The UMFA’s fourth ACME Lab, The International Tolerance Project: Promoting Dialogue Through Design, features select works from a larger traveling poster exhibition, TOLERANCE. The UMFA ACME team thoughtfully chose more than twenty posters to include from TOLERANCE, a project originally comprised of more than one hundred works from artists around the world. The International Tolerance Project will illustrate the power of visual communication and encourage community dialogue around the unifying theme of tolerance.

A series of hands-on art-making, participatory activities, and a free public talk by Mirko Ilić, the New York-based designer/illustrator who orchestrated TOLERANCE, are offered in effort to involve Museum visitors in the overall conversation. UMFA director of education and engagement Jorge Rojas and ACME Coordinator Emily Izzo collaborated with Museum graphic designers Jodi Patterson and Meredith Bunsawat to curate the flagship exhibition for Salt Lake City. Illić’s local liaison Dallas Graham, creator of The Red Fred Project, a national nonprofit publishing company, approached UMFA with this project. Together, the artists and curators hope to inspire viewers to consider their individual and collective roles in working toward a more accepting and understanding global society. The exhibition presents tolerance of others as a starting point toward the broader goal of acceptance.

The UMFA is just one of several participating Salt Lake City organizations who are taking their own part in TOLERANCE, including AIGA Salt Lake, Ririe Woodbury Dance Company, Salt Lake City Public Library, Pioneer Park Coalition, and Salt Lake Film Society. TOLERANCE has traveled to eighteen countries around the world, including most recently South Africa, where the exhibition was on view at the Constitution Hill, now used as a museum, in Johannesburg, the infamous prison where Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and other notable activists were once imprisoned.

The International Tolerance Project aligns with the UMFA’s goals to highlight art’s relevancy and role in creating a just world and to advance diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion across all aspects of the Museum.

ACME Lab is an innovative space in the Museum’s Emma Eccles Jones Education Center dedicated to community engagement and art experimentation. This exhibition and ACME Lab is made possible, in part, by a generous gift from The JoAnne L. Shrontz Family Foundation.