{"id":92979,"date":"2025-05-11T12:23:55","date_gmt":"2025-05-11T19:23:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=92979"},"modified":"2025-05-20T09:54:41","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T16:54:41","slug":"after-a-long-hiatus-springville-embraces-the-mural-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/after-a-long-hiatus-springville-embraces-the-mural-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"After a Long Hiatus, Springville Embraces the Mural Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Chuck Berrett\u2019s mural on the side of Charisma Dance Studio, 245 South State Street, Springville, marks the return of mural-making in \u201cArt City.\u201d Image by Shawn Rossiter.<\/p><\/div>\n

You know what town has sponsored surprisingly few murals, especially considering it calls itself \u201cArt City?\u201d That\u2019s right, Springville.<\/h4>\n

Maybe it\u2019s the mural gods holding a grudge\u2014like how rock giants U2 didn\u2019t perform in Salt Lake City for two decades because they got booed off the stage there early in their career (or so the urban legend goes). When the Springville Museum of Art was built in the middle of the Great Depression with help from the federal government,\u00a0 the regional manager of the WPA, Donald Bear, arranged for a mural to be painted on its side by Salt Lake City artist Gordon Cope. Locals revolted, whether because of the content of the mural, now unknown, or the artist, who urban legend has it was too friendly with the ladies\u2014the struggle of whether to separate the art from the artist being older than the present moment)\u2014and painted over it. To this day, the entire building is covered in generic beige and no one at the museum is sure where the original mural was painted. So, maybe the mural gods were upset with the local philistines and boycotted the place. For several decades. The sculpture gods, on the other hand, love the place\u2014that being the fickle nature of the gods\u2014as you can see in our In Plain Site feature from 2012.<\/a><\/h4>\n

Springville’s long mural hiatus ended a little over a year ago when Charisma Dance Studio commissioned Chuck Berrett to paint the entire length of their south-facing wall in the center of town. If you\u2019ve been watching Utah\u2019s mural scene, you may know Berrett\u2019s work from murals in Murray, SLC, South Salt Lake and elsewhere. He’s known for painting vibrant, stylized flowers, and you\u2019ll find plenty of lavish blooms in this mural, in shades of lavender, violet, and soft teal, mingling with a series of dancers caught mid-motion, their arms outstretched. The size of the mural makes up for lost time: you could probably fit all of the town\u2019s bronze sculptures in front of it.<\/h4>\n

\"Wide<\/p>\n

Springville museum director Emily Larsen says it\u2019s just the first of many upcoming murals for \u201cart city.\u201d They’ll be part of a new public art initiative to create walkable “art loops,” connecting key landmarks throughout “downtown,” with a total of 53 planned installations, including murals, sculptures and performance spaces.<\/h4>\n

Springville has done remarkably well maintaining its old-school charm even as the ever-expanding urban core of the Wasatch Front has encroached on its periphery. Charming 19th-century homes, with porch swings and old trees, still surround its main drag. But across the tracks, closer to the highway, where new developments are cropping up in empty fields, Springville looks more like Daybreak than Spring City. Meadowbrook Elementary serves the young families finding homes in this area and it sits across from a lovely new park, where, in April Springville Public Art unveiled \u201cStippled Space.\u201d It’s aluminum, rather than bronze, and abstract rather than figurative\u2014that is, decidedly not like most of the public sculpture in town. A new style for a new part of Springville. It was created by Shelley and Rob Beishline, aka Tooza Design<\/a>, a creative duo you may be familiar with from their work at Draper’s Kimball Lane TRAX station or Salt Lake City’s Fire Station 14, and was inspired by the experience of driving up Hobble Creek Canyon in the fall.<\/h4>\n

In the same breath the abundantly busy and productive Larsen mentioned the new mural program and new public art sculpture, she let drop a tease about a possible retrofit\/remodel\/expansion of the museum. She\u2019s been meeting with architects this week for a feasibility study.\u00a0 Maybe they’ll uncover the Gordon Cope mural.<\/h4>\n
\"Public

Looking through Stippled Space’s sequential arches that guide pedestrians along a new sidewalk in Springville at 700 South 950 West. Image by Shawn Rossiter.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Curved

\u201cStippled Space,\u201d a new public sculpture by Shelley and Rob Beishline (Tooza Design), brings dynamic color and movement to a residential sidewalk in Springville. Image by Shawn Rossiter.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You know what town has sponsored surprisingly few murals, especially considering it calls itself \u201cArt City?\u201d That\u2019s right, Springville. Maybe it\u2019s the mural gods holding a grudge\u2014like how rock giants U2 didn\u2019t perform in Salt Lake City for two decades because they got booed off the stage there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92980,"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":[45,14],"tags":[3067,4371],"class_list":["post-92979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in_plain_site","category-visual_arts","tag-emily-larsen","tag-springville"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/IMG_0005-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-01 04:57:53","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\/92979","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92979"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92990,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92979\/revisions\/92990"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}