Twisted and overlapping tendrils cascade through Laura Sharp Wilson’s paintings like a jungle of vegetation and bright plastics. Overall, the painted forms resemble plants, however Wilson revels in intentional ambiguity, where the content of her paintings balances between being identifiable objects, abstracted botanics, and non-representational forms. These knotted nets of plants reside in decidedly flattened three-dimensional space—akin to synthetic cubist works from the early twentieth century—as if sandwiching each of these vignettes between glass slides before viewing under a microscope.

The title of the exhibition, Chiasma, is a term used in biology to describe a phenomenon that takes place during meiosis and mitosis wherein homologous chromosomes (genetic information from two parents) cross over and information is exchanged to produce genetic variation. This comes from chi, the Greek letter “X,” where two marks cross at the middle. This concept of intersection and hybridity is at the heart of this body of Wilson’s work. Styles, textures, patterns, palettes, and subjects collide within the walls of her mounted mulberry paper in a delightful chaos. Each painting is a patchwork of Wilson’s visual lexicon.

The paintings really shine when Wilson leans into this variety. The unpredictability from work to work and the level of detail keeps them visually interesting. I’m Not Shooting Blanks (2021) features a bright orange warp and waft of overlapping lines in the background to resemble a latticed grid of fabric. This layer of order stands in contrast to that in its neighbor, Middle Aged Hot Rod (2021), where ribbons of bubble-gum pink entangle earthy ochres and greens skinned in patterns derived from nature, textiles, and tiles. Washes of translucent mauve paint drape over the cluster as a reminder that these are paintings that do not have to follow representational rules.

Nine of the twelve works in the exhibition feature these botanical tangles, while the remaining three revolve around another element that frequents Wilson’s works—ceramic vessels. Black and blue vases float in vacuous and spare fields of color with just a few plant sprigs jutting and drooping into frame. These paintings are the least congested of the group, and in some ways, less compelling. Within the context of the exhibition’s framework, the unhinged morass of forms in the other paintings are exciting and better fit the idea of a chiasma. These subdued works, although interesting in their own right, feel out of place.

The two largest panels, Smoke Rings (2009) and Ring of Fire (2009), depict tall blue vases floating in metallic silver and gold backgrounds, respectively. These works flank a shelf on which sits a fractured teacup nestled in a bowl atop a saucer. The crockery is translucent white with ultramarine blue floral patterns often seen in Chinese and Dutch ceramics. The patterns on the cup and saucer are similar but not identical to what is seen in the paintings. The physical dishes served as inspiration for Wilson, and their presence seem to function as support artifacts in a museum rather than organic to the exhibition. Because of the scale of the paintings, the singularity of the ceramic pieces, and the location at the middle of the featured wall, these pieces are the centerpiece of the exhibition, but are its least engaging elements.

Since this work alludes to the sharing of genetic material, it is fitting to address aesthetic heritage. This body of work bears similarities to Amy Casey’s painted networks of roads, power lines, and forests; Susan Te Kahurangi King’s obsessive cacophony of patterns and characters; Jackson Pollock’s lacy webs of paint strands; Matthew Ritchie’s oversized representational microscopy; and Julie Mehretu’s whirlwinds of marks whipping across canvases and walls. Wilson’s chromosomal amalgam of conscious and unconscious inspirations leads her to her own territory that is compelling and striking.

Chiasma was curated by Scotti Hill, a Utah-based art critic, curator, and lawyer. Granary Arts’ modest upper gallery space calls for more focused bodies of work that allow for deeper contemplation of an artist’s work. In a larger venue that would allow for multiple bodies of art, displaying Laura Sharp Wilson’ multi-faceted output, this exhibition could easily grow into a mesmerizing immersion, and I hope to see such an undertaking. The show currently offers a tantalizing taste of Wilson’s abilities and ideas, and is worth a jaunt to Ephraim to experience.

Laura Sharp Wilson: Chiasma, Granary Arts, Ephraim, through Sep. 23, 2022.

The hope of pristine and picturesque wilderness, adventure, fresh air, and memories forged with friends and family is the siren song of the outdoor tourism industry. Utah, in particular, is a destination for many seeking this type of experience. It is home to five national parks that comprise over 1,300 square miles of geological and historical wonder: Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Zion National Park. High chroma photographs that accentuate the fiery red-rock formations against ethereal blue skies are the bait to entice would-be adventurers to traverse the desert landscape and stand in silent and meditative awe of Mother Nature.

When visiting a national park, there are a number of factors that unexpectedly frame the experience. Travelers have to negotiate vacation time, reserve campsites, buy equipment, plan their road-trip playlists, pack their vehicles, drive for hours on end, haggle over bathroom stops, find palatable roadside dining, circle parking lots, work with shuttle schedules, set up camp at often congested sites, deal with pit toilets, and hike in unfavorable weather. When the perfect picture is to be captured for posterity, a vantage that excludes all the other posing tourists, upraised camera phones, and distracting detritus can be nearly unattainable. It is akin to pilgrims traveling to Paris to view the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, only to find that the desired intimate and quiet communion with the artwork is impossible as they are jostled by the swarming and camera-happy crowd in front off the diminutive artwork sitting distantly behind barriers and bullet-proof glass.

Images of national parks found on postcards, social media, and park websites consumed prior to a vacation shape visitors’ expectations as they look forward. Then the photos and videos taken by tourists cement and mold their memories as they look back. The roads, trails, and signage direct movement and attention to the primary attractions and photo ops. The pristine wilderness exists only as a myth to the sightseer since their experience is highly guided, mediated, and manicured. Often, direct rapport with the earth is not even desired. Campers bring with them all the amenities they can in their cars, trucks, SUVs, and RVs—creating a portable, bougie, suburban home with a national park as their front lawn in search of an idyllic #vanlife.

