Growing from the halls of a high school to the walls of its own museum, storied exhibition series the Spring Salon helped transform a small Utah town into “Art City.”
The 2024 Spring Salon at the Springville Museum of Art received 1,450 submissions to its annual show, breaking their own record—and it makes sense, because this is a big year. Despite its home in a tiny corner of Utah County south of Provo, with a population of just over 35,000, the Springville Museum of Art carries an impressively expansive collection of artwork that brings art enthusiasts in from all over the state. The work has been collected across generations of Springville residents at its annual Spring Salon, which celebrates its centennial this year, alongside 276 selected works, a catalogue, and a documentary film. The exhibition series is not just a venue to view the work of current Utah artists, but, this year, a place to appreciate the legacy of a small community whose history is novelly and deeply intertwined with art.
The tradition of the Spring Salon is the reason Springville has such a regionally significant museum at all. After local residents Cyrus Dallin and John Hafen donated two original works to the local high school in 1903, generations of Springville students kept searching out work, collecting it, and displaying it, to the degree that they finally needed a museum—rather than the halls of the high school—to house the resulting collection.
Some things have changed over the years, like when in 1989, the Salon shifted focus to calling for Utah art instead of any American art. And back when teenage popularity contests were more common, students would elect an “Art Queen” to help organize the Salon—you can see beauty queen-like images of them in the Salon 100 catalogue.
I have realized that the museum doesn’t only hold beauty inside, but it also has a historical relationship to people’s inspiration.
Now, that role is taken on by a volunteer group of student ambassadors. For the centennial show, they represented the museum at events and helped to plan programs, helped comb the Salon archives, contributed to the publications and marketing, and designed promotional merch. They even helped install the exhibitions—recalling black and white images of midcentury Springville teens doing the very same thing, which are on display in the anniversary installation at the museum and in the catalogue.
The art that they helped to install includes a broad range of work from artists aged eighty-nine to just twenty years old—mixed media and experimental sculptural pieces, photographs, portrait miniatures, collages, oil paintings, and more all share the walls, drawing from an array of styles and influences. “I truly believe […], and we as an institution believe, there is a place for all types of Utah visual artists and artworks in the annual Spring Salon,” says Emily Larsen, director of SMA. “It will continue to be a place that champions the best of traditional academic realism being made in the state and exciting and innovative conceptual works in new genres and mediums and everything in between.”
This year’s Salon 100 proves her right: Dennis Smith’s Angels Soaring Over Horsetail Falls is an impressionistic oil painting where a first glance may miss the surreal presence of angels. Regard, a painting by Clinton Whiting, reorients the normative concept of a “landscape” by placing it in the background of green-shaded laborers—landscapers for whom the beauty behind them is as mundane as their grass clippers. There’s the process of cellular Mitosis imagined in three-dimensional alabaster by Spencer Budd, one sickly sweet dog who is Love Sick by Mors Smith, and Reina Kropf’s humanistic deer, I’ll Make Doe, eating snakeskin and drinking something that probably isn’t good for it.
“I think [the Salon] gives a great snapshot of what types of work are being made across Utah and takes them each seriously on their own merit,” Larsen opines.
A constant among all the art in the Salon’s current grouping is a sense of grounding—grounding in the self, the natural world, faith, or the act of simply noticing and observing. In the Salon 100 catalogue, 2024 student committee member Haven Smith writes, “I have realized that the museum doesn’t only hold beauty inside, but it also has a historical relationship to people’s inspiration.”
If the museum is an archive, it’s the Salon that keeps it a living one. “The whole city of Springville right now is excited about embracing our ‘Art City’ identity and heritage,” Larsen explains. “We are working on several strategic plans right now—as a museum and as a city—that will hopefully help move us in that direction. It’s exciting to imagine what will happen in the next five to ten years as this momentum in Utah continues.” As Utah grows as a cultural destination and place of interest for many, it’s easy to imagine SMA’s impressive collection, storied tradition, and unique location attracting further attention soon.
The 100th annual Spring Salon runs through July 6, 2024.
Disclosure: Southwest Contemporary publisher Lauren Tresp was one of three paid jurors for Salon 100.
