Salt Lake City Public Art Program

Connecting people to place and place to stories since 1984

The Bike Stops Here: Artist Designed Bicycle Racks

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Seeing the rapid growth of bicycling in Salt Lake City and the desire to encourage more people to choose cycling as a transportation option, there is an essential need and desire for safe and secure bicycle parking. To that end, and in the ongoing effort to weave art into the fabric of our urban infrastructure, the Salt Lake Art Design Board requested proposals from Utah artists to design and fabricate bicycle racks that are identifiable, functional, and imaginative. The bicycle racks are installed at 8 downtown locations along the 300 South Cycle Track from 200 West to 600 East.

The project was designed to meet the following goals:

To enhance Salt Lake City’s image as a cultural destination and bicycle friendly city: a community that regards bicycles as a permanent and important part of the City’s transportation system.

To promote clean air, a healthy lifestyle, and encourage more people to choose bicycling as a transportation option.

To provide and integrate into our urban infrastructure, usable public art as aesthetically functional bicycle parking.

Secret Dwellings

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Cottonwood Park is an active 25-acre property that intersects with the Jordan River Parkway. It serves the residents of Jordan Meadows Neighborhood as well as the employees of the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food whose building is located adjacent to the park.

Secret Dwellings reflect cottonwood leaves floating down the river, traveling through the landscape and cityscape, like people from all over the world brought to this area to make their homes here, bringing their stories and memories, creating a new vibrant community.

Konopasek’s 3 sculptures are intimate, approachable and encourage curiosity and a sense of wonder. They reference the river as a connection, as a life source and the natural habitat coexisting with the urban habitat. They also suggest the growth cycle of trees and leaves; budding to falling and making space for more leaves – parallel to people and the city.

The text on the sculptures is fragmented nursery rhymes in English and Spanish to represent the sense of wonder and a new beginning.

May We Have Peace

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Born on June 30, 1914, Allan Capron Haozous was to become known as Allan Houser. His parents, Sam and Blossom Haozous were members of the Chiricahua Apache tribe who were held prisoners of war for 27 years. Freed in 1914, most of the tribe returned to New Mexico. Houser’s parents, however, were with a small group of families who chose to stay in Oklahoma to farm.

In 1934 Houser enrolled in the Painting School at the Santa Fe Indian School. He became one of the school’s most famous students and by 1939 his work was exhibited in San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Chicago. The same year, he was commissioned to paint a mural in the Department of Interior building in Washington, and its success led to a second mural commission there in 1940. In 1941 he moved to Los Angeles where he had the opportunity to visit museum exhibitions of European modernist sculptors such as Brancusi, Arp, Lipschitz, and Henry Moore, whose work would have a lasting influence on Houser as his own style evolved in the succeeding decades.

In 1951 Houser moved to Brigham City, Utah where he taught art at the Intermountain Indian School for the next eleven years. He continued to paint and produce small wooden sculptures, and in 1954 he was honored by the French government with the Palmes d’Academique for his outstanding achievement as a teacher and artist.

In 1962 he joined the faculty of the newly created Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe where he created the sculpture department and began focusing his own artistic output on three-dimensional work. In 1975 Houser retired from teaching to devote himself full-time to his own work. In the two following decades he produced close to 1,000 sculptures in stone, wood, and bronze, and emerged as a major figure on an international scale. He had nearly 50 solo exhibitions in museums and galleries in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and he continued working until his death in 1994.

School Children’s Monument (Tribute to the Nation’s Constitution and Flag)

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Knaphus was a Mormon convert, who produced many sculptures and bas-reliefs for LDS temples, as well as busts of famous Utahns, decorations for office buildings, mortuary and chapel friezes. His best known work is the Handcart Monument, one of the most recognized symbols of Mormonism. The heroic size version stands in Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

Perhaps his best-loved secular monument is the 1937 School Children’s Monument near the west entrance to the Salt Lake City and County Building. It features a granite base holding a scroll depicting the United States constitution. On either side of the base, facing each other, are life-size statues of a boy and girl looking up at the United States flag atop the seventy-foot flag pole set in the base. The statue honors school children, whose nickels and dimes paid for it.

Salt Air Summer

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James Harvey Wilson is a watercolorist (egg tempera) and oil painter of color-impressionist landscape scenes. Olpin’s Artists of Utah (1999) cites exhibition activity in Santa Fe and New York City.