Rose Park Community Kiosk

The Rose Park Community kiosk was installed in 2023 at Riverside Park in Salt Lake City with support from a Love Your Block grant from the City Council. A community mural was added in 2024. The goal of the project was to create a public community bulletin board to improve offline neighborhood communications and build interpersonal connections in the Rose Park neighborhood of Salt Lake City. Community engagement was crucial to this piece's success. Hyper-local craftsman were contracted to build and install the bulletin board and over 30 local youth and adults contributed mural designs during an outreach event prior to mural painting. Collectively, about 20 neighbors gathered at different stages to contribute their creative flair to the murals and mosaic panels during workshops that were open to the public.

Grow Together (Twogether) Series

The Twogether series are two art installations that started with a late Fall camping trip into the mountains near Salt Lake City to create tape casts of aspen trees. The first was created for a temporary installation in an empty store window at The Gateway Mall. Accidentally, the original tape cast was discarded by a cleaning crew, so I had to improvise to meet the deadline. A local resident donated a couple of young aspen saplings from their backyard forest to take the place of the lost tape casts. After the first piece was installed at the mall, we hosted a free family art hour at the Day-Riverside Library in Salt Lake City's west neighborhood to decorate the second tree. From toddlers to adults, the library participants learned a little about the incredible ecology of aspen tree groves and made their tissue-paper contributions to the tree. The second piece hung in the library for several months in front of a large river-facing window. It acted as an acopian screen to prevent bird collisions that usually happened at that window. Both were eventually retired to decompose naturally on remote public lands.

Statement

Kate Jarman-Gates and Day-Riverside Patrons

2024-2025

Grow Two-gether

Aspen tree, tissue paper

Imagine standing in a wintry aspen forest and looking upward. Dark branches tangle and cut the sky into pieces, like a stained glass window. It reminds you that everything is connected, that the trees don’t exist without the sky, that windows can’t be made without broken glass, that you are made of all of this. 

Little Free Art Shops

The Little Free Art Shops public art project began in response to the closure of a local beloved creative reuse center (arts and crafts thrift store) in Salt Lake City. With a project grant from the Salt Lake City Arts Council, we acquired several second-hand shelves and cabinets and hosted workshops at their final destinations to decorate them. Overall we engaged about five people per Shop, and installed six Shops across Salt Lake City at locations such as galleries, studios, and libraries. Now they serve as hubs for exchanging creative supplies for free. The project increased arts access for residents and supported the environment by preventing unnecessary craft supply waste. For more information on their locations and current usage, visit https://togetherartsutah.com/free-art-shops/