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Feature: Hints & Tips
Corporations that Collect Art, Prestige and Accolades
by Sue Martin
Corporations may have many reasons for starting and expanding a collection of original art. It may begin with the passion of a top-level executive. It may stem from a desire to support local artists. It may even involve a desire to impress clients or create promotional opportunities for the company. Whatever the reason, artists should keep their eyes open for corporate collectors and the process for becoming part of the collection. Here are three examples of Utah Corporations known for their art collections. Each has a different approach to buying new art.
Parsons Behle Latimer
I first became aware of Parsons Behle Latimer's eclectic art collection though a visit to their downtown Salt Lake City offices on behalf of a client. I would have welcomed a tour of all five floors of PBL office space, but I had to satisfy myself with the pieces in our meeting room and those I glimpsed as I found my way to the restroom.
Ray Etcheverry, Chairman and President of PBL's Board, explains that PBL's collection began in the early '70s as the law firm upgraded office space and wanted to decorate with some unique pieces of art. Over the years, the collection has expanded as the firm has expanded its space. PBL is one of the largest law firms in the Intermountain West, with offices in Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and Reno.
Collecting for PBL is typically space- and need-driven, with no particular style or theme in mind, though they usually try to select pieces by Utah artists. There is no set process for making purchasing decisions, but it usually begins with an identified need, followed by a recommendation by a top-level executive, or a visit to one of the Salt Lake galleries with whom the firm has done business in the past. If some executives have played a bigger role in the expanding collection, it may have been timing – the need to fill newly renovated or expanded space – or the executive's own personal interest in art.
The PBL collection adds a distinctly original touch to the luxuriously appointed offices. How refreshing to see an original contemporary mixed media piece instead of the ubiquitous print of Washington crossing the Delaware. To some discerning clients (and aren't those the kind you want?) the art collection says, "These folks have taste. They don't have a cookie-cutter approach to doing business. They will take special care of my business." But does it also make PBL a great place to work? Etcheverry believes the art "is one of the things that makes the place attractive. Many employees recognize that we do have a very nice atmosphere" in which to work.
Though PBL has never sought proposals from artists, preferring to work through galleries, they would be happy to look at an artist's portfolio if one came through the mail.
Zions Bank
The Zions Bank art collection of some 3,000 pieces was started in the early '60s by longtime bank chairman Roy Simmons and his wife Tibby. They loved art and wanted to help struggling Utah artists. Roy's son Harris Simmons, currently Zions chairman, continues the tradition.
Like Parsons Behle Latimer, Zions expands its collection when they have a need to redecorate or fill a new space. There is no specific art budget, but the bank will typically make purchases every year. The collection is displayed throughout Zions Bank branches and offices in Utah and Idaho. Though they have no particular style or theme for collecting, most pieces tend to be Utah or western landscapes, along with some portraits.
Purchase decisions usually fall to the bank's corporate officers, with input from branch officers or building architects. According to Tom Alder, Vice President of Zions Private Mortgage Banking, the annual Zions Art Show is often a source for purchases or an occasion for bank executives to become familiar with the work of current artists.
Alder explains that what started as a way for Zions Women's Financial Center to help a few of its artist-clients display their work is now an annual early November event with more than 50 participating artists – all clients of Zions Bank. Artists range from experienced and well known to emerging. More than 5,000 invitations are sent out for the one-night extravaganza and some 1,000 people attend. The artists keep all the proceeds from sales.
The annual art show is an opportunity to not only support its artist-clients, but also to invite other VIP clients to a prestigious and fun event. But the everyday original art on the walls at Zions offices and branches also provides benefits. Says Alder, "Employees who appreciate art really like having the original art around; same deal with clients. We’ve had clients call and ask to buy pieces they've seen in a branch; we refer them to the artist."
Deseret News
The Deseret News' offices are another place where one could easily get lost in the art collection and forget the main reason for the visit. You want to ask, "Please, may I just wander down the next corridor to see what's there?"
The Deseret News corporate collection has accumulated over years of sponsoring an annual art show as well as through other art purchases or donations. The artists included read like a "Who's Who" of the best Utah artists, starting with LeConte Stewart, whose painting, Snow Banks, launched the collection.
According to a 1999 pamphlet, "Heritage in Art: The Deseret News Corporate Collection," "the annual Deseret News Art Show began with the idea that the newspaper could play a role in stimulating the development of good artists. It was intended to appeal to emerging artists, giving them recognition and help at the start of their careers. For many, it was the first public attention they received. The Deseret News also hoped to stimulate more Utahns to buy and hang in their homes original artwork by Utah artists."
The first series of annual art shows was held each fall from 1973 through 1989. In addition to giving merit awards, the company purchased a painting from each show. According to Dave Gogan, Visual Arts Editor for the newspaper, the annual show was reborn in 1999 under the leadership of then managing editor John Hughes, who said, "For many years our newspaper fostered the growth of the visual arts with an annual competition. We believe the time has come to renew that commitment."
Now held in conjunction with the Days of '47 celebration, the show has a landscape theme. Beginning last year, and continuing this year, the show is hosted by the Museum of Utah Art and History on Main Street. Gogan says, "Moving to the MUAH also allowed us to remove all size restrictions. We hope to stay at the MUAH for a long time."
