The idea for the Utah Masters Fine Art Tour — a “Parade of Homes”-style studio tour for visual artists in Utah happening this month — started with a conversation among friends, said artist Shari Lyon.
“We have a lot of parents call us and just be like, ‘My kid wants to be an artist. I have no idea where to go or what to do.’ Or we get people saying ‘My kids want to be an artist — can you talk them into doing something else?’” Lyon said.
Lyon — who co-created the tour with her husband, Howard, along with Bryan and Haley Taylor — said that, “we just kind of realized that the general public just has no real experience in being able to see what an artist’s life looks like.”
This year’s tour, the fourth annual, is set for Saturday, Nov. 18, from 1 to 8 p.m. around Utah County, where 13 artists from Alpine to Woodland Hills will showcase their studio spaces.
“People will have a map,” Lyon said. “They can choose to try to hit all the studios, or they can just choose to try to hit those studios of the artists they really like.” (The map will be posted online closer to the event. People can sign up for the tour’s mailing list to be notified when the map posts.)
The majority of those 13 are oil painters, Lyon said. Many of the artists are internationally known, organizers said, but don’t show their work in Utah.
Some Utah artists with established careers opt to sell their work outside of the state, Lyon said, because “Utahns are not notoriously known for spending very much money, so as far as being art collectors, they’re not the greatest audience.”
Painter Brent Godfrey, who is a partner and is represented by A Gallery/Allen + Alan Fine Art, disagrees with Lyon’s assessment.
“The art world in Salt Lake, and in Utah in general, it’s changed over time because it’s not static. It’s not one thing at all times,” Godfrey said. “It is true that our sales in Utah are less about collectors, although there are collectors. But the people who buy art, the majority of them, I don’t think would call themselves collectors.”
People who are “serious” about buying art, Godfrey said, go to art galleries. He cited A Gallery, which he said has been in business for 40 years and boasts clients from coast to coast.
According to an annual report of the world’s art market, compiled for the international art fair company Art Basel and the investment bank UBS, global art sales increased by 3% in 2022, compared with the year before. The report said the U.S. art market saw “one of the most robust recoveries of all the major art markets” after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The economist who wrote that report, Clare McAndrew, wrote in another report that the top art cities in the United States in 2022 were New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Miami.
“[When] you’re in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles … a higher percentage of your population is more likely to be educated about art,” Godfrey said. “In Salt Lake, we are growing, we have more people but we don’t have that intensive mass of people.”
At arts events in Utah — such as the Utah Arts Festival every June in Salt Lake City or Park City’s Kimball Arts Festival in August — the “majority” of buyers don’t live in Utah, Lyon said.
“We definitely do have good collectors in Utah,” she said. “They’re just much less present than they are in other areas.”
The tour’s organizers, Lyon said, wish that were different — which is one motivation for putting Utah artists together with potential art lovers.
“We want people to just have it [be] a bit less of a scary thing to collect art,” Lyon said. “It’s a good way to build community within the artists, but it’s also a great way to build awareness to the people living around us that have no idea what they have in their backyard.”
For artists, Lyon said, there are many positive aspects to being in Utah — particularly the sense of community, which is why she and her husband moved to Utah from Arizona.
“There’s a real saturation of Utah artists,” Lyon said. “There’s a lot of artists who do landscapes [or] religious images. So your competition is definitely going to be a lot heavier within the art community here. … In other states, competitiveness between artists can be a real problem that can be a real frustration. [But] in Utah, we very rarely experience that.”
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Esther Hi’ilani Candari, one of the artists featured in the Utah Masters Fine Art Tour, sits in her studio with her dog Gracie in American Fork on Monday, Oct. 30, 2023.
Opening a ‘sanctuary’
Esther Hi’ilani Candari, who works with oil paints and mixed media, said she is taking part in her second studio tour this year. She also works as director of programming for a Provo gallery, Writ and Vision, where she’s noticed some of the buyer trends Lyon mentions.
Hi’ilani Candari said that the culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints “definitely influences some of the overall trends in Utah. … [It] tends to be very frugal, and have a little bit of a moral aversion to things that are viewed as commodities.”
Hi’ilani Candari is a Latter-day Saint, but said she considers herself a Christian artist. Her art work focuses on stories of women in Scripture, centering BIPOC models and her upbringing in Hawaii.
“There’s a little bit of a difference between old money versus new money,” she said. She attended graduate school on the East Coast, where she noticed, “there’s definitely different attitudes towards how people spend their money when they came from more multigenerational, traditional money sources.”
Hi’ilani Candari said she often notices people in art galleries gawking at the prices. In Utah, work that sells to middle- and upper-class customers can be priced between $100 and $2,000. But, she said, “the type of money that makes for a serious career” means artists need to consistently sell items priced from $5,000 to $30,000.
“[People] don’t understand what goes into [art], but if they can see a studio and see how much equipment and how expensive the materials are, and how much time it’s taking to create these pieces, then it simply makes people much more amenable to the prices that you’re asking,” Hi’ilani Candari said.
That’s one reason, she said, why she’s excited to share her space — what she called her “sanctuary.” (Another reason, she said, is that it gives her a deadline to finish work.)
“What I hope people experience is that they come in and they can kind of feel this is a space set apart, that creativity is a spiritual practice in a sense, and that space needs to be curated in a way that aids in that practice,” she said.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Small paintings of Cristall Harper’s dog Cricket sit on shelves in her studio in American Fork on Monday, Oct. 30, 2023 as she prepares for the Utah Masters Fine Art Tour.
An ‘exercise in resistance’
Cristall Harper, who started participating in the studio tour in 2019, said the tour is one of her biggest events of the year.
The tour, she said, gives her a chance to add or start a new collection. As she described it, her studio has 10-foot ceilings, covers around 320 square feet, and is filled with art.
One year, a couple showed up five minutes after the tour started, and though Harper said she didn’t expect them to buy anything, the woman walked in, pointed to a $3,100 painting and said she wanted that one.
Harper works in oil paints, capturing florals, wildlife and her favorite: dogs.
She said she feels like she was born an artist, but it took her a while to make a professional career out of it. She had a career benchmark, she said, in 2016, when she got into Astoria Fine Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. (At the moment, she said, she doesn’t have a Utah gallery representing her work.)
Being an artist, Harper said, is “an exercise in resistance,” because “you have to have such a strong sense of self to be a professional artist to stay in the game.”
“When somebody can buy it and take it home, it gives the painting a new life,” she said. ”It’s really validating to sell my art and see it get collected.”
