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Anna Campbell Bliss, Utah artist who melded science and motion, dies

First Published      Last Updated Oct 13 2015 08:36 pm

(Tribune file photo) Anna Bliss is pictured by her piece "Tsunami", oil on rives paper, in 2009 The acclaimed Utah artist died this week at age 90.

“Color and light” were prolific artist’s trademarks.

Anna Campbell Bliss, an acclaimed artist and architect who combined color and line, science and technology, and movement and the human form into her many works, died Monday morning in her Salt Lake City home. She was 90.

Bliss' works often explored the overlap between art, mathematics and science, said Ben Butler, a Salt Lake City architect and Bliss' former assistant.

Bliss, Butler said, believed "there's art in everything — it's all in the way you approach it."

Some of Bliss' most recognizable work in the Salt Lake City area includes: "Windows" (1989-90), a 30-foot-long mural of squares in the Utah State Capitol's data processing center; "Discoverers" (1996), a mural evoking the Salt Lake Valley's topography, in the Salt Lake City International Airport's Concourse E; "Light of Grace" (1993), a stained-glass window wall in St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Sandy; and "Extended Vision (2001-03), a series of etched and screenprinted plates depicting math theories, in the lobby of the University of Utah's Cowles Mathematics Building.



Bliss' works can also be found in the collections of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, the U.'s Marriott Library, Alta's Cliff Lodge, the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Anna Campbell Bliss "sort of defies category," said Whitney Tassie, curator of contemporary and modern art at UMFA. Though she incorporated all manner of subjects into her art, Tassie said, "her main focus was color and light."

"The caliber of her mind and her talents, and her contributions to art, are unsurpassed by any [artist] who spent their lives in Utah," said Adam Bateman, executive director of the Salt Lake City gallery CUAC, which hosted one of Bliss' last exhibitions, with her architect husband Robert Bliss, this summer.

Anna Campbell was born July 10, 1925, in Morristown, N.J. She earned a bachelor's degree in art history and mathematics from Wellesley College in 1946, and a master's degree in architecture from Harvard in 1950. She was influenced by the Bauhaus movement, studying with the art theorist György Kepes at MIT, and later with the artist/educator Josef Albers.

In 1947, Butler said, she met Robert Bliss at a dinner party. "He ended up escorting her home, and they were married three months later," Butler said. She was 22, he was 26.

They remained together 68 years, and she died holding his hand, Butler said.

They traveled around Europe after they got married, "living as poor as they could in Florence," Butler said. In 1954, Robert got a job teaching architecture in Minnesota, and he and Anna started their own architectural practice, Bliss & Campbell Architects.

They designed houses, Butler said, that were known for their style and sense of material — incorporating the natural setting in which a house would be built.

In 1963, Robert applied to be head of the University of Utah's Department of Architecture (now the College of Architecture + Planning). "He was their first choice," Butler said. He served as department head, and later dean, until 1986.

The move to Utah didn't sit well with Anna at first. "I'll admit I was in a very depressed mood when I got here," she told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2012. "I was very involved with the Walker [Art Center] and Minneapolis' art scene. I didn't find that degree of stimulation in the art world here."

So, she helped create that stimulation. She focused on art, Butler said, and found inspiration from many sources. She explored computer programming, while also researching dance and human movement with Repertory Dance Theatre. She also took courses in screen-printing, which Butler said became instrumental in her artworks.

She received major commissions, such as her mural "Discoverers," unveiled at the Salt Lake airport in 1996. Creating that work was a case study in testing attitudes about art in conservative Utah.

"I included nudes in a minor way, just to establish a relationship between the ideas and people," she said in 2012. "Because of local attitudes, I couldn't have the nudes."

At an assistant's suggestion, she substituted computer-generated figures. The airport committee that commissioned the work checked up on her from time to time, and she and her assistants referred to them as the "Breast Patrol."

 

 

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