Our national parks were initially envisioned as part preserve and part playground, and these two interests are continually colliding. Access to protected land results in the scarification of the earth with roads and trails, restrooms, and visitor centers. It is this type of interference and mediated experience that irked noted author and one-time resident of Arches, Edward Abbey, who wrote, “Arches National Monument has become a travesty called Arches National Park—a static diorama seen through glass.”¹

Artists Katie Hargrave and Meredith Lynn were fascinated by Utah’s national parks, not solely for the landscape, but for the thing that Abbey despised: the cloud of surrounding tourist culture—from the postcard promises of leisure and adventure to the nitty gritty of camping. Outfitted as proper vacationers with a rented van and a teardrop camper, the artists set out to visit all five national parks in Utah in the early spring of 2020, counter to Abbey’s insistence that it was “better to idle through one park in two weeks than try to race through a dozen in the same amount of time.”²

As John Steinbeck noted in his American travelogue, plans, schedules, and intentions are for naught as trips cannot be completely controlled. Hargrave and Lynn’s trip was cut short as fears surrounding COVID-19 began spreading across the nation in March and organizations began to shut down, including national parks. Fortunately, the abbreviated itinerary allowed them to fly home the day before a 5.7-magnitude earthquake manifested just southwest of the Salt Lake City Airport, forcing it to shut down on the day of their original departure. This same earthquake damaged property in downtown Salt Lake City including the historic Rio Grande Depot that houses a gallery space where the artists were scheduled to exhibit the fruits of their collaborative trek through Utah’s national parks. Their exhibition was postponed indefinitely while repairs took place and COVID restrictions were enacted. Their original plans were dashed to “wreckage on the personality of the trip.”³

The artists were able to pivot and still exhibit their work at The New Gallery at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, November to December, 2020. References to the work in this essay are based on their exhibition at The New Gallery titled Over Look / Under Foot.

The project started in Arches National Park. In advance of their trip, they scoured the internet for Creative-Commons-licensed images previous sightseers had taken of popular vistas of Arches National Park, including other people in their shots. The artists pasted these photographs of red rocks and blue sky together and had them printed onto fabric that would be fashioned into their campsite tent. When erected at the campground in Arches, the tent became a strange form of camouflage that both hid the structure within the similar landscape and caught the attention of other campers because of its unique appearance. In the gallery, video of people photographing themselves and each other in the park were rear-projected onto the tent’s doorway.

In 1971, when Arches was designated a national park, the number of annual visitors was 202,100. In 2019 (pre-pandemic), 1,659,702 individuals came through the park.⁴ On peak days, the park can see over 3,000 vehicles pass through its gates.⁵ This dramatic increase of car and foot traffic means more roads, parking, pollution, trash, and the creation of the single developed campground in the park featuring restrooms with flush toilets. It was at this campground that the artists pitched their tent highlighting the increasing human presence in the park.

Moving on to the next nearest park, Canyonlands, Hargrave and Lynn covered the windows of their camper leaving only one small hole as an aperture, effectively turning the interior into a camera obscura to capture all seven scenic overlooks as they drove through Canyonlands National Park. The resulting photographs were exhibited as they were captured, with the landscape upside down, having been inverted by the aperture. Because the photographs were taken from the vantage of the camper, without the aid of zoom lenses, the images don’t quite resemble the typical tourist pics that seek desperately to mimic professional promotional images. Instead, the camera obscura photos contain the picturesque views as well as roadside gravel, concrete parking bumpers, and road signage. They are more honest images that do not crop out the manmade facets that frame the sightseer experience.

Photography and video are such integral parts of tourism. Pics or it didn’t happen. Whereas static photography is ideal for capturing single vantage points, video is for journeys. Using the same camera obscura setup, the duo shot a video of the sixteen-mile round trip drive along the paved roadway through Waterpocket Fold in Capitol Reef National Park as the passing scenery cascaded across the camper’s interior cabinetry. The external was brought internal, as if the camper were an eye on wheels, continually watching.

At Bryce Canyon National Park, the artists turned their lens on the visitor center. They shot video around the center and gathered found footage of old national park promotional videos and vacation films from the 1950s and ’60s. Ultimately these videos and films manifested in a work at The New Gallery. Their found footage and video of the visitor center were placed inside graphic arrows found in and pulled from driving manual diagrams to assist drivers with maneuvering a vehicle with an attached camper trailer. This video was rear-projected inside another custom tent similar to their Arches tent. The nylon shell remained dark except for the slivers of the footage shimmering through the arrow’s outlines scattered across the tent’s taut fabric, like constellations guiding travelers in the night.

The last stop was at Zion National Park, the busiest of all the Utah parks, receiving 4,488,268 travelers in 2019.⁶ This concentration of traffic has led to unique solutions at Zion, including a new seasonal shuttle service. The road in and out of the park is often highly congested and the visitor center has a line of people awaiting information, brochures, and maps. However, as the artists arrived, they noted that the visitor center was closed. This was a symptom of COVID-19 as it began shutting down the nation in mid-March. Hargrave and Lynn were able to hike around the park, but not execute their original plan. Prior to the trip, they amassed vintage postcards of Zion, hoping to compare the old imagery with new ones in the visitor center gift shop. Instead, the artists sprinkled the roads depicted in their postcards with the tiny glass beads employed in reflective paint used to stripe roadways—drawing attention to this alteration of the landscape that literally paved the way for millions of visitors.

Arriving in Zion—named in reference to a holy utopia—as the world began to crumble under a plague and earthquake, was an appropriately apocalyptic way for Hargrave and Lynn to end their trek. This land which was formed by seismic upheaval, now draws throngs to spend their leisure time hiking, camping, biking, and most importantly, photographing. On top of the strata of indigenous, colonial, and Mormon histories, is a new crust of millions of digital, geotagged images and videos. This latest geohistorical layer was the mine from which the artists drew the raw materials for their project. And it is back to this layer that their project returns, as images, videos, and texts such as this.

In the spring of 1928, the artist John Heartfield stood outside a Berlin factory, asking to examine the hands of exiting workers. When he saw a quintessentially calloused and rough hand, he took the laborer to a nearby site to photograph the hand before returning to the factory to resume his search. Heartfield was part of the agitprop division of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands)—an anti-fascist party—where he had recently accepted an assignment to promote the party’s ballot placement in the fifth slot.¹ He had a vision for using a proletariat hand reaching for the camera to seize political victory—the five extended fingers creating a visual reminder to voters of which box to check.

