Utah Division of Arts & Museums’ new exhibit celebrates its 125-year history
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- Artwork is displayed in the “Impressions of Early Utah” room at the Utah Division of Arts & Museums’ 125th-anniversary exhibition on Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024, in Orem.
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- A portrait of Alice Merrill Horne is on display at the Utah Division of Arts & Museums’ 125th-anniversary exhibition on Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024, in Orem.
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- “Black Rock,” painted by James Taylor Harwood, is displayed at the Utah Division of Arts & Museums’ 125th-anniversary exhibition on Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024, in Orem.
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- A painting is on display in the “Impressions of Early Utah” room at the Utah Division of Arts & Museums’ 125th-anniversary exhibition on Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024, in Orem.
In 1889, Utah Rep. Alice Merrill Horne sponsored a bill to create Utah’s Division of Arts & Museums, the first state-sanctioned art agency in the nation.
Beginning this month, the state division is celebrating its 125 years of history with an anniversary art exhibit at the UVU Museum of Art.
The exhibit had its grand opening Dec. 10 and goes until March 15, 2025. It is free to the public and includes over 100 pieces of art from a variety of Utah art collections.
“Utah has a really unique resource in its Division of Arts and Museums, and the creation of it 125 years ago was really visionary as the first state-sanctioned arts agency,” the department’s Visual Arts Coordinator Peter Hay said. “And we’re really excited to share that history of 125 years with the division and what has come over those 125 years.”
Hay admitted that encapsulating the department’s 125 years of history into a single exhibit is ambitious, but he feels they caught a “small snapshot” of what they had to offer.
Over 80 pieces are from the State of Utah Alice Merrill Horne Art Collection, which has over 2,000 art works. Most notably included from the collection is “Black Rock,” which is one of the department’s first collected pieces in 1889. The piece is typically at the governor’s mansion.
In a front room at the museum is a section titled “Impressions of Early Utah” that displays art from the state’s first handful of decades, from geographic paintings to portrayals of daily life.
“There’s a little over a dozen pieces in there that are some of the most emblematic artists from Utah’s early history,” Hay said. “Folks like Florence Ware and Maynard Dixon, some of these really iconic Utah artists that helped shape the state’s artistic scene early on.”
Upstairs at the museum, each room has a unique flare on how it highlights the history of Utah and the department.
There is a contemporary exhibit that shows a variety of recent artwork ranging from conceptual photography to video artwork and traditional paintings.
“I really wanted to show sort of the breadth of material exploration and concept exploration and the plethora of ways of making art that exist across Utah, and then also represent a lot of different regions from Utah, different groups of people that are here, different perspectives,” Hay said.
A room is dedicated to the public art collection, which was created after the state Legislature passed a law in 1985 that mandates 1% of construction costs (capped at $200,000) on state buildings have to go toward creating or maintaining on-site art.
Art from several other collections owned by the Utah Division of Arts & Museums also are displayed across the museum, including a folk art collection, a traveling exhibit and a programs collection.
For an organization that typically works with outside agencies or institutions, Hay said it was a fun project to look inward and show off the division’s own art pieces.
“I hope folks can come and get some idea of what the division does and be proud that this is something Utah has as a collective governmental agency that really supports arts and culture and museums in the state,” he said.
