NEWS: Utah Museum of Fine Arts March 2013 Exhibition 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 admissionExperience the UMFA galleries through a thirty-minute tour with a docent. No pre-registration necessary.

Palette to Palate: Art and Wine

Tuesday, March 6 | 7-9 pm | UMFA Member discount available

Art Historian Laura Hurtado will guide participants through a tour of six examples of art from different regions of the world, including new UMFA acquisitions and works on temporary display. Then certified sommelier Michael Roussin will guide a parallel exploration of the influences and flavors of six wines. Light refreshments will accompany the wine tasting. This is sure to be an eye- and palate- opening experience! Register through University of Utah Lifelong Learning at continue.utah.edu or by calling 801.587.5433.

Third Saturday for Families: Portraits

March 16 | 1-4 pm | FREE

The Museum is filled with all kinds of people and characters this spring. Be inspired by the amazing portraits in our galleries and create a portrait of yourself or someone you love.

Evening for Educators: Portraits

Wednesday, March 20 | 5:30 pm

The UMFA’s galleries are bursting with portraits! During this free workshop for teachers and others with interest, participants will discover self-portraits, portrait paintings, and portrait photography currently on display in the Museum and in the UMFA’s collection. Participants will then discuss and explore how identity, status, and notions of self in relation to society are expressed through portraiture.

Spring Film Series Co-presented by the Utah Film Center

Wednesday, March 27 | 7 pm | FREE

As a complement to Bierstadt to Warhol: American Indians in the West, the UMFA is once again partnering with the Utah Film Center to present five short films created by Native filmmakers whose work represents an evolution of the American Indian storytelling tradition. Visit www.umfa.utah.edu or www.utahfilmcenter.org for more information.

Native Shorts (a program of short films)

Gesture Down

Shimasani
OK Breathe Auralee
They Grow Together

Napi

ONGOING EXHIBITIONS
salt 7: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Opening February 21, 2013

salt 7: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is the seventh installment in the Museum's series of exhibitions featuring new and innovative art from around the world. For her first solo exhibition in the western United States, British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye will show never-before exhibited oil paintings. Employing a palette and brushwork not unlike that of traditional western portraiture, Yiadom-Boakye's luscious, gestural paintings consider the role of the black figure, as both subject and author, in the art historical canon. Her ambiguous portraits, composed from various sources and imagination, are purposely void of social, economic, and spatial clues. However, her fictitious subjects often engage the viewer with a direct glance or a furtive grin, projecting agency and inviting viewer interpretation.

Dale Nichols: Transcending RegionalismOn view through March 18, 2013

Dale Nichols is well known as the fourth major Regionalist artist, alongside Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and John Stueart Curry. Their work, created in the Midwest during the Great Depression, defined a period in American art when artists turned toward the land and known narratives in hope of creating uniquely American themes and styles of art. The UMFA is delighted to offer Dale Nichols: Transcending Regionalism, an exhibition spanning much of his long career. Nichols' early paintings focused on the often-difficult relationship between Midwest farmers and their land. His stylized landscapes and red barns, representing both shelter and sustenance, held images of hope for a struggling nation and honored the agrarian ideal. By the 1940s Nichols indulged his wanderlust, traveling repeatedly to Alaska and spending extended periods of time in Guatemala and Mexico. Paintings from this period are represented in this exhibition as well.

5 Blocks
On view through April 21, 2013

5 Blocks is an exhibition of youth artwork created in collaboration with UMFA educators by students at Hawthorne Elementary (Salt Lake City School District) and Granger High School (Granite School District). By investigating a five block area near their school, students demystified how we shape the spaces we live in and how those spaces shape us. Through a variety of media, this exhibition shares with viewers what students discovered when they left the classroom and got a chance to engage with the city. During the planning of this exhibition UMFA educators consulted with Damon Rich, a nationally recognized designer and artist who currently serves as the Urban Designer for the City of Newark, New Jersey.

Mike Disfarmer: Cleburne County Portraits

On view through July 14, 2013

The Coen Brothers, Ralph Lauren and guitarist Bill Frisell are just a few artists who have found inspiration in the photographs of Mike Disfarmer. A small town photographer from Heber Springs, Arkansas, Disfarmer used glass plate negatives to create snapshot size photographs as keepsakes for the local community. The stark minimalism of his studio backdrops, especially those used during the 1930s and through the war years, effectively isolate his subjects and in doing so create intimate, deeply human portraits of them. The dignity of hard work and the vagaries of rural life can be read in the faces and demeanor of the many people who sat for his ‘penny portraits'.

Bierstadt to Warhol: American Indians in the West

On View through August 11, 2013

 Bierstadt to Warhol: American Indians in the West is an ambitious exhibition comprising more than 100 oil paintings, sculpture, and works on paper 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.

**Exhibition dates are subject to change.