Utah Women Working for Better Days!

The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) at the University of Utah welcomes the public back to the galleries on Wednesday, August 26. For everyone’s safety, the visitor experience will look and feel a little different, and all group activities—including new digital learning opportunities—will be offered online only.

The Museum’s top priority is to keep visitors and staff safe and healthy by preventing the spread of COVID-19 in the Marcia and John Price Museum Building.

Because circumstances may change at any time, visitors should check umfa.utah.edu/COVID-19 for complete and up-to-date information before they visit. Visitors may also call the UMFA welcome desk at 801.581.7332.

Here are the details:

UMFA members, docents and volunteers, and essential healthcare workers are invited to early reopening on Wednesday, August 19 through Friday, August 21. Admission will be free on those days.

New operating hours are Wednesdays through Fridays, noon to 5 pm. Seniors and high-risk visitors are invited to visit on these days between 11 am and noon.

Visitors and staff will be required to wear face coverings and maintain the recommended social distance of six feet between themselves and other visitors or household groups, in accordance with the University’s COVID-19 policy.

Visitors and staff may enter the building only if they’re healthy.

Visitors are strongly encouraged to reserve tickets in advance at umfa.utah.edu/visit. Tickets may also be purchased at the welcome desk upon arrival—but to guarantee entry, advanced tickets are recommended.

Visitor capacity will be limited to 100 guests at a time, and no groups larger than 10 will be admitted.

Touchpoints have been minimized, cleaning protocols are enhanced, and the building’s HVAC system has been assessed by U facilities experts and exceeds all Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines.

While group tours and classroom visits are on pause, the UMFA offers new digital resources and tours, as well as new distance learning opportunities and digital classroom visits for K–12 educators and U professors.

All UMFA events and programs will be held online until further notice. Please visit the event calendar at https://umfa.utah.edu/events.

The Museum Store and Café
The Museum Store will be open Wednesday through Friday during Museum hours. The Museum Café will be open Monday through Friday for beverage service only.

What’s On View
The UMFA has extended the run of Beyond the Divide: Merchant, Artist, Samurai in Edo Japan, a popular exhibition drawn from the Museum’s collection of Japanese art. Visitors can also see Utah Women Working for Better Days!, a celebration of voting rights anniversaries that opened just a week before the Museum closed on March 13. Four spectacular paintings by renowned artists Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Moran, Alma Thomas, and Diego Rivera, on loan from national institutions, also remain on view. For information on all current temporary exhibitions, please visit https://umfa.utah.edu/temporary.

What’s Online
Visit https://umfa.utah.edu/museum-at-home for digital art-inspired content and art-making activities.

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The UMFA’s new ACME Lab, Utah Women Working for Better Days!, celebrates a number of voting rights anniversaries in 2020, including the 150th anniversary of Utah as the first place where women voted in the modern nation. Organized in collaboration with Better Days 2020, an organization championing Utah women’s history across the state, and drawing from materials in the J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections, this exhibition is less a history lesson than it is a provocation: What do “better days” look like to you?

A variety of histories inspired this ACME Lab, such as the story of Seraph Young, a Utahn who became the first woman in the modern United States to legally vote in 1870 and the 100-year anniversary of Congress‘ ratification of the 19th amendment, which granted American women suffrage in 1920. The Utah women who challenged the status quo in the days leading up to 1870 dared to dream of a world in which they had a say in policies that would affect them. They did not wait for enfranchisement to insist upon it.

Utah Women Working for Better Days! proposes that demanding political representation—while immensely important—is but one avenue of creating social change. Civic participation—like art-making—begins, first, with an act of imagination. It dares to imagine a world not as it is, but as it might be.

Better Days’ interactive components allow visitors to express their visions for the future and help create a fuller picture of the true diversity of experiences that have shaped—and continue to shape—our state. While opinions may differ about what “better days” look like, we hope visitors leave this exhibition energized by rethinking their own roles in creating the future in this place we call home.

Curatorial Sponsor: Sam and Diane Stewart Family Foundation

Support for this exhibition was provided in part by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

ACME initiative was established with generous support from National Endowment for the Arts.

ACME Lab, located inside the UMFA’s Emma Eccles Jones Education Center, is made possible in part by a generous gift from the JoAnne L. Shrontz Family Foundation.

Support provided by Hearst Foundations.