"Since 1999, I've selected the Purchase Award winner to add to the paper's collection," says Gogan. "I'm trying to diversify our holdings by picking up works on paper along with paintings."
On Wednesday July 18th at 12:30 contributors to Artists of Utah and 15 Bytes are invited to a special reception to view the Zions Bank art collection with a guided tour by Tom Alder. Light refreshments will be served. After the Zions' tour, all are invited to go downstairs and around the corner to the MUAH to view the current Deseret News Color of the Land exhibition. Go to page 2 for more details.
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Exhibition Review: Salt Lake City
Contours: Women with Access
by Geoff Wichert
Laura Boardman recently invited some of her fellow artists to participate in an informal experiment to find out whether women as artists differ from men, and what the differences might be. Those invited were full-time painters with BFA or MFA degrees. Experience ranged from five to twenty-five years, and inclusion entailed a brief statement of "why I paint." The non-scientific survey results --eleven artists including Boardman --are on display at Art Access until July 13.
The history of art has more to say about differing opportunities afforded men and women than about their differing abilities. Indeed, a priori assumptions are still the rule: when anthropologists recently measured the famous hand prints in ancient caves and found the hands were small, they assumed they must have been made by adolescent boys, despite the complete lack of evidence that the entire enterprise was not simply the work of women. Today, with restrictions stripped away by social activism followed by laws, women artists often seem to have more confidence in their choices than men.
One subject women were always allowed to paint is nature, and the floral and still life traditions were their inventions. Three of Boardman's eleven artists paint flora up close. None has anything like the agenda that Georgia O'Keeffe was accused of and always denied, but all three depart from the still life tradition by placing their subjects within and against backgrounds. Connie Borup's "Veined Beauties," with its selective focus, is as much about photography as the moody colors of fall. Ann V. Maak's lilies are also separated visually from their background. In "Contours of a Rose with an Inclination Toward Light," Anne Morgan Jespersen's professed interest in "the physics of light" unifies translucent petals and background shadows to make light a corporeal presence.|1|
Four artists chose to feature figures and imply narratives. Alice Perreault's "My Babies" probably comes closest to positing a woman's point of view as different from a man's, but her eighteen portraits subvert any assumptions. Not only does she represent the gamut of neonatal physiognomies, but the cosmic cloud they emerge from turns out to be a vascular network: paint, the interface between artist and viewer, mimics the interface between uterus and placenta. If you want motherhood idealized, ask a potential father, but if you want the ideal merged with the truth about babies, ask someone who's had one. Speaking of insider views, the mannerist proportions of Holly Mae Pendergast's "Sister's Contour" say many things about sisterhood indirectly and simultaneously, capturing the complexity of a fundamental relationship without neglecting the subjective perspective of the artist sister.
Marcee Blackerby's magic realism gives "In Search of the Third Ring" an unsettling quality foretold by her statement, which sensually describes a mysterious process rather than give a reason for it.|2| While it may protect the delicate, costumed performers who float before her painted backdrop, the vitrine enclosing them has the rhetorical role, like a circus ring, of marking the boundary between the mundane and the extraordinary, protecting them both. Blackerby's uncanny theater makes a good point of entry to Bonnie Sucec's six panels, which otherwise might seem to have migrated in from another show, perhaps in another city. Unapologetically self-assertive, they channel spontaneous impulses and capture mental processes on a pre-verbal level. Redolent of Surrealism and its expressionist stepchildren, they risk—no, disregard the risk to—their life spans by ripping their subjects from recent headlines. Let's hope no one attending is so clueless as to expect demure, drawing room embroidery. Real painting has everything to do with attitude.
As the title suggests, "Seven Steps Forward, Seven Steps Back: Five" grows out of V. Kim Martinez' interest in what might be called static dynamics.|3| She has looked at factory machinery, incarceration, and cyclic migrations across the U.S./Mexico border: all institutionalized forms of action. Her hard-edged abstraction softens a little here, in a realistic depiction of ribbons dancing weightlessly in space; yet among its curvilinear components are captivity and imposed directions.
"Feminist landscapes" was one of the descriptive terms used to promote Contours. Perhaps all that means is none of the artists chose to analogize the landscape with a passive female body. What those who entered landscapes have in common is a conviction that close scrutiny of the land—as Joey Behrens puts it, "without assumptions"—combined with the process of painting can manifest environmental gifts we commonly ignore. In "Contour Drawing," Maureen O'Hara Ure gives van Gogh's calligraphic line a sense of appreciation and gratitude where the original was sometimes overwrought. Behrens' "No Parking" and "Self Service" |0| take their names from signs, ubiquitous components of downtown landscapes. Rather than "feminist," they are pedestrian in the best sense of the word: the product of walking, or considering the source, bicycling through town slowly enough to witness the way reflections in glass facades are like paintings in frames, complete with new ways of seeing.
Boardman's "Uneven Terrain," though two-thirds scudding cloudscape, is well named. Somehow the shadows spilling across its corrugated surface gives this terrain a rhythmic, irresistible feeling of motion. Maybe Boardman answers her own question here, her "inner life" of painting finding a resonant response, an inner life in the world around her. If experience is one of the crucial things an artist brings to work—and I think it is—then Contours argues that women's art differs from men's to the extent that their experiences differ from, and complement, each other's.
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