After sorting through hundreds of photos, Heartfield and his colleagues selected a hand featuring thick, boxy fingers with deep, weathered crags.² The dark lighting appeared as a layer of factory soot and grime, lending a further air of gritty authenticity to the image. This was the hand of the people. It was isolated on a white background and emblazoned, larger than life, on posters pasted around Berlin with the accompanying tagline: “5 Finger hat die Hand. Mit 5 packst Du den Feind.” (5 Fingers Has the Hand. With 5 You Seize the Enemy.).

Nearly ninety years later, and 8,000 miles away, the artist Calista Lyon began collecting short video clips of the residents of Green River, Utah, waving hello/goodbye for the camera. Only their hands and arms are visible in the camera frame, with mildly blurry backdrops of the rural town as a secondary character. The resulting silent seven-minute video, Localized Gestures, is a cheery catalog of greetings.

Bright, hazy, desert light cascades across each scene featuring grocery stores, homes, the Green River, Main Street, and other locales. There is not an archetypal Green River hand or wave. Lyon created the video “as a way to see this community together, to hold the nuance of each person through their own gesture.”³ The aggregated 173 vignettes (featuring 175 gestures), become a composite portrait of Green River and its variances. A pudgy toddler, withered senior, sno-cone shack worker, tattooed twenty-something, and hands with missing digits wave frantically back and forth, throw out three-fingered hails, rapidly open and close their mitts, and twiddle their fingers as part of the salutation parade. A single middle finger is jokingly jabbed in the air by an aged citizen as a humorous counterpoint.

Lyon grew up in a family of farmers in Tallangatta Valley, Australia. She recognized the similarities between her rural upbringing and the bucolic Green River. She wrote of her time in Epicenter’s Frontier Fellowship:

One thing I always love when I visit rural communities is that everyone greets one another. [. . .] Almost everyone knows everyone, a lot of people wave to one-another from their vehicles, as a kid I used to love to watch the different gestures of people’s waves from above the steering wheel. To this day, I love going to smaller communities where this is common practice.⁴

The symbolic gesture of a wave is a call-and-response that seeks reciprocation and connection. It is an acknowledgement of seeing and having been seen. By its nature, like a tango, waving takes two.

Lyon’s cavalcade of kindness rolled out in 2019 in the heart of Trump’s America. Amid national calls to return to civility, Lyon’s video is an example of the ingrained courtesy endemic to rural areas and the sense of communal familiarity. Small towns remove the sense of anonymity found in larger cities. Schools, churches, community organizations, and events create an environment for the mixing of classes and groups that might otherwise remain more homogeneous and bring them together in waves, handshakes, backslaps, and hugs.

Green River’s added layer is an economy tied to travel and tourism. Not only is the city friendly to insiders, but outsiders are welcomed into the community and its etiquette as well. Epicenter itself even plays that role—introducing artists from the outside to various social strata within the city.

Lyon’s finished work was projected after dark at a community picnic, on the sides of parked semi trailers that pulled off of Interstate 70, the exterior of a popular local restaurant, and a billboard visible to cars as they drove out of town. This project was made in part by the locals, primarily for the locals, with local symbolic gestures connecting and responding to one another as its subject. Placing the work into the public sphere reflects back to the locals a story of a generosity of spirit; and to those passing through, an invitation to engage with the community on friendly terms.

Although Heartfield and Lyon share a methodology of searching for and collecting images of hands, Heartfield’s hand of the oppressed aggressively reached for and discursively defined a political enemy, whereas Lyon’s hands welcome unity and solidarity. Heartfield sought an emblematic worker’s hand to highlight class division and power struggles, and Lyon’s collective video is not building an “us vs. them” narrative but just an “us.” Heartfield was engaged in agitprop, Lyon in what I call “civicprop.”

Civicprop mediates the bringing together of people, not in opposition to others, but in celebration of geographic proximity and situational commonalities. Lyon’s work in Green River, as well as other areas, falls into this category that is part social anthropology and part representational narrative that reflects back histories, characteristics, and stories to help archive and solidify collective civic identity.

Lyon’s Localized Gestures is a document of Green River in 2019, pointing to larger political climates, symbolic gestures, and the similarities and quirks of rural cultures. It is also a centerpiece of public pride and a clarion call to visit or stay. As a disseminated video, it is a postcard sharing the greetings of Green River with anyone who sees the video, anywhere in the world. With five or fewer fingers, it waves to you and hopes you wave back.

Geologically, the state of Utah is a panoply of strata, formations, and colors. From the sterile expanses of the Bonneville Salt Flats, to the soaring peaks of the Wasatch Mountain Range, to the otherworldly red rock deserts of the south, Utah is constantly and slowly changing. Wind and water contour stone; floods and droughts reveal, and submerge the land; while underground volcanic, and tectonic activity pushes and pulls the surface into craggy wrinkles. A magnitude 5.7 earthquake shook northern Utah as recently as March this year.

In Utah’s evolving cultural landscape, there are only a few steadfast art museums that have weathered corroding social and economic factors over the decades, and of those, there is only one that is not directly tied to a university. Over the years, smaller, artist-initiated projects have emerged then eroded away. Such endeavors are generally founded to provide opportunities that would otherwise be absent given the paucity of galleries and museums. What has changed is the sheer number of initiatives that are continuing to crop up. They each have a stance on sustainability, engagement, and scope—variations that make their coexistence interesting, and relevant.

Pal Gallery started in Provo, Utah in the spring of 2018, with an apartment show of seven artists. Eric Edvalson, the curator, and organizer who recently graduated from Brigham Young University’s (BYU) MFA program, initially thought of it as a one-time thing, but also considered lending the project some legitimacy by naming the space. “There is something interesting about calling it a gallery, and stating that this is our first show.” Assuming that wearing the mantle of a gallery conveys authenticity, a platform is then established for artists to surpass the pall of amateur endeavors, and invite people into their homes, welcome other artists, and avoid the awkwardness in offering casual approaches—“Hey, would you like to display your art in my house?”

