{"id":102786,"date":"2026-04-29T19:24:38","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T02:24:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=102786"},"modified":"2026-04-29T19:24:38","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T02:24:38","slug":"after-fifty-years-at-guthrie-randall-lake-opens-the-studio-door-one-last-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/after-fifty-years-at-guthrie-randall-lake-opens-the-studio-door-one-last-time\/","title":{"rendered":"After Fifty Years at Guthrie, Randall Lake Opens the Studio Door One Last Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Fifty is a big anniversary. Whether a golden anniversary for a couple, or a company marking half a century of endurance and adaptation. Any arts organization that reaches fifty years has something to crow about\u2014a record of having weathered changing tastes, uncertain economies, and the thousand quiet challenges that wear at any creative enterprise. What, then, do we make of an artist and his studio? That relationship can be every bit as intimate as a marriage, as productive as any business, as defining as any institution. A studio becomes both witness and collaborator, absorbing paint along with struggle, habit, and reinvention. For fifty years, Randall Lake has haunted the top floor of Guthrie Studios in downtown Salt Lake City. Before he gives it up for good, he is opening the doors one last time.<\/h4>\n

An American abroad in Paris studying art, Lake encountered two LDS missionaries, converted to the faith, married a Utah woman, and soon found himself in Salt Lake City studying under Alvin Gittins at the University of Utah. It was an era when a generation of ambitious young artists were beginning to shape what contemporary art in Utah might become, and Lake found his place among them. That place became Guthrie.<\/h4>\n

Built in 1890, the J.A. Fritsch Building is a three-story structure in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It began as home to the Fritsch Investment Company and early residential boarding, then passed through the hands of a dry cleaner, a Swedish grocery, and other tenants before Guthrie Bicycle moved in during the 1930s and stayed for eighty years\u2014long enough to give the building the name it still carries. Artists began taking up residence in the 1970s, and they have remained, outlasting even the bicycle shop, through ownership changes and the arrival of Fice Boutique on the ground floor. The building has always attracted people with somewhere to be.<\/h4>\n

By 1981, the Guthrie’s studio community was vital enough that the Salt Lake Art Center organized a studio tour of the upper floors, drawing visitors through the spaces of painters and makers for the price of lunch and a five-dollar ticket. The names on that tour roster read now like a roll call of what Utah art was about to become: Maureen O’Hara Ure, John Erickson, Bonnie Sucec, Meredith Gregg, Steve Dawson\u2014artists who would go on to shape the state’s visual culture for decades. Lake was already among them, and none of them knew yet quite how much ground they would cover.<\/h4>\n

Over time, Lake expanded into four interconnected rooms that became as much salon as studio, carrying something of a 19th-century sensibility. The rooms grew layered with canvases, shelves crowded with books and objects, traces of decades visible in every corner. It became a habitat as much as a workspace.<\/h4>\n

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