLaughlin, whose balanced geometries and disciplined reduction echoed the same values embedded in the buildings outside. Their paintings made abstraction feel less like an artistic choice and more like a way of thinking, shaped entire landscapes, from museum walls to the structural bones of campus.<\/h4>\n
<\/a>Historic view of San Francisco\u2019s Financial District.<\/p><\/div>\n
\nFrom 1962 to 1963\u2014those hinge years when the city was shifting from Beat quiet to full counterculture bloom\u2014they chased the post-graduate art life they\u2019d imagined from afar. Jeff worked as an architectural draftsman in the Financial District, drawing elevations and facades with the same instinctive love of straight lines and structural clarity that shaped him from childhood.<\/h4>\nEven in a city crowded with ornament, his precision never felt rigid. It read as a worldview, a belief that clarity, discipline and restraint could carry their own kind of beauty. They returned to Utah in 1964 with their first child, my mom Kristin, and brought back the openness and confidence they had gathered during that short San Francisco chapter.<\/h4>\nSculpture in the Civic Grain
\nThat impulse toward structure ran through the family in different ways. Jim followed a parallel artistic path north to Ogden, where he became a sculptor and later the Head of the Art Department at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah.<\/p>\n
Sculpture in the Civic Grain
\nThat impulse toward structure ran through the family in different ways. Jim followed a parallel artistic path north to Ogden, where he became a sculptor and later the Head of the Art Department at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah.<\/p>\n
His work entered Utah\u2019s public landscape at a moment when cities across the state were embracing modernism in their civic spaces\u2014treating sculpture and architecture as a shared visual language. MacBeth\u2019s best-documented works appear across Northern Utah, including “Utah Sandscape” (1996), an abstract desert-inspired installation created from tinted mortar on the pedestrian bridge at Salt Lake City\u2019s Gallivan Center, and “Connections” (1998), a 2,000-pound stainless-steel sculpture mounted above the main east entrance of Weber State\u2019s Shepherd Union Building.<\/h4>\n
<\/a>“Utah Sandscape” by James McBeth.<\/p><\/div>\n
About “Utah Sandscape,” Jim said: \u201cI would like (people) to get a feeling of a natural landscape\u2013something that doesn\u2019t happen in the city. It carries people into another environment while still in an urban area.\u201d<\/h4>\nAdditional works appear in Ogden City\u2019s public-art catalog, including installations at Lorin Farr Park. His materials were pragmatic\u2014mortar, steel, colored aggregates. He worked in the abstract modernist belief that form should clarify and enhance space, not decorate it.<\/h4>\nWhere Jeff practiced modernism through drafting tables and elevations, Jim carried it into public sculpture, creating objects that shaped how people moved, paused, and oriented themselves in the built environment.<\/h4>\nLearning to Name Abstraction
\nAs I learned as an undergraduate in Art History at the U, modernism means simplification with intent, structure without apology, and clarity that doesn\u2019t fear silence. The Utah Museum of Fine Arts, just down the hill, reinforced this education through the work of mid-century abstractionists like Ilya Bolotowsky and John D. McLaughlin, whose balanced geometries and disciplined reduction echoed the same values embedded in the buildings outside. Their paintings made abstraction feel less like an artistic choice and more like a way of thinking, shaped entire landscapes, from museum walls to the structural bones of campus.<\/h4>\n
Where Jeff practiced modernism through drafting tables and elevations, Jim carried it into public sculpture, creating objects that shaped how people moved, paused, and oriented themselves in the built environment.<\/h4>\nLearning to Name Abstraction
\nAs I learned as an undergraduate in Art History at the U, modernism means simplification with intent, structure without apology, and clarity that doesn\u2019t fear silence. The Utah Museum of Fine Arts, just down the hill, reinforced this education through the work of mid-century abstractionists like Ilya Bolotowsky and John D. McLaughlin, whose balanced geometries and disciplined reduction echoed the same values embedded in the buildings outside. Their paintings made abstraction feel less like an artistic choice and more like a way of thinking, shaped entire landscapes, from museum walls to the structural bones of campus.<\/h4>\n
\nAs I learned as an undergraduate in Art History at the U, modernism means simplification with intent, structure without apology, and clarity that doesn\u2019t fear silence. The Utah Museum of Fine Arts, just down the hill, reinforced this education through the work of mid-century abstractionists like Ilya Bolotowsky and John D. McLaughlin, whose balanced geometries and disciplined reduction echoed the same values embedded in the buildings outside. Their paintings made abstraction feel less like an artistic choice and more like a way of thinking, shaped entire landscapes, from museum walls to the structural bones of campus.<\/h4>\n