NEHMA Launches ‘The lure and Lore of the West’
Bigfoot — or an art professor dressed as Bigfoot — was seen walking around Utah State University Logan campus last week as part of a promotion for the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art’s newest exhibition, which opened Jan. 20.
The exhibition titled “The Lure and Lore of the West” explores stories and legends of the American West with a special emphasis on local artwork.
“When we started preparing this exhibition, we had almost 1,000 pieces that could potentially go in it,” said Danielle Stewart, the museum’s curator. “We narrowed it down to 80, but we tried to prioritize work that was local to Cache Valley.”
Stewart said she wanted visitors to feel as if they were going on a road trip through the West as they visited the museum.
“So much of the West that we see is through a car window, a train window or even a wagon train,” Stewart said.
Because of this, Stewart included several pieces that display local outdoor landscapes, like Sardine Canyon and the Jardine Juniper — one of the oldest trees in the United States — located in Logan Canyon.
In addition to artwork, the exhibition also includes objects and stories found in Utah State’s archives.
“We have at least one object from every major archive at USU: the library’s special collections, the herbarium, the geology museum and the anthropology museum,” Stewart said.
One of these objects is a dinosaur bone, which was found in Escalante and likely belonged to a brontosaurus-like dinosaur.
“Stories like Bigfoot, or stories like the Bear Lake Monster, often get started with real objects, then morph into a myth,” Stewart said.
The exhibition also incorporates local folklore stories found in the Merrill-Cazier Library Special Collections & Archives. Melissa Anderson Asay, a graduate student studying folklore, was involved in collecting these stories.
“I spent a lot of time digging through the five folklore archives in the library,” Anderson Asay said. “Lots of these stories were gathered by previous students.”
Several pieces in the exhibition are accompanied by headphones that allow visitors to hear the stories Anderson Asay and others collected, which were recorded by students in the USU Theatre Arts Department.
One of these audio recordings is about a Bigfoot sighting, which is paired with a life-sized ceramic Bigfoot skeleton that appears as if it’s being unearthed.
“This piece is really the heart of the exhibition,” Stewart said. “It was made by a California funk artist named Clayton Bailey, and he invented a sort of alter ego for himself called Dr. George Gladstone.”
Stewart said Bailey created the piece and buried it, but then his alter ego uncovered it.
“It’s a piece as well as a performance,” Stewart said.
In addition to folklore and myth, the exhibition also features artwork depicting groups commonly associated with Western stories, like Indigenous Americans, pioneers and cowboys.
Stewart said the exhibition addresses which perspectives have historically been underrepresented in artwork about the West and also aims to contrast artwork depicting Indigenous Americans.
“We don’t have a lot of pictures of women in the West,” Stewart said. “We have two pieces from white-descended artists and then a couple pieces from Native American artists.”
These pieces, as well as the rest of the exhibition, are expected to remain on display until May 2027. The museum is free and open to the public Monday through Saturday every week.