Edvalson named his gallery Pal, because he saw it as a chance to build relationships—strengthen friendships he already had with his exhibiting artists, and form new connections by asking people into his sanctum. Given the spatial challenges of his apartment, the shows could only last for one night. He produced pocket-size print catalogs for each exhibition to document their fleeting nature, and used Instagram to advertise, and serve as his sole digital archive. The future of Pal is in question with the onset of COVID-19, when bringing strangers into one’s apartment is not currently an option, but it does provide Edvalson with time to reevaluate where, and how, he invests his energy and resources. He always hoped that Pal would be a catalyst, saying, (with tongue partially in-cheek) “Part of me doesn’t want to do these things. I’m just doing them because no one else will. And if other people start doing it, then I won’t have to.” This do-it-yourself drive is very common in the arts in Utah. There is not a multi-tiered ecosystem in which artists can thrive. As such, artists must create their own opportunities, or languish waiting for others to lead the way.

Another BYU alumnus, Mitchell Barton, sought to fill those same opportunity gaps, in the fall of 2018. He didn’t have the funds to start a space, given Utah’s rising real estate prices. What he had, thought, was an unfinished laundry room that he thought would make a suitable antithesis to a sterile white-cube space. His wife was pregnant, and extremely sick at the time, so to reduce their stress, they decided no one would actually come to their apartment. They embraced their situation, and Washer / Dryer Projects became an exhibition space that was only publicly accessible through online documentation. Work was physically installed, and photographed for Instagram, and the Washer / Dryer Projects site. Barton treated the shows as he would any public exhibition, keeping work up through the entire stated duration, and moving it only as needed to keep the laundry room functional. When their living situation changed, they no longer had a dedicated laundry room, so Barton invited others to franchise the idea, resulting in upcoming projects in other artists’ laundry rooms.

For many Utah artists—as elsewhere—the digital realm is a more manageable and efficient location for artistic dissemination. Most art that is consumed is via photos on the internet, rather than in-person experiences. Their own artistic output is also more likely to end up on Instagram or web-based portfolios than in a bricks and mortar gallery. Such physical sites are no longer the ultimate destination. Documentation has expanded the chances of professionally beneficial outcomes, while still adhering to traditional presentation standards.

Radical Hope is a good example of this approach. Initiated by Madeline Rupard—who studied at BYU, and is now based in New York—its curatorial team includes Utah-based artist Aloe Corry, Pittsburgh-based Isabelle Brourman, and Ohio-based Connie Fu. The affirmative project opened May 28th, 2020, and was built using ArtSteps, an online platform that employs a 3D gaming engine to create virtual environments, with a retro feel. Launching in the middle of the Coronavirus shutdown, the exhibition leveraged its decentralized nature to inexpensively assemble works from artists around the world into the bespoke space. The curators utilized this fantasy world to play with scale and display, free of physical limitations.

The PARC Collective began when artist Ron Linn was looking to collaborate with, and support other cultural producers around Provo, where he was based. Initially, he approached the artists, Tiana Birrell, and Art Morrill. Since Birrell was living in Salt Lake City (forty-five minutes north) and Morrill lived near Ogden (a further half-hour north), they aimed to widen their net geographically. Their inaugural curatorial effort was an exhibition of emerging, and established artists from across the northern part of the state. After that, they brought on artist and designer Sarah Waldron Brinton to the collective. Before they could develop more of their plans, COVID-19 interrupted production, causing a necessary shift. Birrell spearheaded a partnership with the Granary Art Center, a more established, artist-run non-profit in Sanpete County, and the collective began curating from art submitted via Instagram. The result was Incubation Period, an online exhibition, and proposed publication. Linn has stated that, as an artist, he worked harder when he felt that his community was watching. He said that by assuming the role of an organized group, the PARC Collective could encourage other artists to work more fruitfully, and think more about what it means to be producing work in Utah.

Henry Becker, Nolan Flynn, Josh Graham, and Andrew Rice, inspired in part by Pal Gallery, rehabbed Becker’s garage into a small gallery space and named it the_openroom. They built-out programming that included exhibitions, and accompanying online artist presentations. The art is generally only accessible for one night, but their focus is on post-internet practices, which lends itself to digital documentation, and archiving. Since the pandemic isolation restrictions, they have shifted focus to online discussions with artists and curators, and teamed with the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art on an internet-based project that invites public collaboration on artists’ digital images. Of the individuals, and groups featured in this text, the_openroom is the only one to state that it is dedicated to a sustainable practice in Utah, rather than being provisional and ephemeral. Currently, their collective is entirely self-funded, but they see it as “investing in [their] culture.”

Final Hot Desert is the creation of artist Ben Sang. He attended Snow College, in remote Ephraim. Feeling distant from the art world he was studying, he spent a year researching and writing about contemporary artists. After accepting a corporate job, he dedicated his newfound disposable income to inviting artists to Utah to install their work in unique locations. His first exhibition consisted of work by two locals who responded to, and presented their work at, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Later, Sang leveraged relationships he had cultivated over Instagram to invite national artists. He works with his guests to identify ideal locations for their work, which have included the Salt Flats, Little Cottonwood Canyon, and The Tree of Life sculpture near Wendover. There are no opening receptions or public viewings, only crisp photo-documentation that has earned his project an international reputation. For Sang, Final Hot Desert is about establishing and nurturing networks and relationships, and reaching out from Utah—which is often perceived as a cultural desert—to introduce himself, and his state to the outside world.

The youthful optimism that permeates these examples has shaken the cultural ground of Utah. Artists are learning from these individual, and collective efforts, and are communicating, and networking across geographic divides as never before. They are experimenting within their artistic practices and with modes of installation and display. By encouraging and supporting each other, and in questioning the necessity of standard exhibition models, they are creating excitement, and establishing innovative working methodologies. Whether we are beginning an ascent to a lofty summit, or heading back down into a valley of cultural apathy is yet to be determined.

Wicked Arts Assignments are bold, unusual, contrary, funny, poetical, inspiring, socially committed, or otherwise challenging. Everyone who teaches the arts knows them: assignments that are seemingly simple but challenge participants, students and pupils to the max. Many artists and arts teachers have that singular, personal, often-used assignment in which everything comes together: their artistic vision, their pedagogical approach, and their love for certain techniques or methods.

