salt is an ongoing program of exhibitions showcasing the work of emerging artists from around the world. 

ACME Lab is an exhibition space for art experimentation and exploration. The Lab promotes collaboration between museum and community through active participation—providing an avenue for mutual learning, discovery, and understanding.

Ideas about the American West, both in popular culture and in commonly accepted historical narratives, are often based on a past that never was, and fail to take into account important events that actually occurred. The exhibition “Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea,” examines the perspectives of 48 modern and contemporary artists who offer a broader and more inclusive view of this region.

Air makes the invisible visible, through contemporary art that explores air from environmental, social justice, and cultural perspectives.

Imagine your family’s journey to get here. Imagine the map of the lands and seas they traveled, the borders they passed through, the lands they’ve cared for. Now imagine that journey is on a quilt. What would that quilt look like? 

Through a keen awareness of the spaces we inhabit—whether interior or exterior, natural or built, real or imagined—Space Maker explores the tensions, histories, and myths that shape our experiences of the world.

Featuring one hundred works by nearly eighty artists from the 1920s to the present, Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem surveys nearly a century of creative achievements by artists of African descent.

Seven Masters: 20th-Century Japanese Woodblock Prints focuses on seven artists who played a significant role in the development of the new print–shin hanga–and whose works boldly exemplify this new movement.

Experience Edo-period Japan and its beautiful scrolls, screen dividers, sculpture, prints, and samurai armor and weapons from the UMFA’s vibrant collection of Japanese art.

DE | MARCATION, a limited-edition portfolio surveying the work of Utah contemporary photographers, challenges traditional notions of the West and highlights the state’s complexity.

Landscape Paintings from the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Power Couples: The Pendant Format in Art explores works of art conceived as pairs and examines how timeless pairings from sixteenth-century Europe to contemporary Utah illuminate of-the-moment ideas.

The Race to Promontory: The Transcontinental Railroad and the American West is a major traveling exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary of the “Meeting of the Rails” at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, with original photographs, historic artifacts, and one of the famous ceremonial spikes. 

Site Lines: Recent Work by University of Utah Art Faculty, guest curated by Felicia Baca, features more than forty works in a wide variety of mediums from twenty-seven local creators and teachers. This highly anticipated show celebrates local artists and recognizes the talented creators who teach art on the U campus.

Chiura Obata was one of the most significant Japanese American artists of the twentieth century. Chiura Obata: An American Modern, a major retrospective of his work, features more than 150 watercolors, paintings, prints, and screens. Many of these works have never been on public display.

From a small plane flying at a low altitude, photographer Marilyn Bridges (American, born 1948) captures the marks of mankind on the surface of our planet.

German artist Ilse Bing (1899–1998) balanced unusual perspectives, carefully cropped compositions, and precise technical skill with poetic realism in her extraordinary photographs.

Go West! Art of the American Frontier from the Buffalo Bill Center of the West examines the development and disruption of the American West through more than eighty original artworks by Euro-American and Plains Indian artists. 

World-renowned artist Spencer Finch created the site-specific installation Great Salt Lake and Vicinity in response to our building, our landscape, and our community.