December 2013 Events and Exhibitions @ Utah Museum of Fine Arts (SLC)

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.

Day With(out) Art

Sunday, December 1 | 11 am–5:00 pm | FREE

Day Without Art began on December 1st 1989, the second anniversary of World AIDS Day, as the national day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis. To make the public aware that AIDS can touch everyone, and inspire positive action, an estimated 8,000 national and international museums, galleries, art centers, AIDS Service Organizations, libraries, high schools and colleges take part in Day Without Art. The UMFA will participate in the annual observance of Day Without Art and World AIDS Day by covering up a work in the permanent collection entitled Fermator (1997) by Carl Andre.

Holiday Market

Saturday, December 7 | 11am –5 pm | FREE

Holiday decorations, hand-crafted jewelry, ceramics, textiles, note cards, artisan chocolates, and more—from SLC’s finest local artisans. Free admission. Complimentary gift wrapping. 10% UMFA member discount.

Third Saturday: Word Art

Saturday, December 21 | 1–4 pm | FREE

The UMFA's iconic sculpture, BENT TO A STRAIGHT AND NARROW AT A POINT OF PASSAGE, by Lawrence Weiner is displayed in the Great Hall. Gain inspiration from this amazing work of five-foot-tall letters to create your own word art on canvas.

EXHIBITIONS

The Savage Poem Around Me: Alfred Lambourne's Great Salt Lake

OPENING December 13, 2013

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 fourteen-month 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"—the Great Salt Lake

UMFA Textile Preservation Project

CLOSING December 13, 2013

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.

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.