UMFA Textile Preservation Project
Now on View!
The UMFA’s Collections staff has produced a mini-exhibition showcasing the department’s re-cataloguing project of the Museum’s rolled textile collection. Beginning September 17, the Highlights Wall, located in the UMFA lobby, will feature two textiles from the collection along with an informational video about the project and the Museum’s important preventative preservation work. Almost 300 textiles are being unrolled from their storage mounts and photographed, catalogued, cleaned, and re-housed using new archival quality materials. Collections Manager Jennifer Ortiz is leading the project, which utilizes the help of docents and volunteers as well as other Collections staff. Highlights from this collection include the Judge Willis W. Ritter collection of Navajo saddle blankets as well as selections from the non-Western textile collection.
Martha Wilson: Staging the Self
On view through November 10, 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.
Under Pressure: Contemporary Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation
On view through January 5, 2014
This exhibition presents selections from the largest collection of contemporary prints in the United States. Spanning the past five decades, it features works by thirty-nine artists from Jasper Johns and Sol LeWitt to Damien Hirst, Kiki Smith, and Kara Walker. Under Pressure charts an array of artistic and social concerns, from minimalism to pop and conceptual art, and more recent works addressing race, gender, and identity.
salt 8: Shigeyuki Kihara
On view through January 5, 2014
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.
http://umfa.utah.edu/salt
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
Exploring Sustainability
On view through July 28, 2014
Exploring Sustainability is an exhibition of new projects that explore how principles of ecological sustainability and affiliated design strategies are applied to creative thinking and to the design process. During Sustainable Design Practice, the University of Utah studio art course in which this work was created, students gained an overview of the environmental impacts of design and production practices as well as the processes and methods associated with more sustainable approaches. The projects created over the course of the spring 2013 semester are inspired examples of how students integrated sustainable design into their own creative process. The exhibition is intended to stimulate further dialogue among the university and local communities about issues related to sustainability.
**Exhibition dates are subject to change.
Visit our website: umfa.utah.edu
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