The almost one hundred arts assignments collected here connect to the visual arts, performance, theatre, music and design, but more importantly: they encourage cross-disciplinarity. They reflect themes and ways of working in contemporary arts, offering opportunities to learn about ourselves, the arts and the world.

The first part of this book provides a theoretical view on arts assignments from historical, artistic, and educational perspectives, complemented by interviews with experts in contemporary arts and education. The second part consists of the actual wicked arts assignments. These can be carried out in various contexts: from primary schools to higher education, from home to the (online) community, and from Bogotá to Istanbul. They are intended to spark the imagination of both teachers and students, contributing to new, topical educational and artistic practices.

Editors: Emiel Heijnen, Melissa Bremmer
Co-editor: Sanne Kersten
Contributors: Pavèl van Houten, Jorge Lucero, Nina Paim, Erik Schrooten, Stephanie Springgay, and many many others
Design: Laura Pappa

Valiz, 2020 | in cooperation with Amsterdam University of the Arts | paperback | 304 pp. | 22 x 15 cm (h x w) | English | ISBN 978-94-92095-75-6 | € 19,90

Attempts to gentrify south Provo have been quietly underway for decades. The area around 500 South just west of University Avenue is one of the few industrial areas from the early 20th century in Provo, and developers have recently started to capitalize on the industrial aesthetic fetish, turning former factories into reception halls and co-work spaces. Homes in the surrounding neighborhoods have slowly been purchased, quickly renovated, and flipped while new generic condos have been erected to alleviate the housing crunch. The Frontrunner now chugs through and sighs to a stop in south Provo a block away from Provo Studio, the site of the first exhibition by the curatorial collective working under the name PARC. Comprised of Tiana Birrell, Ron Linn, Art Morrill, and Cole Walker, PARC assembled a cohort of seventeen artists (including themselves) and six writers around the exhibition’s theme and title of dis/place.

Leaden galvanized-steel sheets clad the walls of the main gallery space that is the entry of Provo Studio. Unframed works on paper are gingerly adhered to the metal using neodymium magnets. The magnets are both a practical solution to temporarily affixing the work and a metaphor for the exhibition series of which this is the first. Titled MGNT (“magnet,” minus the vowels), this quarterly series brings together artists to highlight the unseen forces that attract them to one another, and in this case, issues of place. The title of this inaugural MGNT exhibition is obviously meant to be read as a fracturing and self-reflexive displacement of the word “displace” but also can be read as slang: “dis place,” as in “this place,” or “dis” meaning “insult.” All of these readings can be found in the varying work in the exhibition spaces.

Standouts from this well-populated show include Eric Edvalson’s unassuming photograph “Meiji Jingu” (2019), from his Meanderings series. The largely monochromatic photograph depicts a pair of stanchions huddled as closely together as their bases will allow, blocking a narrow path between an empty garden bed and a wall wrapped in a grommeted vinyl photo mural. The mural depicts a set of seven stone stair steps climbing up to a platform behind a wooden railing. The mural’s perspective is warped by the oblique angle at which it is photographed, creating a disorienting space that is made inaccessible by ad hoc fencing and the impossibility of entering the illusionistic space of the mural. Edvalson quietly celebrates these unintentional collaborations as different parties add elements to their built environment, resulting in quirky juxtapositions.

Ron Linn’s understated graphite drawings on tracing paper of photo negatives read as a series of found imagery — children in thick wool sweaters loitering around a fishing dock, vintage alpine skiers, the start of a swimming race in a narrow swimming pool, a small rural structure belching thick smoke into the sky as the building burns. As negatives, the images can be hard to read. Linn has taken the drawn negatives and used them to create positive cyanotypes that are displayed below the graphite drawings, but not paired. The results are rich, Prussian blue photographic scenes that look akin to mezzotints or early 20th-century Pictorialist compositions. The photographic sensibility is moderated by the meticulous scribbles of the parent drawings. This translation from photo to drawing, and back to a photographic process reflects the fleeting relationships to places visited and the evolving and devolving nature of memory of those places.

Jaime Trinidad’s 3D-printed sculptures graft together classical Western art icons with sculptural forms of Trinidad’s native Mexico. In “Small Colossal Head of a WESTERN Youth” (2019), the artist has taken the marble “Fragmentary Colossal Head of a Youth” from the second century BCE and completed the missing upper portion of the head with an Olmec stone sculpture known as “San Lorenzo Colossal Head 4,” dating to before 900 BCE. Both of these “colossal” works are about the scale of tchotchkes picked up in roadside tourist markets around Italy and Greece. It is common to view a fractured Greek sculpture and wonder what is missing. Trinidad’s clever response is to fill that negative space with what is missing in most canonized art history.

Most of the work in the exhibition is small and physically unassuming, which is to be expected given the modest rooms. However, Kelsey Harrison received the lion’s share of the exhibition space, occupying one-third of an adjacent studio/gallery. This work includes a modular interactive sculpture called “Luxury My Way” and two lighted signs resting on an adjacent wall spelling out the titles of the works, “Repeatable Experience” and “Limited Options.” “Luxury My Way” is composed of a set of minimalist forms bearing postmodern ornamentation. The styles and color schemes of these building blocks are taken from new construction going up around Salt Lake City and other areas around the West. Each piece quotes the earth-tone architecture of a storage space, new metal-wrapped condominiums (like the complex neighboring the exhibition), or other similarly generic buildings that utilize a late Modernist aesthetic solely because it allows the owners to be cheap. Visitors are welcome to stack the pieces to create their own bland, khaki, mid-sized Hell.

The adjacent glowing signage borrows the typography habitually found on a real estate office or nail salon and declares exactly what the artist sees within these generic spaces and businesses: “Repeatable Experience” and “Limited Options.” The signs themselves were cut from the walls of Nox Contemporary where the work was first exhibited last year. Since they were built directly into the wall, the walls themselves were displaced to their new temporary home in Provo Studio.

dis/place is a smart first effort that shows these artist-curators working through ideas and democratic collectivism. At times, the impulse to include more artists for more vantages of the curatorial theme results in a less focused experience with some timid, small objects. Since PARC declares that their future endeavors will be nomadic, I hope to see them address the sites of the projects more directly — and I would have especially expected that to be more prevalent in an exhibition about displacement staged in a quickly gentrifying area. The group’s bravado is to be commended given the paucity of established contemporary art venues in the state, let alone Utah County, but I am heartened by newcomers PARC, PAL gallery, the open_room, and other fledgling artist-driven projects. I look forward to them growing, maturing, and developing their voices.

