One painting shows a woman in a kitchen holding a power drill and a bowl as she balances on a board on top of a ball. Another shows a woman wearing a yellow dress and tiara as she puts on makeup with a beehive in the background. A third display features live birds in a cage.
This is how 30 female artists chose to portray their roles as a women in Utah today.
The exhibit, “Rouge: Utah Women’s Voices,” is one of the art projects on display in the Beehive State as people across the country celebrate the centennial anniversary this month of the ratification of 19th Amendment, which expanded voting rights to women across the U.S., on Aug. 18, 1920.
People can view “Rouge” through Sept. 19 at the Bountiful Davis Art Center, at 90 N. Main St. in Bountiful. It’s accompanied by “Utah Women Making History,” an exhibit from Better Days 2020, a nonprofit that promotes the state’s suffrage history, featuring illustrations created by Brooke Smart of 50 Utah women.
The center is also hosting “Mother: Landscape,” an exhibit that examines “the correlation between the treatment of the natural world and women within a patriarchal society,” as well as “Locate,” which “looks to navigate identity through visually exploring the impact and accumulation of experiences tied to places.”
Together, the exhibits portray the experiences of women from the past and present in the Beehive State, said Nancy Andruk Olson, who curated “Rouge.”
(Photo courtesy of Nancy Andruk Olson) "True Peace is not a Lovely Facade - It's Homemade," created by Katrina Berg, is part of the exhibit "Rouge: Utah Women's Voices," which features 30 local female artists who portrayed how they view their roles as a women in Utah today.
Women artists “are grossly underrepresented in museums and galleries throughout the United States,” Olson said. From 2008 to 2018, “only 11% of art acquired by the country’s top museums for their permanent collections was by women,” the New York Times has reported.
“I wanted to provide opportunity for representation and to explore their voices,” Olson said.
Other shows featuring Utah women:
• The works of five female artists from Utah — Amanda Lee, Anna Laurie Mackay, Elise Wehle, Lydia Gravis and Ya’el Pedroza — are available to the public through Oct. 31 in the exhibit “Paper Projects” through Carper Contemporary.
People can see the pieces from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday at The Argo House, at 529 25th St. in Ogden. Weekend and evening showings are available by appointment by calling 540-290-4930 or by emailing kelly@carpercontemporary.com.
• Modern West is hosting the “Right Here Right Now” exhibit through Sept. 10, featuring Jann Haworth’s “Work in Progress” mural alongside pieces from 20 contemporary women artists with local ties.
Haworth, a Salt Lake City artist, is known for her design work on The Beatle’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. “Work in Progress” is a community-based project that Haworth collaborated on with her daughter, Liberty Blake. Since 2016, they’ve held workshops in Salt Lake City and other places for people to use stencils and add to the project. Haworth also has a piece in the “Rouge” exhibit.
“Right Here Right Now” is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday at Modern West, at 412 S. 700 West in Salt Lake City.
(Photo courtesy of Jann Haworth) Salt Lake City artist Jann Haworth incorporated her ongoing mural, Work in Progress, into a stripe she created for the Her Flag project.
Becky Jacobs is a Report for America corps member and writes about the status of women in Utah for The Salt Lake Tribune. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by clicking here.
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