ART on view
74
AFRICAN, MESOAMERICAN,
By Luke Kelly and Virginia-Lee Webb
John Price Museum Building. The Price Building
was designed by Machado and Silvetti of Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and overseen locally by
Prescott Muir Architects of Salt Lake City.
Years of environmental wear on the building
required it to close temporarily in January 2016,
and all art in the galleries had to be de-installed.
Gretchen Dietrich, the executive director, saw
this as an opportunity to rethink every aspect of
the museum’s galleries and programs. The entire
staff participated in this extensive project with
Dietrich and her director of education, Jorge
Rojas, director of collections and exhibitions,
David Carroll, and senior curator for modern
and contemporary art, Whitney Tassie, all overseeing
the project teams.
Extensive work was completed during the
nineteen-month closure, including the replacement
of the building’s vapor barrier to improve
and maintain appropriate humidity levels in the
galleries, replacement of windows, HVAC upgrades,
and a new roof parapet. The museum
reopened to the public on August 26, 2017.
In addition to the reinstallation of the art galleries,
educational spaces were also refurbished.
The ACME Lab’s existing space in Emma Eccles
Jones Education Center was redesigned to focus
on community engagement and artistic experimentation.
(ACME stands for Art. Community.
Museum. Education.) Conversation areas were
developed in several locations, focusing on land
art, modern and contemporary arts, and the arts
of Africa and the Pacifi c. New interactive kiosks
were installed for the arts of Africa, the ancient
Mediterranean, Asian, and modern and contemporary
galleries, as well as a printmaking video in
the European gallery by Curator Leslie Anderson,
and supported in part by the Kress Foundation.
Located on the Salt Lake City campus
of the University of Utah is the Utah Museum of
Fine Arts. The museum is the only institution in
the state that collects, exhibits, interprets, and
cares for an extensive collection of original artworks
representing a diverse range of global cultures
from the ancient to the contemporary.1 The
collections are presented on the campus in the
Marcia and John Price Museum Building (fi g. 1).
The museum began in 1914 when a small art
gallery opened in the university’s Park Building
on Presidents Circle. The gallery was renovated
in the late 1940s to accommodate a substantial
gift of art from Winifred Kimball Hudnut,
daughter of a prominent Utah pioneer family.
The new gallery was incorporated as the Utah
Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) and reopened in
1951. In 1970, the UMFA moved into the university’s
new Arts and Architecture Center and
in 2001 into the 74,000-square-foot Marcia and
AND PACIFIC ARTS
at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City
FIG. 1 (above):
The Marcia and John Price
Museum Building of the
Utah Museum of Fine Arts.
Photo courtesy of UMFA.