The Day After Tomorrow: Art in Response to Turmoil and Hope

July 1 – December 19, 2020
Our new reality is profoundly different than it was six months ago. The 2020 pandemic, COVID-19, has swept the world, and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, we have seen unprecedented civil unrest calling for racial equality. What will these dilemmas leave in their wake? The Museum hopes to engage the community in these issues, ones that have changed our lives in unprecedented ways.

One of the central galleries in the exhibition is a Community Response Space designed to elicit and give expression to the personal feelings, fears, and hopes for the future that have arisen for individuals in the community over the course of the last several months. This space, with the contribution of Utah artists, will undergo transformations over the course of the exhibition. Also included in the space is an interactive display through which you may share your personal emotional journey throughout the past few months.

Currently featured in the Community Response Space is a series of 30 portrait photographs by photographer and USU professor of Hispanic Studies J.P. Spicer-Escalante. Entitled The Love in the Time of Coronavirus Project, the exhibition documents the power of personal relationships amid the current health crisis.

The Day After Tomorrow is divided into three themes. A Better Tomorrow focuses on transcendence, alternate realities, the divine, afterlife, and bliss. A Worse Yesterday comprises works of art that address events that have shaken the world and thrown it into crises such as world wars, nuclear proliferation, AIDS, genocide, racism, and immigration. Awry Ecosystem focuses on art by artists concerned with the environment and how humans are changing it.

The Day After Tomorrow is largely drawn from NEHMA’s permanent collection and contains many works of art that have not been exhibited before by living and deceased artists from California, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, as well as prior USU visiting professors.

This exhibition and programming have been made possible through the support of the Utah Division of Arts and Museums.