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 admissionExperience the UMFA galleries through a thirty-minute tour with a docent. No pre-registration necessary.
FREE with general Museum admissionExperience the UMFA galleries through a thirty-minute tour with a docent. No pre-registration necessary.
Lunchtime Series: Exploring Sustainability
Thursday, January 16 | 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. Each presentation will be
led by U of U students, faculty, or UMFA staff; visit umfa.utah.edu for details.
salt 9: Jillian Mayer Artist Talk
Thursday, January 16 | 5:00 pm | FREE
salt 9: Jillan Mayer is
the ninth installment in the Museum’s series of exhibitions featuring
new and innovative art from around the world. Jillian Mayer
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. Please join us for a viewing of the
exhibition and a conversation with artist Jillian Mayer and the Museum's
curator of modern and contemporary art, Whitney Tassie.
Third Saturday Art Activity for Families: Hard Edge Paintings
Saturday, January 18 |1-4 pm | FREE
Minimalist painters of the twentieth century used various tools to make their Hard-edge paintings—including
household items like masking tape. Participants will view Hard-edge
paintings in the Museum and will then paint on canvas to make their own
Minimalist masterpiece.
Artist Talk: Tacita Dean
Friday, January 24 | 5:00 pm | FREE
Tacita Dean’s newest film, JG,
intersperses salt-encrusted landscapes, machines, and animals with a
host of abstract shapes and voids. The British artist will discuss the
film’s treatment of time and place, her collaboration with science
fiction writer J. G. Ballard, her strong connection to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, and the relevance of 35mm film as an artistic medium.
Spring Film Series: Creativity in Focus
Co-presented with the Utah Film Center
Wednesdays, January 29 | 7 pm | FREE
The
UMFA is excited to partner with the Utah Film Center to present a
series of films that address the lives and creative processes of various
artists, exposing the pressures, concerns, and influences that shape
their work. Visit umfa.utah.edu or utahfil
EXHIBITIONS
Under Pressure: Contemporary Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation
CLOSING 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
CLOSING 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.
salt 10: Jillian Mayer
OPENING January 24, 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.
Tacita Dean: JG
OPENING January 24, 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 the 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, the 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.
The Center for Land Use Interpretation: The Great Salt Lake Landscan
OPENING January 24, 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 the 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, The 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 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
Lawrence Weiner:
BENT TO A STRAIGHT AND NARROW AT A POINT OF PASSAGE
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.
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.
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