{"id":104166,"date":"2026-06-30T11:22:26","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T18:22:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=104166"},"modified":"2026-07-01T11:37:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T18:37:08","slug":"isaac-kings-formalist-eye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/isaac-kings-formalist-eye\/","title":{"rendered":"Isaac King’s Formalist Eye"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Image by Tanya Bennett.<\/p><\/div>\n

“It is so strange that simply placing two objects next to each other helps you to see each of them better. Sometimes it is what they have in common that is most striking, but I have always been drawn to the contrasts because they remind me of my own limited view of the world and its history. When you take stock of these differences, you get a peek at alternative possibilities and perspectives.”<\/p>\n

Comparison is at the center of how Isaac King thinks\u2014as a teacher, and as Curator of American Art at the BYU Museum of Art, a post he’s held for three years. That instinct shows up most visibly in his work alongside Miri Kim, BYU MOA’s other Curator of American Art, on the re-envisioned American Art gallery Crossing the Divide<\/em>, where the comparison approach let the curators sidestep the collection’s chronological gaps in favor of more surprising juxtapositions between works.<\/p>\n

King’s path to the museum ran through physics before it ran through art history. Starting his undergraduate work at Northern Arizona University, he began in physics and astronomy. “I always had a dual interest in art and science and numbers. Prior to NAU, I had an Associate’s degree from Coconino Community College in studio art. But I really struggled with the difference between what I thought an artist was, the mythos of it all, and the more modernist conventions of artistic training. There weren’t a lot of fundamentals being taught in the places I found. It was more focused on modernist sensibilities like composition and I really wanted to learn the craft more than the concept. So, I switched to pursuing science. But I always enjoyed my art history classes and I found a rigor there that I thought was missing in the studio art classes that I was going to. And more room for abstract thinking.”<\/p>\n

After a master’s in art history at the University of Arizona, he began his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh, writing a dissertation “about early American portraiture; the reception, history, and debate surrounding the authenticity of Washington portraits, which whenever you say that sounds more boring than my interest, which was how, in the 19th century, people were really changing how they were thinking about likeness and what made something authentic or not authentic.”<\/p>\n

He still teaches art history as an adjunct at BYU alongside his curatorial post, and the same instinct for comparison shapes how he builds exhibitions. “As a curator, it is difficult to set the stage for this kind of a reading of an artwork. No one wants to come to the museum and get beat over the head with a lecture, so the tools have to be more subtle. I want my exhibitions to open a conversation, first-and-foremost, through the works themselves. Unlike the classroom where every object ever produced is available to you digitally, the museum is privileged to traffic in originals. There is a certain power to working from a tangible and limited body of works. For example, our museum does not really have a canonical collection, so most of our objects have the advantage of being lesser known. This makes them a bit more agile and able to take on many different meanings more easily. A good show should have some unexpected surprises that force museumgoers to slow down and reconsider the relationships between the rest of the works. Other interventions are made through didactics in the gallery, but rather than attempting to present my own hard-won conclusion to visitors, I really want to leave a bit of a puzzle for them to work out.”<\/p>\n

His science background still shapes how he reads a painting. “As an art historian, I would categorize myself as a formalist. I tend to be most interested in how visual art communicates as a kind of visual technology. Because of this, I pay a lot of attention to the mechanics of the tools, media, and techniques that are used to create the work. But I am also a cultural historian, and I want to understand the formal elements of a work within the larger pool of ideas that it is swimming in. It is like there is this invisible envelope of ideas and potentialities that surround a work of art. Art is a bit of a riddle in that way. On one hand, it is often written in a dialect that may be foreign to you, but with a little effort, it can yield a wonderfully direct view into a different way of seeing and understanding the world.”<\/p>\n

With Crossing the Divide<\/em> set for another few years, King’s current focus has been on Homeward to the Prairie I Come: Gordon Parks Photographs from the Beach Museum of Art<\/em>, which opens July 2. The exhibition’s travel was made possible through Art Bridges Foundation, a traveling exhibition program founded in 2017 by Alice Walton, whose mission after founding the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in 2011 was to share American art across the United States.<\/p>\n

“I want exhibitions to be digestible at different scales for different audiences: as visual encapsulation of a large body of research, as a more piecemeal treatment of related artwork, and ideally, even down to the size of a single sentence. I want the museum to be a playground of history. Not everyone wants to play with the same equipment, or to use it the same way, and I am happy with that. At the same time, I want to bring the most interesting objects, themes, and interpretation into the museum for all of us to play with.”<\/p>\n

\n

Homeward to the Prairie I Come: Gordon Parks Photographs from the Beach Museum of Art, <\/em>BYU Museum of Art<\/a>, Provo, July 2 – Nov. 21.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“It is so strange that simply placing two objects next to each other helps you to see each of them better. Sometimes it is what they have in common that is most striking, but I have always been drawn to the contrasts because they remind me of my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1736,"featured_media":104168,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art_professional_spotlight","category-visual_arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Tanya-Bennett-5-scaled.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-09 12:32:05","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1736"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104166"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104170,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104166\/revisions\/104170"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}