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Editor's note:This article is part of a series reviewing Utah and national history for KSL.com's Historic section.SALT LAKE CITY — Commonly known as the “First Lady of Utah Art,” Utah’s art circles are celebrating the 150th anniversary of Alice Merrill Horne’s birth this year and honoring one of the state’s more prominent artists and earliest female politicians.
“She probably had the biggest impact on the development of the visual arts in Utah,” said Jim Glenn, visual arts manager for Utah Public Art and Design Arts. “She set up a framework to support the arts in Utah with the establishment of the agency, the Utah Arts Institute.”
One of Horne’s major contributions to the state, a state-run art collection, has had her name on it since the 1930s, informally named the Alice Collection. However, lawmakers passed a bill that formally rename it the State of Utah Alice Merrill Horne Art Collection during this year’s legislative session.
The move, Glenn points out, better recognizes Horne for the work she did for Utah’s artists and for the role she played in Utah.
She was born in Fillmore on Feb. 2, 1868, and studied art at the University of Utah (then known as the University of Deseret) and at the Art Institute of Chicago and privately under various local and national artists, according to Utah History Encyclopedia.
She began as a schoolteacher in her hometown of Fillmore and then taught at a school in Salt Lake City. When she was 23, she was named chair of the Utah Liberal Arts Committee and published a book of poems written by female poets living in Utah.
In 1898, at the age of 30, she became the second woman to be elected to the Utah House of Representatives. While there, she forged a bill that created Utah’s art collection of state artists in 1899.
The collection remains in existence to this day as the oldest state-run art agency in the nation and is now valued at more than $10 million dollars, according to Glenn.
She also sponsored a bill that provided full four-year tuition scholarships for teaching students at the University of Utah and chaired the university’s Land Site committee that selected the current location of the school, according to Utah History Encyclopedia.
In 1914, she published “Devotees and Their Shrines,” a handbook of Utah artists that focused on visual art, architecture and traditional craft and their importance.
“She was really interested in supporting Utah artists and suggested in her book that every home should have original artwork, both for the betterment of the people that bought the artwork, but also to support Utah artists,” Glenn said.
In the following decades of her life, she promoted Utah and other intermountain region artists, selling their paintings to help artists continue in the field. She also created a foundation that provided scholarships for art students before her death in 1948.
However, Horne’s impact in Utah wasn’t just centered in the arts. She served on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ General Board of National Women’s Relief Society from 1901 to 1915, once representing the relief society and the U.S. at the International Congress of Women in Berlin, Germany, in 1904. She chaired an infant care committee that sponsored a “Clean Milk for Utah” campaign that led to stricter standards for milk sold in the state, according to the Utah History Encyclopedia.
Horne was a historian who served as a president of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. She also was an early advocate for clean air in Utah, organizing the “Smokeless Fuel Federation” in the 1930s to cut down and eliminate coal burning as a home heating fuel.
As Glenn puts it, Horne had a “broad interest” in helping shape Utah. Her work in the arts and beyond not only impacted the state during her life but in the 70 years after it, as well.
