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Utah Museum of Fine Arts August 2013 Exhibitions and Events

SPECIAL EVENTS

Highlights of the Collection Tour
6:30 p.m. on the first Wednesday of the month and 1:30 p.m. on all Saturdays and Sundays |
FREE with general Museum admission
Experience the UMFA galleries through a thirty-minute tour with a docent. No pre-registration necessary.

Third Saturday Art Activity for Families: Jigsaw Puzzles

Saturday, August 17 | 1–4 pm | FREE

Make your own fine-art jigsaw puzzle. Learn how conservators have saved some of the treasures at the UMFA, including a 2,300-year-old Roman vase that was a puzzle to put back together. Then create your own artwork to break up and reconstruct. Third Saturday is funded in part by Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts and Parks Program (ZAP).

EXHIBITIONS

Bierstadt to Warhol: American Indians in the West

CLOSING August 11, 2013

Bierstadt to Warhol: American Indians in the West is an ambitious exhibition comprising more than 100 works drawn primarily from the Diane and Sam Stewart Collection. It examines depictions of American Indian identity (by both Natives and non-Natives) in a diverse array of styles: from the traditional European schools to Modernist abstraction and conceptual renderings of cultural motifs. Subject matter focuses on the Pueblo people of Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico but other important and impactful portraits of American Indians are also included. Artworks range in tone from the romantic and ideal to the utterly real, sometimes taking on sensitive subject matter that is often inherent to contemporary American Indian identity. This exhibition negotiates the devices and implications of portraiture as a historical genre, to show that a portrait can either fashion a mythologized persona or an authentic personal dynamic that speaks to lived experience.

Drawing Lab

CLOSING August 25, 2013

This hands-on, interactive exhibition, in which visitors create the artwork themselves, is inspired by the idea that mark-making is a fundamental human impulse and that there is no wrong way to do it. UMFA educators developed five drawing stations to encourage visitors’ creativity: participants can contribute to a chalkboard drawing Museum staff have begun, do free drawing directly on a coffee table, draw from objects in the Museum’s permanent collection, create drawings with tape and paper, or contribute to a “metamorphosis” scroll drawing that will take shape over the course of the exhibition and incorporate the creativity of all participating artists. Visitors can also draw inspiration from I See the Fish, Finally, a collaborative, experimental wall drawing created by eight students from the University of Utah art department, who created the work during a three-day drawing “marathon” before the exhibition opened.

Lawrence Weiner:
BENT TO A STRAIGHT AND NARROW AT A POINT OF PASSAGE

On view through mid-2014

A fascinating work of language sculpture by groundbreaking contemporary artist Lawrence Weiner is now on view in the UMFA G.W. Anderson Family Great Hall. Purchased by the Museum in 2011 with funds from the Phyllis Cannon Wattis Endowment for 20th Century Art, BENT TO A STRAIGHT AND NARROW AT A POINT OF PASSAGE (1976) is an important addition to the UMFA’s permanent collection of contemporary art and represents a canonical moment in art history.

http://umfa.utah.edu/lawrenceweiner

salt 8: Shigeyuki Kihara

OPENING August 2, 2013

salt 8 will feature the work of Shigeyuki Kihara, a prominent artist based in New Zealand. Born in 1975 in Samoa to a Buddhist Japanese father and a Christian Samoan mother, Kihara investigates the complexities of cultural identity, colonialism, representation, gender roles, and spirituality through performance, photography, and video. In the UMFA’s salt gallery, Kihara will present large-scale looping projections of her 2012 videos Galu Afi and Siva in Motion. Inspired by the traditional Samoan dance Taualuga, both videos are lamentations for the loss caused by the 2009 tsunami as well as poetic meditations on Samoa’s colonial past and future climate change. Adjacent to the salt gallery, Kihara will stage a photographic intervention with our Pacific Island collection.

Martha Wilson: Staging the Self

OPENING August 30, 2013

Martha Wilson’s career, spanning forty years, encapsulates the contestations inherent in feminist and socially engaged practices. In her work and throughout her life, Wilson has explored how identity and positioning are not just self-defined or projected, but also negotiated. The complex nature of her work encompasses her activities as an artist, creating conceptually-based performances, videos, and photo-text compositions since the early 1970s; her position as the founder and director of the non-profit space Franklin Furnace; and her collaboration with other women to form the group, DISBAND among many other things. Wilson’s attitude to collaboration and openness to constantly redefining both personal and collective identities make her a central figure with which to collaborate on producing this exhibition that explores current approaches toward feminism, activism, and collaborative practice.

Martha Wilson: Staging the Self is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. Guest curator for the exhibition is Peter Dykhuis. The exhibition, tour, and catalogue are made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Cowles Charitable Trust, the ICI Board of Trustees, and ICI Benefactors Barbara and John Robinson.

**Exhibition dates are subject to change.

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Utah Museum of Fine Arts
University of Utah
Marcia & John Price Museum Building
410 Campus Center Drive
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112
(801) 581-7332

Museum Hours
Tuesday–Friday: 10:00 am–5:00 p.m.
Wednesday: 10:00 am–8:00 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday: 11:00 am–5:00 p.m.
Closed Mondays and holidays
Visit our website: umfa.utah.edu

General Admission
UMFA Members FREE
Adults $7
Youth (ages 6-18) $5
Seniors & Students $5
Children under 6 FREE
U students, staff & faculty FREE
Active duty military personnel FREE
Thanks to the Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts, and Parks fund, the UMFA opens its doors for FREE on the first Wednesday and third Saturday of the month.