In late January of 1978, from under a thick crust of snow deposited by the Great Blizzard of ’78, a new art organization sprouted on the frozen shore of Cleveland, Ohio’s cultural landscape. Squirreled away above a McDonald’s on Euclid Avenue, this newly minted non-profit entity called itself Aeolus after the Greek god of the winds (apropos of the 70 mph gusts that ushered it in).¹ By late May of that same year, Aeolus’ founder, James Rosenberger, pecked out on his typewriter an invitation to like-minded artists in the region to help conceptualize a program of Aeolus called “a space.”

Copied and distributed throughout town, this flyer was not an enticement to a meeting, but a “gathering.” The deliberate choice of words meant that on May 25th the gathered artists would not be debating mission statements, or negotiating public postures, but aggregating their youthful energies and ideals to see what might result.

Rosenberger had moved to Cleveland 18 months earlier after completing his graduate studies in theater at York University in Toronto, ON. When weighing relocation options, he decided that the expense of New York City and Chicago would be anathema to the experimentation he was looking for, but that a faltering blue-collar burg like Cleveland was a place where failure could be affordable.

While at York University, Rosenberger worked with John Cage and was drawn to experimental theater. He also spent time at a relatively new artist-run venue called A Space (founded as Nightingale Gallery in 1968, and later incorporated as the not-for-profit A Space in 1971).² This venue hosted early residencies for Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci, and it was one of the first venues to organize an exhibition of video art in Toronto.³ Rosenberger was taken by the organization’s adventurous programming, embracing of the new and technological, and urgent energy—something he sought to recreate in his new home of Cleveland.

There was an analogous rebellious vibrancy in Northeast Ohio in the 1970s. Proto-punk and art bands like Rocket from the Tomb, The Dead Boys, Pere Ubu, Devo, the Bizarros, electric eels, X_______X, the Pagans, and the Mirrors reflected the snotty and angular discontent of middle-America’s working-class youth and their reactionary neo-Dadaist tendencies. These bands found hospitable environments in Cleveland’s underground bars and clubs where they could form (and break up) over beers and combust on stage with frenetic bravado. Within the triangle of Cleveland, Akron, and Youngstown, Kent State’s department of art fostered students who embraced performance, technology, and conceptual art. Although a number of art spaces called Cleveland home, many were of a parochial, regional flavor, or were bankrolled by banks, oil companies, or old family money and had their sights set on the blue-chip avant-garde like Andy Warhol.

Many of Northeast Ohio’s youthful bands, venues, and galleries did not seek permanence, and even distrusted anything with a semblance of considered organization. They burned bright and fast, leaving behind a trail of confusion and awe. Aeolus’ two programs, a space (“a” for art) and p space (“p” for performance), provided platforms and audiences for these bright lights.

Early p space events included a staging of Mason Williams’ hotel-and-salad-themed scenario Crackers, a chaotic live-video happening by Johnny & the Dicks (featuring John Morton, formerly of electric eels), and a number of short-term performance works by various artists. a space hosted large-scale photographs by Abe Frajndlich and Joel Marcus, and film, photo, and video installations involving Kent State University faculty, students, and recent graduates. Through each project, Aeolus’ family grew and its notoriety spread. Few other venues in town invited such adventurous and gritty executions of art.

Underscoring the precarious nature of small alternative art spaces, Rosenberger announced in 1979 that he accepted a position at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati and would be departing Cleveland, taking the names “Aeolus,” “a space,” and “p space” with him. The remaining artists who attended the 1978 gathering, and those that joined afterwards, were left with the options of letting the space flame out or finding a new identity and leadership to push forward (or whether to have a leader at all).

Eventually, co-conspirator Robert Mihaly took the helm. At that time it was decided that rather than addressing individual programs (e.g., an art space and a performance space), the new organization would embrace its plurality and simply be called SPACES.⁴ It would remain true to its multidisciplinary founding as a haven for the experimental, the performative, and the critical.

It is this type of origin story that is familiar to many artist-run spaces that self-organized in the 1960s to the 1980s. A small group of like-minded individuals could not find a reliable, local outlet for their art, so they pooled their resources and found some real estate where they could stage performances and exhibitions. Initial energies waned and/or key players stepped away from the organization. A crisis of identity, purpose, and fortitude ensued.

Artist-run venues often stay open for a few months or years at best. They tend to run on a diet of gumption and favors. They have to debate becoming a 501(c)3 with all the limitations and trappings—board of directors, audits, lawyers, etc. If they manage to find funding, it is usually only semi-reliable and comes with enough attached strings that some founding ideologies have to be retooled or abandoned. The affordability of their real estate is often undermined by their gentrifying presence in a neighborhood. Founders and directors rarely have appropriate administrative and financial training (and few would get into arts administration if they were aware of the mountain of spreadsheets, insurance paperwork, and budget meetings involved). A small handful of these artist-run spaces make it to a decade. Even fewer make it to two. What makes SPACES unique is not necessarily its beginnings, but its survival. In May of 2018, SPACES celebrates its 40th anniversary.

So much cultural work that leverages external funding, facilities, and networks benefits from a rich ecosystem that is rarely talked about in an effort to keep the focus on the art. (It’s also hard to feel rebellious and punk while debating spreadsheets and building funding projections). The truth is that without a healthy ecosystem, public interface with the art and artists becomes more difficult. Energetic artists without funding (cash or in-kind) can only go so far. Without a responsive audience, artists can wither. In the absence of critical dialog or documentation, cultural amnesia takes a hold and regional identities suffer. If a non-profit’s board activity does not maintain a certain level of activity and engagement, fundraising and networks wilt. Board members that do not fully grasp an organization’s mission statement can alienate staff and artists. Funders, whose dangling carrots are placed primarily according to their needs rather than the recipients’, can redirect organizations away from their missions and into strange territories.

