The Utah Women Mural: Celebrating Past, Present, and Future Generations with South City Campus Installation

 

On March 6, Salt Lake Community College hosted the formal unveiling of the Utah Women Mural, a 1,000-square-foot collage featuring hundreds of women (and a few animals) from the Beehive State. The new mural is adapted from a 2020 mural commemorating the 100-year anniversary of women’s suffrage and the 150-year anniversary of the first woman to cast a ballot in Utah. Both are testaments to community and to the remarkable legacy of Utah women throughout history. 
  
In remarks at the event, former SLCC President Deneece Huftalin highlighted that wide range of backgrounds, noting the inclusion of such disparate political figures as Republican Olene Walker, the state’s first female governor, and Heidi Redd, the cowgirl and conservationist from Dugout Ranch who often serves as the ecological conscience of Southern Utah. Huftalin was also one of the women present at the event wearing an “I’m in the mural” sticker.  

Other attendees featured in the mural included Holly Yocom, former director of Salt Lake County’s Department of Community Service and current partner at The Pathway Group, who anchors the piece in the bottom center with her daughter, Harper; Neylan McBaine, who founded the Mormon Women Project and co-founded Better Days 2020; and Gail Miller, namesake of SLCC’s Gail Miller Business School, which is one of the only business schools in the country to be named after a woman. 

Gail Miller, Deneece Huftalin, and former Board of Regents member Jesselie Anderson at the unveiling.

While introducing Huftalin, Zions Bank Advisory Board Chairman Scott Anderson dedicated the South City Campus mural’s unveiling to her tenure as president of SLCC, praising her contributions to the city, county, and state as a leader and an example for every woman or girl in Utah. He had similar praise for Miller and for every other woman depicted in the mural, including the two women whose companies catered the event. 
 
The first, Ana Valdemoros, is the owner of Argentina’s Best Empanadas and a former Salt Lake City Council Member. In the mural, she’s depicted with a platter of empanadas similar to those served as the savory portion of the event’s fare. The sweeter side was in the hands of Romina Rasmussen, a product of the French Culinary Institute in New York who proved her mettle in east-coast hotbeds of haute cuisine before altering Salt Lake City’s confectionary map with landmarks like Chez Nibs. In the mural, she’s depicted hoisting a box of fruit; at Chez Nibs, she works in different media: bonbons, butter, and her signature kouign-amann. 

Pop artist and soft-sculpture pioneer Jann Haworth led both projects, and the mural at SLCC was funded by Zions Bank and the SLCC Foundation and co-installed by Haworth’s daughter and fellow artist, Liberty Blake. The massive collage comprises over 350 individual stencils – many life-sized, many much, much larger than life – in a riot of colors and styles as varied as the women they depict.  

 

 Artists Jann Haworth and Liberty Blake discuss the Utah Women Mural at SLCC's South City Campus.

The original artwork was also commissioned by Anderson on behalf of Zions Bank. That version was created by Haworth and her son, Alex Johnstone, who combined digital versions of the 350 individual portraits into a collage that was then printed on vinyl sheets and unfurled on the eastern face of the Dinwoody Building in downtown Salt Lake City. That installment remains viewable at 37 W 100 S.    

The Dinwoody Building is a much smaller canvas than the new mural’s space at SLCC, so adapting the same stencils required some creative analog collage work by Blake. She created the new mural with the original paper portraits, which have been housed at SLCC since 2024, when the College accepted the gift as an addition to its permanent art collection. Each original paper portrait, with some new additions, was repositioned and wheat-pasted (“buckets of glue,” Blake joked) onto wood panels to create this new iteration of the mural.  
  
“It is truly a community-oriented artwork,” said James Walton, who co-chairs SLCC’s Art Committee and manages the College’s art collection. “It is such a brilliant way to create a single artwork containing hundreds of different portraits. With so many different artists involved, you see this incredible variety of styles and skill levels that capture a wonderful diversity of looks and personalities that would be impossible to achieve from a single artist.”  
  
During the creation of the Dinwoody mural, the pandemic hit, and Haworth had to adjust her approach. Instead of offering local portrait workshops, she turned to artists and non-artists in Utah and throughout the world to contribute stenciled portraits of Utah women. Because of the lockdown restrictions in many areas, creators had to work with whatever materials they had at home, sometimes using crayons and cereal boxes.  
  
“This mural is about equality and fair representation—the women in it are from all walks of life. And, it has been created by individuals from all artistic backgrounds, many not formal artists but who are teachers, nurses, and lawyers. It opened the art process to everyone,” explained Haworth, who also designed The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album cover and the “SLC Pepper” mural (250 S 400 W). “I feel like the Utah Women 2020 Mural is an apology for the near complete absence of women in the Sgt. Pepper design.”  
  
During his remarks at the event, Anderson made a similar comment about absence. “There’s a figure in a blue hat with a blank face,” he noted, explaining that this allowed any observer to project the face of a woman significant in their life or community into the mural, letting it evolve with the lived experience of every woman or girl – or man or boy – who views it.  
  
An interactive website for the SLCC mural displays the name and the artist for each included figure. For the everywoman who Anderson indicated in the blue hat, that artist is Haworth herself, suggesting that her “apology” for so few women in the Sgt. Pepper collage was to create space for every woman to be included in this one.