Creativity is a broad-band term.  

– Utonian, 1970-71 

The artist does not have to will a response to the ‘deepening political crisis in America.’ Sooner or later the artist is implicated or devoured by politics without even trying.⁸  

– Robert Smithson, “Art and the Political Whirlpool, or the Politics of Disgust,” Artforum, 1970 

On a daily basis, students witnessed the latest casualties of the Vietnam War televised across evening news reports and newspapers. Whether the violent imagery fueled artistic vision or not depended on who was doing the creating.  

While Robert Smithson seldom made direct references to political and social issues in his writing, and even fewer appear in his best-known artwork, countless other artists made racial injustice, feminism, environmental decline, and controversial military campaigns the subject matter of their paintings, plays, poems, dances, films, and music.  During the seventies, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts exhibited artwork on these themes and brought works into the collection that remains today as a testimonial to the tumultuous times.  

Music spoke to these same issues – or provided escape from them. Salt Lake City youth formed their own bands, enjoyed campus-sponsored dances and concerts with psychedelic light shows, and saw internationally recognized acts at the Terrace Ballroom, the Coliseum, and Lagoon. The variety of acts were enough to rival that of the formidable record collection of Robert Smithson himself, which ran from Argentine tango to the Velvet Underground.9  

Meanwhile, dance reached an interdisciplinary zenith at the University of Utah in the 1970s as collaborations with students and faculty in architecture, photography, music, and even computer science flourished. Current events found their way into every creative endeavor imaginable – with some artists going so far as to form an emergency cultural government. Arts and culture on the U’s campus couldn’t help but reflect the times – so long as creatives had the will to respond.