SPACES’ longevity and focus are a testament to its staff, board, funders, patrons, artists, and luck. Not everything always synced up at the right times, but just enough to keep the organization alive and thriving. There were many opportunities for poor bookkeeping, gaps in leadership, withdrawn funding, and misguided public perception to derail SPACES over its 40 years. For decades, SPACES has been creating and tweaking its institutional framework so it can be true to its origins, stable enough to reliably support artist projects, and invisible enough that the art and artists are at the fore. It is an acrobatic feat of administration for an organization to engage artists at the edge of their practice and keep up with them without getting in their way.

One of the first hurdles for an organization to conquer is reliable funding that can provide the necessary resources for artists, and the flexibility to be used for general operations—staff salaries, utilities, rent, and so on. The occasional large donation from a family member or smattering of admission fees are never enough to keep the lights on for an upstart venue. Significant, consistent funding is a must.

In 1972, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) established a new category within the Visual Arts Program called Workshops to support the work of artist spaces. This was a quizzical categorization that seemed to see artist-run organizations as centers of either production or education. The name and framing later changed in 1980 to Workshops/Alternative Spaces (a term coined by Visual Arts Program director Brian O’Doherty), and again in 1982 to Visual Artists’ Organizations.⁵ This evolution shows the thinking around and eventual acceptance of artist-run presenting organizations.

What this meant was a wider, public support of the contemporary efforts of artists to self-organize and self-present. Small artist spaces that may have only been in existence for a brief instance could now receive enough money through the NEA to extend their life and grow to possibly reach a new level of visibility and funding.

By 1982, the four-year-old SPACES was receiving one-sixth of its operating budget from the NEA, and another sixth from the Ohio Arts Council.⁶ For a struggling organization that was largely living hand-to-mouth, these funds were a godsend that alleviated annual fundraising tensions. It should also be said that SPACES has received continual funding from the NEA ever since 1982. This was the same year that Robert Mihaly stepped aside and a non-founding, non-artist occupied in the director’s chair: Jane Farver.

This shift of consciousness was striking for an “artist-run” organization that had been led by founding artists. To retain that artist-run identity, SPACES maintained a board of directors that was half comprised of practicing artists. That way policy, budgets, and the choice of executive director were all under the close scrutiny of artists and subject to more than just business concerns.

With Jane Farver, the organization found more administrative acumen, and someone who could speak the language of funders. One of her first items of business was relocating SPACES from its initial location on Euclid Avenue in Playhouse Square. The Euclid Avenue location happened to once house the radio station WJW (850 AM) where disc jockey Alan Freed coined the term “rock ‘n’ roll” to label the mix of country, blues, and R&B that he spun. This move would signal SPACES’ transposition from its adolescent rock ‘n’ roll roots to a more mature and buttoned-up identity.

As of December 1983, SPACES’ new home was in the Bradley Building in Cleveland’s Warehouse District where artists had been squatting for years. Although a step up from Euclid Avenue in terms of square footage, it was still a rough space. More room meant more renovations and more art—both of which meant more need for funding. A $10,000 community development block grant helped with renovations over the next few years, and the nature of artist projects changed to better address the space. Expansive installation art and full-wall slide projections that were not feasible in the cramped quarters in Playhouse Square now populated the deep corridor-like space on West 6th Street.⁷

As renovations were underway in 1985, Farver announced that she was moving to New York City to work at the Alternative Museum. Susan Channing, who had just recently arrived in Cleveland with over a decade of arts administration experience, was selected as her successor and began in January of 1986—going on to guide SPACES for the next twenty-one years.

The NEA Advancement Program awarded SPACES a two-year grant in 1988 that provided consulting assistance to create a long-range plan and stabilize the organization. SPACES was the first Ohio organization receive such an awarded, and one of only 37 nationwide. The long-range plan got SPACES thinking about it’s delicate relationship with real estate. As the cost of leases steadily climbed in the Warehouse District (due in part to the presence of SPACES), the organization considered ways to become more rooted and they researched the possibility of purchasing, rather than leasing a location. This was another sign of a maturing organization leaving behind post-graduate attitudes and settling into young adulthood.

In 1989, property was identified across the Cuyahoga River on the Superior Viaduct that could serve as SPACES’ new home. Community development corporations had indicated that the Viaduct and surrounding area had high potential for restaurants and shops, thereby driving foot traffic onto what was essentially a dead-end bridge. It was tempting to get in on the ground floor, and own the building rather than being priced out once all the development occurred.

Through funds from the Cleveland Foundation, George Gund Foundation, and BP America Corporation, SPACES had enough money for the down payment on 2220 Superior Viaduct—a 36,000-square-foot building spread out over three floors and a basement.⁸ Tenants on the upper floors would help cover the mortgage, and then provide a revenue stream once the mortgage was paid off. The first exhibition was staged as slide projections on the front bank of windows the day SPACES closed on the building on September 14, 1990. Over the next three months, volunteers worked on the gallery spaces until they were ready to open on December 13th of the same year.

Finally, after 12 years, SPACES was not spending so much time and so many resources on relocating and rehabilitating real estate. It had a permanent home where improvements and monthly payments would be building equity rather than disappearing.

By 1996, SPACES was being recognized by local art institutions for the work it was doing. Urban Evidence: Contemporary Artists Reveal Cleveland was a citywide series of concurrent exhibitions that was a collaboration between the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (now MOCA), and SPACES. The young pup (now almost 20 years old) with the meager budget, was playing with the big dogs.

In 1999, SPACES was invited by the Andy Warhol Foundation, along with 23 other arts organizations, to participate in its new program, the Warhol Initiative, that came with $100,000 to better serve artists. SPACES proposed that it could put that money toward its mortgage. The Warhol Foundation responded by awarding $126,500, allowing SPACES to completely pay off its mortgage.⁹ This was the beginning of a relationship with the Andy Warhol Foundation that was crucial to the development of SPACES. The Warhol Foundation was radically accommodating and responsive to the needs of smaller art organizations. Endless applications and labyrinthian grant reports were not part of the Warhol lexicon. A few conversations and brief written justifications secured significant funding that helped launch new programs, beef up programming, and direct more money toward artists and their projects.

