Kimball Art Center inspires and connects through art. Dealer’s Choice is a collaboration with Park City gallerists, who are a celebrated part of this exhibition. The Kimball Art Center asked local gallerists to look beyond their galleries (both their own and those of the Park City Gallery Association) and think about the other artists who inspire them. Featuring one artist per gallery, these artists come together in a captivating group exhibition. Dealer’s Choice is equally about the galleries and the artists they select, with each gallery highlighted through a statement about why they selected their artist and what inspires them to look deeper.

Participating galleries and artists include:

• Gallery MAR – Amy Ringholz (Jackson Hole, WY)
• J GO Gallery – Nicolas Sanchez (New York, NY)
• Julie Nester Gallery – Joe Brubaker (San Rafael, CA)
• Kimball Art Center – Nicole Pietrantoni (Walla Walla, WA)
• Lunds Fine Art Gallery – Christopher Maggio (Murray, UT)
• Meyer Gallery – Fidalis Buehler (Provo, UT)
• Montgomery-Lee Fine Art – William Maughan (Highland, UT)
• Silver Queen Fine Art – Stacey Embry (Versailles, MO)
• Trove Gallery – Kate Kilpatrick-Miller (Helper, UT)

Local artist Doug Smith took his first encaustic class at the Kimball Art Center, and now is a successful artist using this long-established medium for contemporary explorations in color, form and texture. Using a variety of techniques and materials like rust prints, metal, horsehair, campfire charcoal, print media, kanji symbols and more, his abstract works are a compelling example of continual experimentation.

Inspired by WPA-era serigraphs (also called screenprints) used to advertise America’s national parks, Doug Leen’s work is both aesthetically and historically significant. The Work Progress Administration (WPA) was the largest and most ambitious American New Deal agency, employing millions of unemployed people to carry out public works projects during the Great Depression. Hiring artists to make advertisements for national parks was just one of many New Deal projects. Leen, a former park ranger, has researched and salvaged these historic designs to bring the original posters back to life while also creating new contemporary serigraphs for today’s national parks.

KPCW Interview with Doug Leen

How do artifacts tell us of a place’s past? Artist Faith Hagenhofer asks this question in her installation NewLand. Hagenhofer creates felted wool objects—quilts, boulders, and buckets of water—to act as artifacts from a former frontier that the audience must interpret for themselves. Confronted by these artifacts, the viewer will have to make sense of a past civilization, how they used the land and why through what remains of their material cultural.

KPCW Interview with Faith Hagenhofer

You Are Here presents two unique views of Utah. It begins with Inland/Outland: Utah—a multidisciplinary project by Icelandic artist Svavar Jonatansson and Utah-based composers Matthew Durrant and Devin Maxwell. Their four short films comprised of timelapse video and original music create a mesmerizing and objective-minded look at the majesty of Utah’s landscapes. In contrast, Utah-based artist Jared Steffensen’s work reconstructs the state’s identity through appropriated movie footage that is filmed in Utah but depicts a different place in the movie’s plot—Arizona, New Mexico, and even Mars. These two complimenting examinations of Utah pull into focus our own awareness, misconceptions, and perceptions of our surroundings.