Salt Lake City Public Art Program
Connecting people to place and place to stories since 1984
This project was completed in partnership with the Community Reinvestment Agency of Salt Lake City for the downtown business district. The series of benches, thirteen in all, are located within a three block area on Main Street.
This series of three benches is located on the east side of Main Street in front of the entrance to Gallivan Plaza.
Sun, Moon & All Things In-Between is a glazed tile mural that artistically reflects the vitality, cultural diversity and aspirations of the Glendale neighborhood. The mural showcases the community’s inclusiveness and through the vibrant, colorful and inventive imagery, celebrates its residents. This collaborative, enlightened artwork blends thoughtfulness and respect in its creative function and encourages imagination, exploration and the exchange of ideas by those who observe it.
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.
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.
Kathy Wilson is a popular Salt Lake City artist. Her work is widely collected in Utah, and is offered at her own Sego Gallery, and by other dealers in the state.
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.
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.