Expanding Collections Access with Digital Exhibitions

Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the J. Willard Marriott Library’s Art and Archives Metadata Librarian and the Utah Museum of Art’s Collections Research Curator have facilitated deep and meaningful faculty and student engagement with University collections. Likewise, their intensive research has led to in-person and virtual exhibitions and programming, bringing the unique stories of the collections to light for those at the University of Utah and beyond. Finding new ways to collaborate, the UMFA and Marriott work together to foster object-based projects that enlarge local, regional, and global narratives and encounters with the collections.

See how the UMFA and Marriott are collaborating to expand access to their collections with the below virtual exhibitions. 

time trip logo with swirling striped line in pink, red, orange and yellow evoking a 1970s esthetic
Time Trip
Utah, Spiral Jetty, and Robert Smithson in the 1970s

In this digital exhibition journey to the time that Spiral Jetty took shape while, on the other end of Great Salt Lake, the University of Utah’s landscape underwent its own kind of transformation.

a black and white photograph of a women standing in the large entry to a ruined building made of rocks in a desert
Mining the West

Mining the West: Primary Elements is a digital exhibition that explores the technological, economic, social, and environmental aspects of mining in the American West from the nineteenth century through today. The exhibition features art from the UMFA and primary source material from the J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections, with additional perspectives and curricula material created by the students, staff, and faculty of the UofU and beyond. 

Susan B. Anthony stands with a group of Women Suffrage Leaders in a group in front of Hotel Utah in 1915 behind the groups a banner reads We demand an amendment to the US Constitution Enfranchising Women.
Utah Women Working for Better Days!

This digital exhibition documents a physical exhibition of the same name that was installed in the UMFA's ACME Lab beginning in March 2020. Utah Women Working for Better Days! celebrates voting rights anniversaries in 2020, including the 150th anniversary of Utah women casting the first votes in the United States under a women's equal suffrage law.