{"id":38126,"date":"2017-07-31T20:11:33","date_gmt":"2017-08-01T02:11:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=38126"},"modified":"2025-11-10T21:53:19","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T04:53:19","slug":"stephen-goldsmith-the-ontolotor-of-bonneville-basin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/stephen-goldsmith-the-ontolotor-of-bonneville-basin\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Goldsmith: The Ontolotor of Bonneville Basin"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Stephen Goldsmith in Salt Lake City, 2014. Photo by Zoe Rodriguez.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cWhat\u2014exactly\u2014are you?\u201d I ask Stephen Goldsmith as we walk through City Creek Park, past an elegant little flume that Goldsmith created when he was involved in the redesign of the park back in the \u201890s.<\/p>\n

Making sense of Stephen Goldsmith\u2019s resume could be a daunting task for someone trying to pin down who he is or what he does exactly. His career doesn\u2019t fall into any of the categories that any other artist\u2019s might. Even the word \u201cartist\u201d feels small in the context of the work he has done. \u201cI like to create,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd the tools and materials change, but the creative process stays the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the years, Goldsmith has asked himself how he would describe what he does. His answer is a word he had to assemble from scratch to describe his work\u2014\u201contoloture.\u201d Combining \u201contology\u201d with the suffix for action or process \u2014 \u201c-ure\u201d \u2014 it\u2019s the creative discipline, he explains, \u201crelated to one\u2019s sense of existence and being.\u201d What does the career of the ontolotor look like? Kind of like water. Powerful, transformative, and always in motion.<\/p>\n

Salt Lake is dotted with Goldsmith\u2019s sculptures, large-scale environmental works and water features, including installations at City Creek, Liberty Park, Salt Lake Community College, and Gallivan Plaza. While he wasn\u2019t formally schooled as an architect or city planner, he\u2019s had an important role in shaping Salt Lake City. He\u2019s perhaps best known around town as the founder of Artspace, which started back in 1980 with the Pierpont Project, long the city\u2019s nexus for galleries and nonprofit organizations, as well as live\/work spaces for artists. He served as director of Artspace for 20 years, developing out The Rubber Company, The Bridge Projects, and City Center while at the helm.<\/p>\n

After Artspace, Goldsmith served under Mayor Rocky Anderson as Planning Director for Salt Lake City, where he worked to foster an ethical, green, pedestrian urban ecology. He\u2019s now an Associate Professor with the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Utah and serves as the Director of the Center for the Living City.<\/p>\n

Words like \u201carchitect,\u201d \u201cdeveloper,\u201d and \u201cartist\u201d end up being problematic. \u201cAll of these labels really get in the way of the creative imagination,\u201d Goldsmith says. He says that it\u2019s easy when you get caught up in the labels to not venture outside of them. A sculptor might feel reluctant to venture into neighborhood transformation, for example.<\/p>\n

Sculpture was where Goldsmith started. He began making art when he was a kid. Furniture mostly, at first, and then sculpture. \u201cOne of the first pieces of big sculpture that I ever made\u2014which my mother and father still own,\u201d Goldsmith says, \u201cwas the earth. It was a hammered copper globe that took me weeks and weeks and weeks to form.\u201d He was 16, made it by hand, and though of course he didn\u2019t think of it that way at the time, it was almost like a model for the projects he would be engaged in further on in his career. \u201cHere I am, you know, 44 years later,\u201d Goldsmith says, \u201cworking on the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldsmith grew up in Utah, and after spending a bit of time with him, it feels like the only place he could have possibly grown up. This is a person deeply rooted in Utah culture and ecology. If you ask him to meet for an interview in his natural habitat, you might think you\u2019re speaking metaphorically, expecting to meet in his office, or studio, but instead you find yourself walking up City Creek Canyon chatting over the sound of the water rushing by.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis ecotone between the built and natural environment has so much a role in my being here today,\u201d Goldsmith says. \u201cBecause I never expected to be back here after high school again. I had such bitterness about my life here, growing up here. Not that I didn\u2019t have great times as well, but I\u2019d had enough of Zion.\u201d<\/p>\n

