Salt Lake Art Center has invited Westminster students to the opening night of its Go West art exhibition, which will feature 20 contemporary artists who delve into the myths surrounding the Old West. Opening night is Friday, October 8th, and the evening's itinerary includes square dancing from 7-9 p.m. and live performance art by artist, Chris Coy, at 8 p.m.
The following is from Salt Lake Art Center's website concerning the exhibition:
" 'Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country,' the newspaper editor Horace Greeley advised his readers in 1865. The familiar quotation* registers a number of attitudes and concerns that characterized mid-19th century America: beliefs surrounding societal progress and social evolution; beliefs (and doubts) about a stable and vigorous masculinity; and beliefs about independence and personal freedom. Such attitudes about the West intruded on and determined the kinds of stories that America came to tell about itself, the mythic ideas and iconographies it produced-stories and myths and icons that are alive today.
Go West brings together [approximately] twenty contemporary artists who are engaged in an excavation of myths and ideologies of the old West. Working in a range of media (including painting, works on paper, sculpture, photography, and video), these artists offer up critical reflections on the West as both destination and destiny. Go West considers the varied reasons people came west over the years: some, like the Cherokee Indians, were forcibly moved west, while others, like the Mormons, sought exile here; some came in search of fame and fortune, while others staked their claim to a separatist space, away from mainstream society. The exhibition further explores such topics as: "promised lands," the West as utopia, wilderness and land use, expansion and sprawl, and tropes of the frontiersman and cowboy.
*The quotation may not have originated with Greeley but is widely attributed to him. "
For those who want more information from Salt Lake Art Center, here's a link to the website:
http://www.slartcenter.org/pageview.aspx?menu=2825&id=9535
(On a more personal note, for those who want to read a book that deals with the mythology of the Old West, I would recommend Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident. I read it during my sophomore year of high school, but remember thinking that it deftly examined ideas of law, order, and justice in the American West circa late nineteenth-century.)
*For those who haven't explored Mel Brooks' territory, my post's title is a borrowed line from his film, Blazing Saddles, a spoof on the Western genre.
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