A Utah artist’s life’s work on State Street has been demolished

After a three-year-long saga, a Salt Lake City artist’s life’s work is now rubble along Utah’s main thoroughfare.

A curious building might have caught the eye of anyone who could spare a glance to the side of State Street just after the 1300 South light. It was the utterly unique Christian School — a building with a brick facade; a hand-painted, bright-blue sign and sculptures galore.

Ralphael Plescia, the visionary behind the sculpture-filled art building on State Street, died in August 2022. He spent 50 years filling the building with his artistic interpretations of scriptures from the Bible.

As of Wednesday evening, the artwork that he dedicated his life to had been demolished. Among the rubble, chips of the blue, hand-painted sign still shine.

The Christian School had three different levels to it. Each one was filled with debris, supplies and, of course, art.

In 2023, burnt musical instruments, boxes of comic books nibbled on by rats, and papers torn from a Bible filled the rooms. Countless religious paintings, and accounts written by Plescia in his slanted and distinct penmanship, were tucked between piles of unfinished work. Some of the art was attached to the structure of the building.

Art preservation website Spaces Archives wrote that the work in his Christian School was inspired by the 12th chapter of the Book of Revelation.

That chapter describes a pregnant woman confronted by a seven-headed dragon preparing to devour the woman’s child when it is born. One of Plescia’s sculptures shows the boy, usually interpreted to be Jesus, and his mother, referred to as “The Lady of Wisdom,” escaping by hiding inside the mouth of a lion.

On the ceiling of the building, Plescia painted portraits of family members who had died.

After Plescia died in 2022, his widow, Vonna Rae Plescia, and daughter Neena Plant-Henninger were at a loss as to what to do with the packed-to-the-brim building. Rae Plescia died in March 2025.

The Plescias had been leasing the building where the Christian School was located from the Shriners Children’s hospital. Originally the family was asked to vacate the building entirely by Dec. 1, 2022.

The Utah Arts Alliance stepped in that November, however, to help the family try to preserve the building. Derek Dyer, the founder and executive director of UAA, previously told The Salt Lake Tribune he approached Shriners about purchasing the building. He said he wasn’t given a fair chance to do so.

Instead, the Colmena Group, one of Utah’s largest development companies, bought it in August 2023. The group has created the Milagro Apartments downtown, the Wilmington Apartments in Sugar House and has proposed a mixed-use development at 1435 S. State St. — across the street and a block south of Christian School. It is unclear what the Colmena Group’s plan is for the site.

In 2023, Plant-Henninger and Dyer said they’d been in contact with Scott Karen. Karen worked in property management with Colmena Group at the time and told The Tribune then that “there are no plans for redevelopment.”

In the years since the sale, UAA and the family started taking Plescia’s work out of the building, undoing the work the artist spent years creating in order to preserve it.

They also took 3D scans and photographs of the Christian School to capture the artwork that was attached to the building’s structure and could not be moved.

Dyer confirmed via text message Wednesday night that all of the 2D artwork was taken out of the building, including two dozen canvas paintings, three big sculptures and six smaller sculptures.

A YouTube video from Really Bad Media documents the removal of the “The Lady of Wisdom” sculpture in September 2024.

The works that have been removed are being stored at the Arts Castle, the refurbished former Latter-Day Saint meeting house the alliance acquired in 2021.

Now, Dyer said they’re focusing on Plescia’s home, which has more artwork.

Back in 2016, Plescia had his doubts about whether Christian School would last beyond his life.

“The reason I don’t think it’ll survive,” he said in a video by OHO Media, “is because what I’m doing here is not something to make money on. I’m not trying to sell anything other than knowledge.”

Plescia added, “There’s probably a 98% chance that one day none of this will be here and I wasted my life. But let’s put it this way: We all have a choice of wasting our own life the way we want.”

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