He describes himself as a fourth-generation outsider. His family came to Utah at the turn of the 20th<\/sup> Century from Ukraine to escape the Czar. \u201cI come from a family of poultry farmers in Nephi, Utah, who gradually migrated north, and then had a very prominent role in businesses and cultural and social roles on Main Street. So, I\u2019m from here. I\u2019m definitely from here.\u201d But as for staying here, that wasn\u2019t the original plan. He came home briefly, after graduating from college, for his sister\u2019s high school graduation. He intended for it to be just a weekend visit. But while he was here, he went on some hikes and realized that the landscape of the Bonneville Basin was home. \u201cI\u2019d taken some walks up City Creek,\u201d he says, \u201cand I realized I had sagebrush in my blood. I\u2019m here because I have sagebrush in my blood. I have such a love of the geography.\u201d<\/p>\n

And once he committed to Salt Lake, his work kept widening to embrace more and more of Utah. His career is interwoven with the aesthetics of the natural, cultural, political, and ecological landscape of Salt Lake City. Perhaps because of his love of the place, there\u2019s also a kind of fierce kindness to Stephen Goldsmith. Maybe fierce isn\u2019t the right word, maybe it would be more accurate to say something like steadfast commitment, unyielding devotion to his ideals, or an almost spiritual calling to protect the landscape and shape it in a way that\u2019s natural and organic for the land and all of its inhabitants.<\/p>\n

When he tells stories of working on projects, you get a sense of how commitment and generosity dovetail in his work. Take the City Creek project as an example again. Prior to the project, City Creek, which connects with the Jordan River, flowed underground after Memory Grove. \u201cBack at the turn of the 19th Century, [the city planners] decided to channelize it, to put it in pipes underneath the ground. Partly because it was being polluted, partly because they thought it was a health hazard,\u201d Goldsmith explains. There had been a movement to daylight the creek since the 1960s. Thirty-five years later, in 1994-95, Goldsmith was chosen to be involved in the redesign of City Creek Park\u2014which would bring up a half-mile of creek connecting Memory Grove and the upper wilderness of City Creek Canyon with the Salt Lake business district through a new urban park.<\/p>\n

That elegant flume we walk next to was the result of Goldsmith working to accommodate the neighbors\u2019 concerns. Strangely, many of the residents of the historic neighborhood where City Creek Park now exists were resistant to the project at first. They didn\u2019t want the stretch of water between Ottinger Hall and Memory Grove to go in. They were nervous about having running water flowing through the neighborhood, they thought it would be noisy, they worried that a creek would bring loiterers into their front yards, and they resisted the change, and, perhaps most importantly, resisted having the project imposed on them by the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause of our deep belief in community-based and participatory processes,\u201d Goldsmith says, \u201cwe got the neighbors involved in the design process as quickly as we could.\u201d For the planning meetings, he says, \u201cI would put together models of the ideas with blank clay, and I would say, \u2018This is sort of what we\u2019re thinking, how do you feel about this, how do you feel about that?\u2019\u201d And in that way, by involving the residents, they not only got the neighbors on board, they experienced a synergy in their design process. \u201cIf we really learn how to listen, and we let empathy be the guide for the kind of design interventions that we make, we can come up with some pretty good things,\u201d Goldsmith says. The neighbors loved the solution of the flume, and for visitors to the park, it\u2019s an unexpected treat.<\/p>\n

