The Salt Lake Art Museum opens July 24 at 249 S. 400 E. in Salt Lake City. The grand opening runs from 3:30 to 8 p.m. and is free. The museum calls itself the first in the state dedicated exclusively to Utah artists. By its own accounting, it is also the first new fine art museum in the capital since 1983.
The building came first. Congregation B'nai Israel, organized in 1873, commissioned Philip Meyer, a German architect and nephew of the merchant Frederick Auerbach, to design a sanctuary seating 500 at a cost of $37,500. Meyer modeled it on Berlin's Fasanenstrasse Synagogue and faced it in rusticated Kyune sandstone. Dedicated in 1890–91, it preceded the Salt Lake Temple and is the oldest synagogue in the state. Meyer went home to Germany, became a prominent architect there, and died in a Nazi death camp in 1943.
The congregation merged with Congregation Montefiore in 1972 to form Kol Ami, and the building was sold. It spent the next fifty years as a restaurant, a school, and offices. The National Register of Historic Places listed it in 1978, but it holds no local landmark protection, and when a developer bought the block for apartments, its future was uncertain. Chris Jensen, the architectural historian and realtor who handled the sale, told Fox 13 it could have been leveled.
Micah Christensen paid $3 million for it. Christensen is an art historian trained at Sotheby's Institute and University College London, a partner in Anthony's Fine Art and Antiques half a block away, and co-author of the Dictionary of Utah Fine Artists, a reference documenting more than 4,500 artists connected to the state. Until last year, he sat on the board of the Springville Museum of Art. His great-grandfather, Philip Fitzler, belonged to the congregation, and Christensen, half Jewish and half Mormon pioneer by descent, told Fox 13 that the purchase "feels full circle." Jensen came aboard as executive director. The apartment tower next door, approved unanimously by the city's Historic Landmarks Commission, will be named The Frederick, after Auerbach, and will hold parking for the museum.
The museum has been running quietly since November, open by appointment while restoration continued, staging a Utah Masters Series on the state's most influential artists. During early programming, it welcomed local Jewish groups back into the restored sanctuary for holiday gatherings among the artworks.
Jensen told KSL that Utah has "more artists here per capita than anywhere in the U.S." and no dedicated space to show them. The museum's supporters point to a real gap. By 15 Bytes' account, the Wall Street Journal has ranked Utah ahead of only West Virginia in museums per capita. Not everyone welcomed the framing. When 15 Bytes profiled the museum last fall, a reader objected in the comments to a new institution arriving as a criticism of the existing landscape. Springville has collected Utah artists for a century, though never exclusively. SLAM's entire argument rests on the word "exclusively."
The opening exhibitions immediately complicate that word. One show is Albert Bierstadt, who was not a Utah artist. He spent three weeks painting here in the 1800s, and the museum will hang 25 of his roughly 30 Utah landscapes beside modern photographs of the same locations. Another is Pilar Pobil, the Spanish-born, self-taught painter and sculptor who made Salt Lake City home and died in 2024. Christensen has noted that Pobil, for all her stature, never received a full retrospective at the state's largest museums. A third gallery covers the building's history.
The fourth is Julia Reagan.
Reagan died in June 2024 at 81. Her husband, Bill Reagan, founded Reagan Outdoor Advertising, and after her death, he put her face on roughly 300 billboards across Utah and beyond. He told the Deseret News, "I didn't get a chance to say goodbye." The billboards collided with Charli XCX's "so Julia" lyric at the height of Brat Summer, turning Reagan into an internet saint. Utahns got tattoos and dressed as the billboards for Halloween. City Weekly called them increasingly creepy. The company now reinstalls them every June to mark the anniversary of her death, and the family has sued University of Utah Health, alleging negligence in her care. The museum's opening slate includes a show on the billboards and their collision with pop culture.
So the first museum devoted to Utah artists opens with a German landscape painter who visited once, a Spanish immigrant, a synagogue, and a billboard campaign.
The grand opening is July 24, 3:30 to 8 p.m., 249 S. 400 E., Salt Lake City. Free. saltlakeartmuseum.org.
