SPECIAL EVENTS
Highlights of the Collection Tour
First Wednesday of every month | 6:30 pm | FREE
Saturdays and Sundays | 1:30 pm | FREE
FREE with general Museum admission
Experience the UMFA galleries through a thirty-minute tour with a docent. No pre-registration necessary.
Chamber Music Series: Forward 4 Clarinet Quartet
Wednesday, March 5 | 7 pm | FREE
Experience the harmonious convergence of music and art as clarinet performance students from the University of Utah play a variety of selections in the galleries of the UMFA.
Conversation on Creativity with Doug Fabrizio and Jeffrey Hein
Friday, March 14 | 6 pm | FREE
Join UMFA, KUER, Williams Fine Art, and F. Weixler Co. for a live portrait demonstration and interview with Utah artist Jeffrey Hein and KUER’s Doug Fabrizio. Free and open to the public. Limited seating.
Third Saturday for Families: Bird’s-Eye View Maps
Saturday, March 15 | 1-4 pm | FREE
During this family activity, participants will gain inspiration from aerial views of Great Salt Lake and other landscapes on exhibition at the Museum in order to create a bird’s-eye view map of their own neighborhood using artist’s and cartographer’s tools like rulers, compasses, protractors, stamps, and stencils.
Evening for Educators: Inspired by the Great Salt Lake
Wednesday, March 19 | 6–8:30 pm | FREE
The UMFA’s Evening for Educators program is designed to help teachers integrate the visual arts across their curriculum. During this event, educators are invited to gain inspiration from Great Salt Lake as we explore the science, ecology, and art of this iconic landmark. This event includes a keynote lecture and hands-on workshops by local educators. Teaching packets—including art and interdisciplinary lesson plans, along with reproductions of the artworks and biographies of the artists featured—will be provided.
Lunchtime Series: Exploring Sustainability
Thursday, March 20 | 12:30-1 pm | FREE
Join us for a lunchtime break every third Thursday this spring term with conversations and presentations that engage the ideas present in our current exhibition Exploring Sustainability. U of U students, faculty, or UMFA staff will lead each presentation. Visit umfa.utah.edu/lectures for details.
Gallery Talk: Kelly Kivland, Assistant Curator, Dia Art Foundation
Spiral Jetty film screening
Thursday, March 20 | 5 pm | FREE
Kelly Kivland will speak on the work of Robert Smithson, one of the most important American artists of the last century and creator of Spiral Jetty. Kivland’s talk will focus on the new installation at UMFA of Smithson’s Leaning Mirror (1969), a seminal sculpture that exemplifies what Smithson defined as a “Nonsite,” or an indoor artwork that utilizes natural materials taken directly from an outdoor site. Kelly Kivland received her Master’s Degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2011 and joined Dia Art Foundation in June of the same year.
Spring Film Series: Creativity in Focus
Co-presented with the Utah Film Center
Everybody Street | Wednesday, March 26 | 7 pm | FREE
The UMFA, in partnership with the Utah Film Center, presents a series of films that address the lives and creative processes of various artists, exposing the pressures, concerns, and influences that shape their work. Everybody Street focuses on the lives and works of New York City street photographers and pays tribute to these icons in a cinematic exploration of the city that inspires them. Directed by Cheryl Dunn, 83 min., USA, 2013, not rated. Visit umfa.utah.edu or utahfilmcenter.org for more information. CUAC is a community partner for this event.
Artist Talk: Kate Gilmore
Thursday, March 27 | 5 pm | FREE
In November 2013 the UMFA’s Friends of Contemporary Art (FoCA) voted to acquire Kate Gilmore’s video Rock, Hard, Place (2012) for the Museum’s permanent collection. Now FoCA is bringing the performance and video artist to give a public artist talk in the Katherine W. and Ezekiel R. Dumke Jr. Auditorium. Gilmore will discuss how her work investigates female identity, artistic labor, and resistance as a way of challenging heroic myths and gendered stereotypes. Come early to see her video work on view in the second-floor Phyllis Cannon Wattis Gallery for Twentieth Century Art.
City Library: Finger Puppets with the UMFA
Saturday, March 29 | 10–11 am | Registration required
The University of Utah and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts have been collecting and exhibiting portraits for 100 years. In this workshop, participants will use portraits of fantastic people and their costumes as ideas for stories to create with puppets. Participants will learn how to create a story using five characters and make those characters as finger puppets on a glove. These puppets will help the paintings “walk and talk” and tell their stories. This class is held at the City Library in conjunction with their annual Puppetry Festival. Registration is required. Call the City Library at 801.524.8200 for information.
EXHIBITIONS
umfa.utah.edu/exhibitions_current
Tacita Dean: JG
On view through May 4, 2014
JG, the new film project by internationally recognized artist Tacita Dean, takes its point of departure from the physical and thematic interplay between a work of science fiction and a work of Land art: the short story “The Voices of Time” (1960) by writer J. G. Ballard and Spiral Jetty (1970) by artist Robert Smithson.
