Murals from now-shuttered Native boarding school on display at Utah State museum

Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Murals from the now-shuttered Intermountain Intertribal Indian School are on display at Utah State University.
The exhibit aims to preserve the history of the Brigham City school and the students who attended it.
The murals were discovered in storage 2013 and required over two years of work to restore.

LOGAN — Eleven restored murals from the now-shuttered Intermountain Intertribal Indian School are going on display at Utah State University, in part to recall the history of the facility and students who attended.

The history of the Brigham City school, opened from 1950 to 1984, "is unique to Utah and Native American boarding school history, and it deserves to be shared and not forgotten," said Katie Lee-Koven, executive director and chief curator at Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State in Logan. "As an art museum, we focus on art as an object, but also on how art reflects the larger context of issues, ideas and questions core to our human experiences. These experiences are stories and histories filled with resilience and imagination."

The exhibit opened to the public on Friday, but a formal ceremony unveiling the artwork is set for Jan. 31 from 6-8:30 p.m., when Lee-Koven, Farina King and Sheila Nadimi will speak. King is an associate professor of Native American studies at the University of Oklahoma, and Nadimi, a Utah State graduate, is a professor of art at John Abbott College in Canada.

A collection of photography of the old Intermountain campus by Nadimi is part of a parallel exhibit, "Eagle Village: Sheila Nadimi," which also opened on Friday.

A mural by an unknown Native American artist that's part of an exhibit of murals from the old Intermountain Intertribal Indian School that went on display Friday at Utah State University. (Photo: Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University)

"While the Native American boarding school era in North America is heavily marked by the abuse, mistreatment and systematic erasure of students' identities, Native students at Intermountain found ways to assert their cultural heritage and navigate the constraints of an assimilationist system," reads a press release about the exhibit.

Indeed, Lee-Koven said alumni from the school gather for a reunion each year in Brigham City and repaint a giant "I" on the mountainside abutting the city.

"They do not want Intermountain to be forgotten, so that is our goal, too," she said. Their experiences at the school varied, but those who take part in the annual reunions "are proud of their association with Intermountain and have fond memories."

The 11 murals on exhibit were found in a garage in 2013 after Utah State bought the land where Intermountain had been located. They required more than two years of restoration efforts to get them ready for public display. Eight of the murals were cut out of sheetrock, Lee-Koven said; one was the top half of a door while the other two were framed paintings on Masonite, an engineered wood.

The works on Masonite were painted by professional artists, and the other nine were created by students. They feature Native American figures, landscapes and more. "There was art on walls throughout the campus and buildings. The two large paintings were in the cafeteria and, I believe, the boys' gymnasium," Lee-Koven said.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.