Brigham Young University Museum of Art

Provo, Utah: October 26, 2009 — The Brigham Young University Museum of Art invites you to get creative by participating in the museum’s SNAP! Project — a crowd-sourced, crowd-curated online exhibition of self-portraits.

From now until midnight on Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2009, you are invited to submit digital self-portraits that capture your own personality in a unique and imaginative manner. Digital files should be e-mailed to byusnap@gmail.com. Digital files should be no larger than one megabyte. Participants may not submit more than one entry each for this competition. Participants must include their name and contact information in the body of the e-mail.

“We hope the SNAP! Project will help our visitors think critically about the questions posed and the ideas raised about identity and perception in the recently opened ‘Mirror Mirror’ exhibition,” said Christopher Wilson, public relations manager at the Museum of Art. “We hope the SNAP! Project encourages participants to take some time pondering the works in the exhibition to get their creative juices flowing.”

Online voting for the most interesting and imaginative self-portraits begins on Dec. 9, 2009, and continues until Jan. 19, 2010. Participants, who submitted a self-portrait, as well as those who did not, are encouraged to participate in the voting. To vote, go to Museum of Art's homepage (http://moa.byu.edu). There will be a link to the SNAP! voting page.

Entries that receive the most online votes will be displayed at the Museum of Art on January 21, 2010. The outcome of the project will be the subject of a panel discussion that will take place at the MOA at 7 p.m. on Jan.21, 2010, when the winning entries will also be announced in the Museum of Art Auditorium on the museum’s lower level. More information about the SNAP! Project is available online at http://moa.byu.edu.

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Provo, Utah: April 10, 2009 – Since the early 1900s, Americans have been interested in the lands of the southwest, many of which have been designated as national parks that draw thousands every year to explore ancient ruins, natural arches, dramatic canyons, subterranean caves, rugged deserts, solitary buttes, red rocks, sand dunes and volcanic areas.

On two consecutive Thursdays in May, the Brigham Young University Museum of Art will provide an opportunity for Utahns to explore America’s fascination with the southwestern landscape through the works of the artists and authors whose romantic visions of these wild areas continue to influence the way we think about them today.

“There is something peaceful and awe-inspiring about the great southwestern desert—its rich and varied beauty engages our aesthetic sensibilities,” said Museum of Art Educator Rita Wright. “We hope to encourage further contemplation of these sensitivities with our first-ever reading circle, which will focus on Willa Cather’s enduring literary novel of the American Southwest ‘Death comes for the Archbishop.’”

On Thursday, May 7, 2009, at 7 p.m. in the auditorium on the museum’s lower level, Gloria Cronin of the BYU English Department will introduce Cather's (1873 – 1947) “Death Comes For the Archbishop” in a 50-minute illustrated lecture. The lecture will document Cather’s numerous visits to the religious landmarks of Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico, as well as the many stories of the area told to her by priests, miners, railroad workers, Native Americans, explorers, hunters and artists.

“Cather’s painterly prose owes much to her intimate acquaintance with the early Taos and Santa Fe artists who were busy recording the local landscape, its animals, occupations, peoples, artifacts, textiles, dwellings, sacred places, rituals and religion,” Cronin said. “Like their paintings, her anthropologically accurate prose was also filled with nostalgia and longing for the purity of the primordial — an unmediated space in which to rethink the American relationship between self, nature, God, culture, and a disorienting modernity.”

Those who are interested in reading and discussing “Death Comes for the Archbishop” are invited back to the museum on the following Thursday to attend the first-ever MOA Reading Circle event. Museum staff members and Dr. Cronin will take part in the reading circle, which will be held at 7 p.m. in the West Lied Gallery on the museum’s main level on Thursday, May 14, 2009. Copies of “Death Comes For the Archbishop” are available at a discount from the Museum Store. For more information about the store, call (801) 422-8251. This lecture and reading circle event are offered in conjunction with the museum exhibition “Visions of the Southwest from the Diane and Sam Stewart Art Collection.” Admission to the lecture, reading circle and exhibition is free. For more information about the lecture and reading circle, call the museum at (801) 422-8287.

“Visions of the Southwest from the Diane and Sam Stewart Art Collection,” currently on view at the BYU Museum of Art, features 124 works of art from the private collection of Diane and Sam Stewart, Utah art collectors and friends of the museum. The oil paintings, works on paper, and sculpture in this collection were created by many of the master artists of Taos and Santa Fe as well as their contemporaries in California, Utah, and other Western states. Native American baskets, pots, and rugs from the Stewart’s collection and antique furniture from the Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe complement the works in the exhibition. The exhibition will be on view through July 3, 2009.

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Provo, Utah: March 5, 2009 – Beginning April 1, 2009, the Brigham Young University Museum of Art will change its weekday evening hours.

The museum will be open Monday though Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The museum will remain open until 9 p.m. on Thursday evenings for lectures, exhibition openings, and other educational programming. The museum’s Saturday hours will remain unchanged: opening at noon and closing at 5 p.m.

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