In a series of conversations with Ballard prior to his death in 2009, Dean was encouraged to treat Spiral Jetty as a mystery that might be solved through a filmic investigation into the nature of history and material. Employing her patented technique of “aperture gate masking,” in which she uses stencil-like masks to alternately cover up and re-expose her film, Dean transfers images from one place to another, generating visual and conceptual juxtapositions within the space of the individual 35mm frame.
Shot in Utah’s desert, Great Salt Lake, and even the Hogle Zoo, the film intersperses a variety of salt-encrusted landscapes, machines, and animals with a host of abstract shapes and voids. The viewer experiences time and place in ways that parallel the effects of Ballard’s fiction and Smithson’s artwork.
JG reaches across decades and disciplines, tracing the connection between three distinct artists and their interrelated work.
Center for Land Use Interpretation: Great Salt Lake Landscan
On view through May 4, 2014
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts commissioned the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a Wendover/Los Angeles-based research organization concerned with how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived, to produce a “landscan” of Great Salt Lake. Filmed from helicopters, CLUI landscans are dynamic, crystal clear, gyro-stabilized high-definition videos that function as portraits of places. They represent major elements of continental land use, depicting man-affected landscapes so large the only way to visually capture them is with one long, continuous, aerial shot. Accompanied by subtle ambient sound, Great Salt Lake Landscan flies over brilliantly colored salt concentration ponds and a landscape often described as otherworldly.
The Savage Poem Around Me: Alfred Lambourne’s Great Salt Lake
On view through June 15, 2014
Alfred Lambourne walked the Mormon Trail in 1866, at age sixteen, to Salt Lake City, sketching during much of the route. By the 1880s he had become a well-known local artist who painted and traveled with Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt on their many visits to Salt Lake City. Of the varied landscapes he painted, nothing held his imagination so thoroughly as the Great Salt Lake. Captivated by it, he painted many views of Black Rock, the infinite and varied moods of the weather, and the shipwrecks and the drama of the lake. In 1887 he realized his dream of perfect solitude by homesteading Gunnison Island.
In his book Our Inland Sea: The Story of a Homestead he described the first day of his self-exile: “Ghostly, wrapped in its shroud of snow, my island stands white above the blackness of unfreezing waters. What have I done? Although I had lived these days by anticipation, no sooner had the sails of the departing yacht vanished below the watery horizon . . . than I realized at once, and with a strange sinking of the heart . . . the savage poem around me.” This exhibition will explore the art—roughly twenty-five paintings—the many sketches, and the poetry and writing of this unique and beloved pioneer artist and his obsession with the landscape of our “inland sea”—Great Salt Lake.
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.
salt 9: Jillian Mayer
On view through August 17, 2014
“What’s the point of living offline anymore?” Jillian Mayer asks in her catchy sing-a-long MegaMega Upload. The artist debuted this hip-hop song on her YouTube channel in January 2013 before it premiered as part of her short film #PostModem at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. Since then, the video has received 21,000 views and has inspired more than 160 viewer comments. In 2011 Mayer uploaded her song and video I Am Your Grandma, and it’s since received 2,445,525 views, 20,895 likes, 1,601 dislikes, and 7,970 viewer comments-not to mention the countless spoofs it’s inspired, including choreographed dances and remakes by five-year-olds, an Internet troll, college students, a fake plastic kitty, Darth Vader, Wes Borland, and a Cabbage Patch Kid.
But, what does it mean to upload your soul to the Internet or to leave a timeless video message for your unborn grandchild? Cloaked with humor, fast editing, and pop soundtracks, Mayer’s videos are designed for mass appeal but ask big questions about human connection and manufactured realities. Her work lives in, and is activated by, viewer participation. She investigates the (im)possibility of authenticity and the multiplicity of authorship by co-opting the visual language and tools of Google, online chat boards, and viral videos. Indebted to the cultural constructions of the 1980s sitcom but looking ahead to the infinite implications of the Internet, Mayer uses photography, video, drawing, installation, and performance to tease out the pathways and pitfalls of postmodern identity formation while considering our increasing integration with the web and questioning the distinction between reality and the virtual world.
Jillian Mayer (American, b. 1984, lives Miami) received her BFA from Florida International University in 2007. In 2010 her video Scenic Jogging was one of twenty-five selections for the Guggenheim’s YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video and was exhibited at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany. Recent solo projects include Love Trips at World Class Boxing, Miami (2011) and Precipice/PostModem at Locust Projects, Miami (2013). In 2012 and 2013 Mayer’s short films were selected to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2013 Mayer was in residency in Berne, Switzerland, as a Zentrum Paul Klee Fellow and in New York City as an NEA Southern Constellation Fellow.
umfa.utah.edu/salt
**Exhibition dates are subject to change.
####
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
Adult | $9
Senior (ages 65+) | $7
Youth (ages 6-18) | $7
Children under 6 | FREE
Out of State College Students | $7
Utah College Students with a valid ID | FREE
University of Utah students, staff and faculty with a valid ID | FREE
Military Families | FREE
For group rates (10 or more) please call 801.581.3580, 24 hours in advance.