Hannah McBeth

As the water of the Great Salt Lake disappears, exposing an arsenic-filled lakebed, the once straightforward name “Salt Lake City” has become an emblem of lives that are vulnerable as the landscape shifts, and what we could lose if we don’t take action. The lake has shaped life across the region for generations, from skiing powder days to migration patterns among the many processes shaping the region.

In the three years since opening Salt Lake Pottery Studio, Madison Maria has seen her life change as quickly as her business. “I was engaged when I opened, married, divorced last year,” she says, describing a period marked by “constant change, with life and business and the economy.” That instability has shaped the way she runs the studio.

On view through June 21, Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt at the UMFA brings together more than three decades of the artist’s practice in an exhibition that approaches storytelling not as illustration, but as structure. Drawn from the collections of the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation, the exhibition traces how narrative moves across mediums and communities.

Modern West opens a new chapter with Unbound: Art of the West, the first exhibition staged in the gallery’s new space at 242 E. South Temple in Salt Lake City. The inaugural show introduces the gallery’s presence along one of the city’s more visible cultural corridors. The front exhibition area is an open glass room, with space for a key work to be installed directly behind the street-facing wall.

Ryan Harrington has lived in Utah long enough to watch its creative landscape reshape itself—slowly, unevenly, and often through the efforts of people working quietly in the background. Over the past two decades, he has become one of those people. His art blends the clarity of design with the energy of urban visual culture: his marker and acrylic works are built from clean lines, calibrated color interactions, balloon-lettering structures, and a long-running block-head character.

Dan Evans’ work begins with the question of what remains once an image has been 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 the viewer and holds itself.” It’s a clarity rooted not in what the image depicts, but in the structure left behind after everything recognizable has been reduced.

Rios’s path to MFA printmaker sharpened her focus on how women see themselves, and her new exhibition uses collage, text, and the uncanny to press into quiet examination. Her silhouetted collages and cropped bodies form a fragmented visual language that mirrors those inherited pressures and expectations. The show invites a slower kind of looking, where the familiar turns strange just long enough to reveal how deeply those expectations shape us.

Completed in 1890 for Salt Lake City’s first Jewish congregation, the B’nai Israel Temple carries a depth of cultural memory rare among the city’s remaining historic buildings. Its survival is uncommon in a city where progress has a habit of erasing the physical traces of its own past. Restoring the temple and establishing the Salt Lake Art Museum (SLAM) within it brings into view a narrative that has long remained at the margins.