{"id":106303,"date":"2026-10-07T07:44:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T14:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=106303"},"modified":"2026-10-10T08:23:21","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T15:23:21","slug":"the-making-of-the-legacy-of-anna-campbell-bliss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/the-making-of-the-legacy-of-anna-campbell-bliss\/","title":{"rendered":"The Making Of The Legacy of Anna Campbell Bliss"},"content":{"rendered":"

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If you\u2019re new to Utah\u2019s art world, right now the work of Anna Campbell Bliss may feel like one of those odd vocabulary words you\u2019ve only just learned and suddenly hear everywhere. Her geometric compositions, built from color and repetition and carrying a glowing, mesmeric power, have been appearing in exhibitions all over the state: at the Southern Utah Museum of Art, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and Salt Lake Community College, to name a few. That\u2019s largely the work of the Bliss Foundation for the Arts, the organization that since her death in 2015 has spent much of the past decade preserving and documenting Bliss\u2019s work and, increasingly, finding new homes for it. The foundation is working against a clock: the trust that governs her studio and its contents expires in about two years. This week, as part of Salt Lake City Design Week, the foundation has opened the artist\u2019s longtime studio in the Marmalade district to reveal a stunning exhibition pairing Bliss\u2019s prints with the silkscreens used to make them.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve been around Utah\u2019s art world for a bit, however, Anna Campbell Bliss will hardly be new to you. She and her husband, architect Robert Bliss, arrived in Utah in the 1960s steeped in a postwar Modernism that treated art, architecture and design as interconnected disciplines. Robert was hired to lead the University of Utah\u2019s Department of Architecture and would spend the next 27 years at the university, eventually serving as dean of its Graduate School of Architecture. Anna had studied art history and mathematics at Wellesley and architecture at Harvard, and went on to study color and design with some of the central figures in 20th-century visual theory, including Gy\u00f6rgy Kepes and Josef Albers. In Utah, she developed a practice that moved among printmaking, painting, architecture, public art and emerging computer technologies.<\/p>\n

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Color in her work became structural\u2014something that could be organized, measured, repeated and altered to change how a viewer perceived a form or space. For the University of Utah\u2019s LeRoy Cowles Mathematics Building, for example, her \u201cNumbers and Measure\u201d installation used 18 plates to explore the connections between mathematics, art and culture. She also pursued those same questions more intimately in prints and other works. By the end of her career, she occupied a distinctive position in Utah art: simultaneously artist, designer, color theorist and architectural thinker. In 2015, shortly before her death, Bliss was selected by her peers as one of Utah\u2019s 15 most influential artists in Utah\u2019s 15, a project of this magazine\u2019s publisher, Artists of Utah.<\/p>\n

Her death that year, followed by Robert\u2019s in 2018, left behind the studio Anna had worked in for decades, their home and its furnishings, objects collected over a lifetime, Robert\u2019s furniture and a substantial body of Anna\u2019s artwork. There were also 10 beneficiaries\u2014five individuals and five institutions\u2014and a trust intended to extend Anna\u2019s artistic legacy.<\/p>\n

The trust document offers little direction. Trent Smith, one of the trustees and a Salt Lake City architect, says there is essentially one line governing the studio: put Anna\u2019s work on display in the hope of creating an interest in her art. \u201cThat\u2019s our guidance.\u201d The Blisses appear to have imagined something resembling a museum. \u201cWhat was in her will was this idea of the museum, and then we charge admission,\u201d Smith says. \u201cWell, that model doesn\u2019t really work. Anna is not famous enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trustees have had to invent much of the model themselves, moving between the interests of the nonprofit foundation and the estate. The same people oversee both, Smith explains, which can make their role difficult to define. \u201cWe\u2019re always with the sort of thing of like, are we a foundation or is this the estate?\u201d The foundation may be primarily interested in exhibiting the works and keeping the studio as a museum of community art space. The estate may be interested in selling the work and distributing the proceeds.<\/p>\n

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Smith estimates that approximately 2,000 works by Bliss remain in the hands of the estate and the care of the foundation. Over the past two years, the trustees have donated about 330 works to 18 institutions. Salt Lake Community College recently exhibited some 40 works together, effectively creating a small monographic presentation of Bliss\u2019s career. Discussions continue with other institutions, including the Utah Division of Arts & Museums, and Smith hopes the growing institutional interest could eventually lead to a substantial exhibition.<\/p>\n

Getting several hundred works into public collections, however, is not as simple as calling a museum and asking whether it wants an Anna Campbell Bliss. First the trustees had to document the work. Then they assembled presentations for institutions showing what was available. Museums made selections. Their boards had to approve gifts. The Bliss board had to approve them. Works had to be picked up, transported and, in some cases, sent to framers. That helps explain why the foundation has been relatively quiet publicly. \u201cThe last two years, part of the reason we haven\u2019t done a lot of public-facing stuff is we\u2019ve been working to donate 10 percent of the work we have here,\u201d Smith says.<\/p>\n

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