With new-found stability, support from the Ohio Arts Council, the Warhol Initiative, and some extra space on the third floor, SPACES began an international artist residency in 2002 called SWAP (SPACES World Artists Program).¹⁰ This new program was intended to introduce global alternative art to Cleveland to inspire and better contextualize the work of Northeast Ohio artists. Each six-to-eight-week residency asked artists to leverage SPACES and its networks to help them create and present new work. The resulting projects were often social—directly engaged with people and communities. This was not an insular studio residency program, but an embedding in Cleveland. The first years of SWAP saw artists from Chile, Slovakia, Czech Republic, New York, Hungary, Poland, San Francisco, Israel, Romania, Chicago, and Texas.

However, the dreams of financial independence and a bustling neighborhood faded. A decaying building from the 1880s with the second-oldest functioning freight elevator in Cleveland, ill-fitting windows from the 1970s, and a consistently leaking roof required relentless upkeep. Both staff time and money from the tenants were being drained by the needy facility. What was supposed to be a hip neighborhood with bars, shops, and restaurants simply became a monolithic condo development that blocked the view of SPACES from the highly-trafficked Detroit-Superior Bridge. There was no draw to the Viaduct other than SPACES itself, which remained hidden and obscured.

As Susan Channing announced her retirement in 2007, the board began to explore the option of selling the building and moving so that SPACES would not be a landlord and it could have greater visibility. With the prospect of a new building and new director, SPACES was poised for a fresh future built on a sturdy, stubborn, and artist-driven past.

Two failed searches for an executive director was threatening the momentum of the organization and funders were growing nervous as SPACES entered its 30th year. The board and staff valiantly forged ahead, but without a director, plans stalled and the organization moved into a maintenance rather than a growth mode.

In August, 2008, I started as the executive director of SPACES. Coming from my previous position as the director of the Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, I was hired to oversee the sale of the Superior Viaduct building, start a capital campaign, relocate SPACES, and help the organization discern its identity as an alternative art space in the 21st century.

However, the deal to sell the building fell through as the U.S. market quickly crumbled at the beginning of the Great Recession. What was a plan for progress was suddenly looking like a plan for survival. Tighter accounting procedures and monthly finance committee meetings were implemented to head off any potential problem like a funder abandoning ship. Luckily, funders rallied and SPACES barely saw a dip in its funding.

As the organization developed a long-overdue strategic plan, it began to examine its mission statement and purpose. In 1978, there were few contemporary or experimental art galleries in Cleveland, and even fewer that worked with local and regional artists. The term “alternative space” (to borrow Brian O’Doherty’s phrasing) indicated a reaction against the prevailing styles, politics, and practices at the time. As Cleveland developed, the New Gallery became the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art and then the Museum of Contemporary Art; the Cleveland Museum of Art hired a full-time curator of contemporary art and put more money into contemporary collecting; smaller artist spaces were cropping up independently, like Zygote Press, and in aggregate buildings, like 78th Street Studios and the Screw Factory; and some contemporary commercial galleries, like the William Busta Gallery, created adventurous exhibitions with regional artists. With a greater appetite for contemporary art and new generations of artists raised on SPACES’ programming, to what was SPACES an alternative? At 30 years old and with a $400,000+ annual budget, could the initial scrappiness be captured or should that even be a goal? To borrow corporate terminology, who was SPACES’ primary customer?

These are the questions with which we wrestled. After a number of debates and discussions a new mission statement was forged: “SPACES is the resource and public forum for artists who explore and experiment.” To me, this exemplified SPACES in its past, present, and future possibilities. SPACES’ “primary customer” was not “the public” as is the case with most non-profit art venues, but “artists who explore and experiment.” The mission purposefully did not even mention art or exhibitions. These were happy byproducts of SPACES’ relationship with artists, but first and foremost, SPACES was and is a resource and a way for the public to interface with artists who step into the unknown, whatever form that may take.

I stepped away from the organization in 2013 as we finally sold the Superior Viaduct building. Succeeding me in early 2014 was Christina Vassallo, the former director of Flux Factory in New York City. Subsequently, she received similar marching orders to mine—start a capital campaign, move, and make sure that SPACES is relevant and true to its origins. This time the economy cooperated more fully, and in 2017, SPACES opened its new location a half mile west of its previous location, now in the developing Hingetown neighborhood and on a major thoroughfare to downtown. The first-floor space was purchased from local art philanthropists Fred and Laura Bidwell, the powerhouses behind the Transformer Station—a neighboring art venue that is a collaboration between the Bidwell Foundation and the Cleveland Museum of Art—and the upcoming Front Triennial in Cleveland. Vassallo’s work has been marked by fostering more art writing in and about the region, community outreach, and more overtly political projects (inspired in part by Cleveland hosting the 2016 Republican National Convention). She is seeking to grow the ecosystem in which SPACES resides and have the organization act as a responsible citizen to make sure it and its artists are around for another 40 years.

While SPACES hosted a residency in 2011 for Machine Project (the now defunct artist collective founded in Los Angeles in 2004 by Mark Allen), I had a conversation with one of their artists, Emily Lacy. She was talking about Machine Project’s approach to being a nimble, scrappy, non-profit, and stated, “We are intentionally casual.” To which I responded that SPACES was “casually intentional.” This difference in attitude summarizes SPACES evolution over the past 40 years. At first, SPACES/Aeolus was barely organized, and intentionally so. The casual flexibility provided intense freedom for the artists and audiences. However, without a single, hard-headed individual driving an organization for four decades, it could never survive, and would likely not grow much beyond a couple of low-rent rooms above a McDonalds. Part of SPACES’ formula was a shift from making casualness its first priority, to placing intention and planning first, while allowing flexibility. This creates a more stable framework in which artists can experiment. The young punk becomes the upstanding citizen (with a subversive twinkle in its eye). It will be interesting to see how SPACES and the rest of the surviving 1960s and ’70s alternative art spaces evolve as they further grow, mature, and functionally resemble the organizations to which they were once an alternative. It will also be interesting to see what alternatives spring up in reaction to them.

SPACES’s 40th anniversary exhibition 20/20 Hindsight = 40 Years is on view April 20–June 15, 2018.