The J. Willard Marriott Library and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts have unveiled an exhibition titled "Utah Women Working for Better Days!" to celebrate the historical and contemporary contributions of women to the state of Utah.
The exhibition was made possible through funding from several major organizations, including the Sam and Diane Stewart Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This specific funding supported the J. Willard Marriott Library and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts initiative titled "Landscape, Land Art, and the American West."
The project team responsible for creating the exhibition includes Jessica Breiman, Alison Elbrader, Ashley Farmer, Katherine Kitterman, Sarah Palmer, Jorge Rojas, Naomi Watkins, and Alana Wolf. The initiative also received significant contributions from various experts and collaborators.
Joy Goh, Jodi Patterson, Stacey Kelly, Addie Ryder, Maggie Leak, and Emily Izzo provided invaluable time and expertise to the project. Additionally, Giuliana Serena and Lara Jones assisted in transitioning the storytelling program from an intended in-person event into a radio format.
A central component of the exhibition's visual storytelling includes illustrations of Utah women's advocates provided by Brooke Smart. These illustrations were made available through the use of materials from Better Days 2020, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.
Better Days 2020 is dedicated to popularizing Utah women's history through a combination of art, education, and legislation. The organization focuses on sharing history in creative and communal ways to ensure the legacy of the past contributes to a better future for women in Utah.
The exhibition highlights a significant historical period for women's rights in the United States. The year 2020, which served as a focal point for the project's themes, marked the 150th anniversary of Utah women casting the first votes in the United States under a women's equal suffrage law.
That same year also commemorated the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which extended women's right to vote nationwide, and the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibited race-based discrimination in voting laws. The exhibition seeks to honor the women who paved the way for these rights while reflecting on the leadership required to build future legacies.
The exhibition is part of a larger scholarly effort involving the J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections Division. This division serves the University of Utah, the state, and global scholars by preserving original primary source materials.
These materials include rare books, maps, diaries, correspondence, oral histories, unpublished manuscripts, and ephemera. Such collections provide essential context for local and global histories. The Aileen H. Clyde 20th Century Women's Archive, housed within Special Collections, specifically documents and preserves the history of women whose work helped drive social and cultural change in Utah and beyond.
The collaboration between the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and the J. Willard Marriott Library is part of a four-year research and scholarly engagement initiative titled "Landscape, Land Art, and the American West." This initiative is supported by matching grants from the University of Utah's Office of the Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs and the colleges of Fine Arts, Health, Humanities, and Mines and Earth Sciences.
The goal of this collaboration is to transform the University of Utah into a global resource hub for scholars studying the American West by capitalizing on the unique collections held by both the UMFA and the Marriott Library.
Institutional and Scholarly Contexts
The University of Utah maintains a formal Indigenous Land Acknowledgement as part of its institutional identity. The university acknowledges that the land, named for the Ute Tribe, serves as the traditional and ancestral homeland of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute Tribes.
The university recognizes the enduring relationship between Indigenous peoples and their traditional homelands. It affirms a commitment to partnering with Native Nations and Urban Indian communities through research, education, and community outreach activities, while respecting the sovereign relationships between tribes, states, and the federal government.
