Appropriately, It’s an Art Exhibit That Helps Put a Century of Zion Into Perspective
Lenses snap, brushes stroke, a dancer leaps … and Zion National Park is transposed to St. George. The resulting artwork—photographs, paintings and a video installation—is on display in an old seed warehouse in the Utah town’s historic district, a 45-minute drive from its subject. The St. George Art Museum has turned over its entire space for this special show, A Century of Sanctuary, an early kickoff to Zion National Park’s 100th birthday, the rest of which will be celebrated on location throughout 2009.
Here the grandeur of Utah’s oldest and most visited park is spliced into 143 pieces displayed on two floors. While the firsthand Zion experience is hard to top, there’s an advantage to seeing it through this collection of strategically curated perspectives. It’s easy to get overwhelmed at the park itself; here viewers can experience the emotional responses elicited by these framed interpretations of Zion’s iconic vistas.
It seems impossible to fully appreciate the breadth of this majestic landscape without taking in these intimate and expansive portraits of stone, sky, flora and water. Shape and color resonate in each room of the museum. The warmth of the cliff faces and summits shine in vermillion, tan, crimson, orange and ecru, peppered in a glaze of black where minerals merit it. The exposed expanses of Kayenta and Navajo sandstone represent both the real form and the art.
On the first floor, 68 contemporary paintings—selected from more than 500 entries—are hung to create a visual flow. Nearly all the pieces are recognizable and accessible views of nature, with little abstraction or coded interpretation, yet they are dynamic by virtue of the subject. To absorb these pieces is to contemplate the idealized versus the real, the varied symmetry of eroded stone, the subtext of water and wind shaping landscape over millennial time. Such as “Unmatched Beauty” by Nevadan Steve William Lensick, who captures the lights and darks of the Virgin River, backed by golden trees and craggy heights. It’s hard to imagine that this sleepy river was once mighty enough to carve the narrow canyons and fill their depths.
Closer to the cutting-edge is an installation in which a video is projected onto a textured mosaic backdrop of gypsum. A lone dancer interacts with the landscape of Zion to the symphonic sounds of “From the Canyons to the Stars,” composed by Olivier Messiaen for the American bicentennial and inspired, in part, by images of Zion. In the commentary accompanying her work, video-artist Kathy Clement Cieslewicz describes how Zion intensifies her senses, whispers to her in silence, shouts to her in rushing waters, offers her visual phenomenon usually found only in dreams.
For the most intense Sanctuary experience, visitors should start in the large second-floor space where the 74 historical works hang beneath a high ceiling of exposed rafters and steel trusses. They are arranged in chronological order, starting in the 1870s, and form a panoramic portrait of Zion. Dating to the 1870s, these works include the most famous early artists associated with the park. Among them are Thomas Moran, the dean of American landscape painting, and Ansel Adams, whose crisp black-and-white photographs capture the “Yosemite of the Desert” and are among the best of his oeuvre.
Frederick Dellenbaugh’s powerful paintings were such a hit when they were first exhibited—at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis—that they stirred great national interest in Zion. Along with an article that chronicled his expedition in the Colorado Plateau for a leading magazine of the day (Scribner’s), Dellenbaugh is credited with helping to preserve Zion as a park.
Artists have long been the “mediators between nature and art,” says Deborah Reeder, the museum’s curator. “Art helped create the desire to found the park system in order to protect and preserve American’s marvels for all time.” For the uninitiated, these early paintings and photographs were “windows onto that special world of the West.”
Zion went from frontier obstacle to magnetic destination after the early artists—some attached to government-funded expeditions—arrived on the scene. The advent of the Union Pacific Railroad’s tours to Zion and the installation of buildings to house wealthy visitors brought further attention to this natural wonderland. Artifacts from these early days are displayed in glass cases as part of the exhibit.
Zion was actually designated as the Mukuntuweap National Monument by President Taft in 1909. The not-so-catchy name came from the Paiute word for “narrow or straight canyon.” Ten years later the National Park Service went with “Zion,” borrowing the Hebrew word for “sanctuary” that Mormon pioneers had first used to describe the place. It was a good marketing move: Zion’s visitation has grown from a few thousand in the early days to a few million last year.
In Zion, nature is conscripted by biblical references given not only by the Mormons, who made the canyon home in the wake of the Paiutes, but also by a Methodist minister who left the indelible mark of his associations, including “Angel’s Landing” and “Court of the Patriarchs.” Those are some powerful titles, and perhaps that’s why most artists chose to simply mimic the names of the formations that their works portray—“Entering Kolob,” “The Great White Throne.” Sometimes it’s not worth trying to compete.
Zion’s Centennial Events
A Century of Sanctuary: The Art of Zion National Park—On view at the St. George Art Museum through Jan. 24. Free lectures (all at 7 p.m.): Nov. 18, Donna Poulton, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and Vern Swanson, Springville Museum of Art; Dec. 16, J.L. Crawford “On Growing Up in Zion”; Jan. 20, Artists’ Round Table with Roland Lee. Museum admission is $3 adults, $1 kids under age 12, free under age 3. Open 1-8 p.m. Mon., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat. 47 East 200 North, St. George, Utah, (435) 627-4525, sgartmuseum.org.
Zion in the Movies—Ten films shot in or near the national park, shown throughout the summer of ’09 in Springdale’s Canyon Community Center. Zion in the movies—Ten films shot in or near the national park will be shown throughout the summer of ’09 in Springdale’s Canyon Community Center. Included will be Robert Redford’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (he recommended Zion to the director), The Electric Horseman and Jeremiah Johnson, plus The Eiger Sanction, starring Clint East-wood, with Zion standing in for the Alps.
Centennial Interpretive Programs—There will be a variety of special activities at Zion Lodge and the Human History Museum in 2009.
Zion Field Institute—Spend a day soaking up natural and cultural history on educational explorations in March, April and October ’09. 800-635-3959, zionpark.org.
Details—For information on all things Zion, call (435) 772-3256 or visit nps.gov/zion.
Escapes feature by Rosie Dempsey in Desert Companion Magazine’s Nov/Dec 08 issue
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