SALT LAKE CITY — Some could argue helping to design the album cover of a Beatles album might be a crowning achievement.
While not belittling her role in helping design the artwork for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band record, Utah artist Jann Haworth laments the lack of female representation in the famous album cover. Nearly 60 years later, with a new mural at Salt Lake Community College’s South City Campus, she’s making amends.
“I feel like the ‘Utah Women 2020 Mural’ is an apology for the near complete absence of women in the Sgt. Pepper design,” she said.
The massive collage, though it’s been up at SLCC’s Center for Arts and Media building since September, was ceremoniously unveiled Thursday — and Haworth was there along with daughter Liberty Blake. The mother-daughter team assembled stenciled portraits of more than 350 women made by around 300 artists to complete the project.
March is Women’s History Month and Haworth hopes the artwork draws attention to the lack of equity women contend with in pay and other matters. The first version of the collage — a massive vinyl print on display in the Dinwoodey Building in downtown Salt Lake City since 2020 — was commissioned to mark 150 years of women’s suffrage in Utah and the 100th anniversary of national suffrage.
“That’s a big point. … And we still haven’t passed ERA. I’m sorry, but that’s ridiculous,” Haworth said, alluding to the Equal Rights Amendment, the proposed U.S. constitutional amendment to guarantee equality of rights, regardless of sex.
With the broad range of artists of varying experience who contributed to the collage, Blake hopes it unleashes the creativity of those who took part. “I would like to think that after they made this, their first stencil, that they would go away and maybe make more art,” she said.
The “Utah-centric” women in the collage represent historic and contemporary figures from a range of fields, some widely known, others not so much. “There are people in the medical world, athletes, the arts … there are writers, lawyers. There’s a single mom,” Haworth said.
The 300 or so artists created stencils of the more than 350 women represented in the artwork. Those individual works were digitally reproduced and combined to create the vinyl collage on the Salt Lake City building. After that, though, the original stencils remained, which Haworth and Blake combined on separate panels into the new “analog” artwork unveiled Thursday. Zion’s Bank helped fund the project.
“Each head is a hand-painted and cut stencil and then the mural is collaged onto these panels. Everything is paper and glue,” Blake said.
James Walton, who manages the college’s art collection and serves as cochairman of SLCC’s Art Committee, created one of the original stencils and helped assemble the larger piece. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You’ve got 350 portraits, over 300 different artists and community members have their hand in this and it’s huge. It’s 1,000 square feet,” he said.
He noted the detail when looking at the collage from up close in contrast to the view from afar as well as the many varied styles of the individual women represented. “Because you have so many different artists’ hands in this work, it makes it really unique. Each portrait is really individual and special in its own way,” he said.
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