Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art celebrates 40th anniversary – Cache Valley Daily

Patrons view exhibits at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art on the Utah State University campus in Logan. (USU photo)

LOGAN – A 40th anniversary celebration at Utah State University’s Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art Saturday, March 19, will include not only two new art exhibitions but also a lot of fun.

Katie Lee-Koven, the museum’s executive director and curator, said everyone is invited to this free event.

“The Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art has been the community’s art museum for now 40 years,” Lee-Koven explained. “We’re really proud of our accomplishments and we’re looking forward to having a really fun evening with some live music and refreshments and some fun and family-friendly activities and, of course, the wonderful art we have here.”

She said the museum’s current collection includes about 5,500 objects. One of the new exhibitions on view features the work of a wide range of artists collected over the last 40 years.

“We focus on American art over the last 100 years, with an emphasis on art in the western United States. And so we took on the task with our 40th anniversary to select 40 art works that we felt reflected the sort of evolution of our collection. It’s a wide range of art works and objects and it was a really fun project to do.”

The second exhibition is “The Driek and Michael Zirinsky Gift.” The Zirinskys are art collectors now living in Boise. They are gifting the museum several contemporary artworks “…with an emphasis somewhat on women artists,” Lee-Koven said. “I would say a tilt toward representing more women and contemporary young artists. So we wanted to feature that gift from them, of these 19 contemporary art works.”

The museum celebration is Saturday from 7-9 p.m. with live music, food and a kid-friendly scavenger hunt with prizes.