The Salt Lake Art Center unveiled its biggest exhibit of 2010, Contemporary Masters, on Friday, June 17.
If you’re thinking the collection includes pieces from fine artists like Damian Hirst or Julian Schnabel, you are wrong.
The Contemporary Masters collection is a collaboration between the Salt Lake Art Center (SLAC) and the 337 Project and will feature 18 holes of playable art as a mini-golf course.
“Contemporary Masters presents a wonderful opportunity to examine the relationship between art and audience,” says Adam Price, SLAC Executive Director.
In a revolving show of 19 Utah and four national artists, each exhibit will be a playable installation created as a whole mini-golf course.
“My own experience in this community is that not nearly enough people are given the opportunity to encounter contemporary art or to incorporate it into their daily lives,” says Price.
John Bell, a participating artist, is contemplative about the show, “This has been a pretty interesting commission. I leaned more toward making a piece of art you could play golf on rather than making a golf hole that you would call art.”
The participating artists were selected from a juried competition where they submitted a proposal outlining an idea for a functional miniature-golf-hole-as-art.
Jeff Lambson, Curator of Contemporary Art at the BYU Museum of Art, and Jill Dawsey, Acting Chief Curator at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts chose the finalists.
“Making art is an open-ended and hands-on process that involves exploration and play. It is exciting that viewers will literally be part of this play and exploration,” says Peter Everett, participating artist and Associate Professor at Brigham Young University.
“This exhibition offers visitors, in a good-humored way, a chance to explore their world through contemporary art and to decide for themselves whether they want to become fans,” says Price.
The series will also feature a 30 Anniversary screening of Caddyshack hosted by the SLC Film Center on July 14 at 7:00 p.m. in the SLAC auditorium.
SLAC and 337 Project also recently announced that 337 Project would become part of SLAC, where it will continue to provide community-based art programming in Salt Lake City neighborhoods.
SLAC will extend public hours during Contemporary Masters to include Sundays June 20 – September 16, from noon to 5 p.m. Visit www.slartcenter.org for complete details about the exhibit and hours of operation.