Exhibition Preview | 5 pm | ACME Lab

Artist Talk: “Designing Our Futures” with Ryan Baxter, Bryan Brooks, Jarod Hamm, Maria Sykes | 7pm

Step into the year 2039 and imagine our futures. Vote for the version you hope to see, explore futuristic objects, snap a souvenir photo, and consider your own role in shaping your community’s destiny.

With its motto “Rural and Proud,” the Green River, Utah-based organization Epicenter engages in design-based practices to support the residents, businesses, and artists within a town of 961 people. In Epicenter’s Our Futures ACME Lab, visitors are invited to “time travel” through this interactive, hands-on installation to explore possible futures for Green River. What will it look like several decades from now? Will it be boom or bust for our rural neighbors? How do these possible futures impact individuals? This fun, futuristic, and semi-fictional “case study” asks visitors to speculate the future of their own towns—and to examine the role they each play in creating it. 

Located in the Emma Eccles Jones Education Center, ACME Lab is a new exhibition space for art experimentation and exploration. Visitors of all ages are encouraged to ask questions, make connections across disciplines, and engage with art in new ways. The lab promotes collaboration between museum and community through active participation—providing an avenue for mutual learning, discovery, and understanding.

Epicenter: Our Futures is on view in the UMFA ACME Lab March 2–July 1, 2018.

This exhibition and ACME Lab is made possible, in part, by a generous gift from The JoAnne L. Shrontz Family Foundation.