Hannah McBeth

As the waters of the Great Salt Lake disappear, exposing an arsenic-filled lakebed, the name "Salt Lake City" has become an emblem of lives vulnerable to a shifting landscape—and a warning of what we stand to lose without action. For generations, the lake has shaped life across the region, sustaining everything from winter snowpack to crucial migration patterns.

In the three years since opening Salt Lake Pottery Studio, Madison Maria has seen her life transform as rapidly as her business. “I was engaged when I opened, got married, and then divorced last year,” she says, describing a period defined by “constant change—in life, business, and the economy.” That very instability has come to shape the way she runs the studio.

On view through June 21, Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt at the UMFA gathers more than three decades of the artist’s work in an exhibition that treats storytelling not as illustration, but as structure. Drawn from the collection of the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation, the show traces how narrative weaves across mediums, histories, and communities.

Modern West opens a new chapter with Unbound: Art of the West, the inaugural exhibition in its new space at 242 E. South Temple in Salt Lake City. The show marks the gallery’s arrival on one of the city’s prominent cultural corridors. Inside, an open, glass-fronted gallery space allows a key work to be displayed directly behind the street-facing wall, inviting passersby into the exhibit.

Ryan Harrington has lived in Utah long enough to watch its creative landscape reshape itself—slowly, unevenly, and often through the quiet efforts of those working behind the scenes. Over the past two decades, he has become one of those essential figures. His art blends the precision of design with the raw energy of urban culture, combining clean lines, calibrated color interactions, and balloon-lettering structures centered around a long-running block-head character in marker and acrylic.

Dan Evans’ work begins with a fundamental question: what remains once an image is pared to its essentials? “I’ve always been drawn to systems where clarity matters,” he says, “where you pare things down until the lack of recognition engages viewers and holds their attention.” It is a clarity rooted not in what the image depicts, but in the structure that remains after everything recognizable has fallen away.

Grounded in her background as an MFA printmaker, Rios’s work centers on how women view themselves. Her new exhibition uses collage, text, and the uncanny to press into a quiet examination of those internal dynamics. Through silhouetted forms and cropped bodies, her fragmented visual language reflects inherited cultural expectations, inviting a slower gaze where the familiar grows strange enough to reveal its hidden weight.

Built in 1890 for Salt Lake City’s first Jewish congregation, the B’nai Israel Temple holds a depth of cultural history rarely preserved in the modern urban landscape. In a city where progress frequently erases its own architectural heritage, the temple's survival stands out. Restoring the space and establishing the Salt Lake Art Museum (SLAM) within its walls illuminates a narrative long kept at the margins.