Exhibit centered on Western perspectives is in Salt Lake before heading to Smithsonian

SALT LAKE CITY — A nationally touring exhibit featuring art that tells the story of the American West is at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, before making it to a final destination at the Smithsonian.

"This nationally touring exhibition, organized through a deeply collaborative process with our colleagues, presents the opportunity to see the West anew through the eyes of diverse modern and contemporary artists," said Stephanie Stebich, director at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The exhibition, titled "Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea," is a collaborative effort between four museums in the American West and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. The gallery features mixed media portraying different perspectives of the West by modern and contemporary artists.

The 46 artists featured in the exhibit feature diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Artists with different racial and ethnic backgrounds were emphasized to bring a more nuanced and multifaceted perspective on the West into view.

"It's really quite an extraordinary exhibition, not just for the state, in the sense of its topic which is trying to explore the notion of the West — which is such an iconic part of American history and American identity — but through a much more complicated lens than what we typically see," said Alisa McCusker, senior curator of European and American art at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.

"Individual stories really make up the history of the West," she added. "It's not just these consistent themes that we've sort of had driven into us about 'Manifest Destiny' or 'Cowboys versus Indians,' but that it's a much more complicated story than that."

The exhibition is bilingual, with both English and Spanish markers, as well as a land acknowledgment recognizing each native tribal land that the contributing institutions reside on. Artwork featured in the exhibit is drawn from the permanent collections of Idaho's Boise Art Museum, Washington state's Whatcom Museum, Oregon's Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, the Utah Museum of Fine Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The art has been organized into three sections with the themes:

• Caretakers, which examines how artists can redefine what it means to take care of themselves, their communities and their futures.
• Memory Makers, which explores how artists act as transmitters of cultural memory as they bring forth neglected histories of the West through their work.
• Boundary Breakers, which highlights artists who unsettle common beliefs that inform the popular understanding of the American West.

The overarching themes are meant to illuminate the different ways artists perceive life in and the history of the American West, in ways that may be in conflict or contradiction with one another.

"What's taken over in popular culture is not the classic image of the Western landscape that we can talk about in art history, but rather the Hollywood image — the stereotyped and racist images have become the mainstay of popular culture," said McCusker. "In order for us to finally move past some of these stereotypes, we need to accept that there are so many more, like this whole multitude of stories and perspectives about the West."

The West and the histories of those who've lived in it are often centered on themes of survival and hope. While the West represents different things to different people, the exhibit is an opportunity to explore its history in a complex way. It will be at the Utah museum until June 11.

"My family came from Ireland during the potato famine and barely made it here. My other ancestors were also very poor farmers from northern Germany and from Sweden. The United States, the West especially, was a place of hope for so many people," said McCusker. "And I want my son, I want our children, future generations, to recognize that all of our stories are actually much more similar than they are different."

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