Yesterday Anne and I wanted to break our usual weekend routine so we took a field trip to the Springville Museum of Art. It’s a place we’ve known about for some time and have often threatened to check out, but we never managed to make it down there until yesterday. If you live in the Salt Lake or Provo area and are interested in visual arts, I highly recommend this little-known treasure.
Springville is just south of Provo, about an hour’s drive from the Salt Lake Valley (35 miles from the south end of the valley, where Anne and I live). Its reputation as Utah’s artist colony is confirmed as you explore its small-townish Main Street. Many of the old store fronts and gas stations have become boutiques, galleries and studios, and I counted three businesses that included the words “Art City” in their name. The town’s single-screen moviehouse, once a common feature of all the main streets in America, now hosts live theater, while a two-story building that I suspect was a hotel in the pre-freeway days is home to a child-oriented art discovery center.
The centerpiece of this thriving scene, however, is the museum itself. Constructed as a New Deal public-works project during the Depression, the building is a fine example of the Spanish Revivalist style — in other words, it looks like Zorro’s hacienda, with tall, arched windows, stucco walls, and a floor of glazed red tiles. I love old buildings like this (not Spanish-style, necessarily, although I do like that look; I’m speaking of its vintage). I was as fascinated with the museum’s solid wood doors, which close with a deep, satisfying ker-thunk that you rarely hear these days, as I was with the collections.
The museum is dedicated almost exclusively to local Utah artists, although there is also a current exhibition of Russian works, and the permanent collection covers a timespan from shortly after the Mormon pioneers arrived in Utah through the present day. Paintings dominate, but sculpture is well-represented as well. Individual pieces range from stark landscapes to sentimental portraits to the sort of modernistic oddities that I frankly don’t understand. The sculptor Cyrus Dallin is given special attention, as is impressionist landscape painter John Hafen.
I saw a number of pieces that I liked, but two in particular really grabbed me. One was a landscape depicting Sam Bennion’s homestead near modern-day Taylorsville. I have a personal connection to that one; Sam was my direct ancestor and I’ve heard stories about this homestead from my grandfather. It was both unsettling and pleasing to finally see what the place looked like, like encountering something out of a dream.
The other painting that elicited much conversation between Anne and myself was a large wildlife by a friend of ours, Brian Durfee. Brian, if by chance you’re reading this, Anne and I were really impressed…
If any of my loyal readers are thinking you’d like to make a run down to the Springville Museum, consider driving home on old Highway 89 through Provo, Orem, and various smaller Utah County towns. Traffic is heavy and modern development is fast eating up the hay fields and farmhouses that used to line this route, but it is still possible to discern the flavor of the small farming communities that these places used to be. That’s the real Utah, not the WalMarts and Olive Gardens that repeat themselves every five miles or so.
Oh, as long as you’re down that way, you ought to stop into one of Anne’s and my favorite eateries, the Purple Turtle in Pleasant Grove. I can’t remember the exact address and I’m too lazy to look it up right now, but if you’re driving on 89 you can’t miss it. It’s a local institution that’s been there as long as I can remember, and probably longer. Everytime I pass through Utah County, I fear I’m going to learn that the Turtle has become another victim of “progress,” but judging from the Saturday afternoon crowds that Anne and I encountered, this venerable burger joint is more than holding its own against the faceless chain establishments. I recommend the Mile-High Burger, which comes with your choice of ham or bacon, and an order of Tater Gems. Anne likes the shakes.
