Visitors can interpet new art at USU Museum

The Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art invites visitors to engage one-on-one with a newly acquired painting and provide feedback. The painting, a gift of the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation, went straight from the crate onto the wall, and highlights the fact that the museum’s collection is continually growing, said the museum’s Education Curator Jay Heuman.

The painting by Jack Goldstein, large-scale and abstract, is presented in isolation in the museum’s West Gallery. The eight-foot by eight-foot canvas is brightly colored and fills one’s field of vision, Heuman said. 

“Art critics have suggested varied meanings – from heat or radiation scans, to pure energy or matter,” he said. “But visitors may write their feelings and ideas on ‘Collected Thoughts’ sheets. These sheets will become a part of the display, on view next to the painting, so museum staff and other visitors can share their experience.”

Goldstein was educated on the west coast during the early 1970s, lived and worked in New York City during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, then returned to the Los Angeles area in the early 1990s.

“Yet his artwork is unlike anything created by other artists on the West or East coast,” Heuman said. “Goldstein was unique, and his popularity has increased exponentially since 2000, despite his untimely death in March 2003 at the age of 57.”

Work by Goldstein was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City), in addition to major solo exhibitions at the Whitney (2002), MAGASIN – Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France (2002) and Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany (2002). During the past several years his paintings have been included in exhibitions in Berlin, Cologne, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Munich and Vienna.

“Jack Goldstein did not produce a large number of paintings but he was an influential artist on the East and West coasts of the United States and internationally,” said Museum Director Victoria Rowe. “We are lucky to have this stellar example in our collection.”

For more information about this new acquisition, the museum or its programs, call Heuman, at (435) 797-0165.

Summer hours for the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (650 North 1100 East, Logan, Utah, 84322, (435) 797-0163, Fax (435) 797-3423, www.artmuseum.usu.edu) are: Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Wednesday, 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday, noon to 4 p.m.; closed Sundays, Mondays and major holidays. Admission is free; parking $4 (free after 3:45 p.m.). For more information or to schedule a tour of the museum, call (435) 797-0165. The museum is accessible to persons with disabilities.