After Ottinger Hall, the creek disappears under the road and then surfaces again on the other side, where it flows through a pebble-studded concrete channel. It\u2019s a marvel that a city would want to bury their creeks underground. \u201cWe have done this to so many of our creeks,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I\u2019ve been working with students now, for many, many years on what I refer to as the Seven Canyons Trust. It\u2019s a hundred-year project to daylight all of the creeks from here in the Salt Lake Valley down to the Jordan River and create these beautiful riparian zones that would be pedestrian zones, bicycle zones, maybe have a trolley as well. But they would run in all seven of the canyons\u2014not up the canyon, necessarily, but from the Jordan River to those spots so you have these beautiful ribbons of green. With birds and the water.\u201d They would be places that celebrate the history and ecology of the place. Goldsmith\u2019s fountain at Liberty Park, the Seven Canyons Fountain<\/em>, comes to mind\u2014 it\u2019s a small model of this vision, where kids can splash in the water flowing from the miniature canyons of the Wasatch Front.<\/p>\n

Recently, Goldsmith\u2019s work has been not so much the building of physical structures, but in working with the next generation of planners and city builders. He says teaching has been his main creative practice lately; and that it has been some of the richest work he has engaged in. And, of course, he\u2019s helping to re-shape the structures in the institution. \u201cOne of the things that we just accomplished with some of my supportive colleagues at the university was changing the urban planning undergraduate degree to \u2018Urban Ecology.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

We walk next to the creek that he brought above ground, chatting over the sound of the water rushing by, stepping over tiles in the path that read \u201cpika,\u201d or \u201cgoshawk,\u201d or \u201cyellow bellied sapsucker.\u201d Goldsmith put them there. \u201cThere are a hundred and forty-six different species that exist in this nature preserve area,\u201d he says, \u201cso we just brought many of them up so that kids could do rubbings, so that they could discover that they share this space with many other creatures.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, cities are for people-\u2014they\u2019re not about the buildings, it\u2019s about the people,\u201d Goldsmith says. \u201cAnd about the birds,\u201d he adds quickly, \u201cAnd about the other life forms that they contain. If we can create places that celebrate life and are conducive to life, we\u2019re probably going to make much better decisions as a species. When we\u2019re repressed, and when we\u2019re in places that are not conducive to life, it seems we do all kinds of negative things. We can damage them, we litter, we don\u2019t take care of our home \u2013 our home can be the place where we literally live, but this is my home.\u201d His gesture takes in City Creek Canyon, the valley beyond, the planet.<\/p>\n

Nowadays \u2013 it occurs to me \u2013 Stephen Goldsmith\u2019s artwork is primarily culture \u2013 helping culture to flow in a way that is natural and aesthetically pleasing. Not unlike the work he\u2019s done with water. The structures he builds for culture to flow through are less tangible, but the impact is profound. For a person who has done so much to shape the city, you can find very few actual marks that bear the artist\u2019s signature. Instead, there is an openness, a generous environment to move into, to feel natural in, spaces that celebrate their inhabitants rather than their creator.<\/p>\n

In the heart of Salt Lake City, the path and the creek wind through a grassy park filled with giant sycamores and stands of birches. Toward State Street the creek opens up, becomes pond-like, with little islands. Benches and grassy hills surround the water. Lovers lay on the lawn gazing at the sky, the trees. Across the path a big covey of quail bobble and peck under a blue spruce. Beyond that, the creek slips under another bridge, emerges briefly on the other side, and then disappears into the city.<\/p>\n

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This article originally appeared in the Artists of Utah publication Utah\u2019s 15: The State\u2019s Most Influential Artists<\/em>, published in 2014.<\/p>\n

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Stephen Goldsmith in Salt Lake City, 2014. Photo by Zoe Rodriguez. \u201cWhat\u2014exactly\u2014are you?\u201d I ask Stephen Goldsmith as we walk through City Creek Park, past an elegant little flume that Goldsmith created when he was involved in the redesign of the park back in the \u201890s. Making sense […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1526,"featured_media":38127,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artist_profiles","category-visual_arts"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-26 08:32:59","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/2014-01-31-Stephen-Goldsmith-for-Utahs-15-1710-1988-final-edit-AdobeRGB-1200x799.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38126","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\/1526"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38126"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98441,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38126\/revisions\/98441"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}