Julia Reagan has become a pillar of Utah’s pop culture. The billboard matriarch has inspired tattoos, songs, Halloween costumes and now: the opening exhibit at the new Salt Lake Art Museum.

Starting Friday, Reagan — printed on a massive banner and dressed in a hat and stellar jewelry — will greet visitors to the downtown museum.

Her fans, of course, are used to seeing her larger than life.

Reagan’s husband, Bill Reagan, founded Reagan Outdoor Advertising, the largest billboard company in the state. And she was memorialized on billboards throughout Utah — and Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, Nevada, Texas and Tennessee — after she died in 2024.

In the eyes of Chris Jensen, the museum’s executive director, Reagan became an undeniable Utah icon, which is why she is the star of the new “Love in Landscape” exhibition.

Jensen, who has a master’s degree in historic and cultural preservation, said he’d never seen such a large dedication to a non-celebrity in modern history.

“The first year it was 360 billboards spread across America over 2,500 miles,” Jensen said.

He quickly took note of this bit of modern history.

“I just started thinking about the cultural implication with how this intersected with art and media online,” Jensen said. “It really became a pop culture moment.”

That’s reflected in the exhibit. Two parallel walls tell the story of Julia, the “icon of the interstate.”

Photos of her billboards are how Utahns have come to know her. But here they are juxtaposed with photos from her life, as mother, grandmother, philanthropist and activist — traveling in Egypt, picking apples with her grandchildren, even posed on top of a bull with a child.

The exhibit was curated by Liz Finlayson, an exhibition assistant at the museum. The Reagan billboard photos were taken by Salt Lake resident Bryant Heath.

What really struck Jensen about the billboards — and their subsequent pop culture moment — is that they weren’t trying to sell people something, but rather shared the message that Reagan was deeply loved and dearly missed.

“It was a monument to love in reality,” Jensen said, comparing it to others he’s researched like The Taj Mahal, The Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tomb of Hephaestion.

The Julia Reagan exhibit has an interactive area where people can make their own monuments to share how they want to be remembered.

There’s also a photo op — people can take a picture in front of a wall that is painted like one of the billboards, which reads, “I am loved, like Julia.”

It’s an example of how the museum wants to pay homage to past, present and future Utah artists, but also have a fun side to it, Jensen said.

Another one of the museum’s opening exhibits focuses on the history of the building it’s housed in — the B’inai Temple of Israel, which was built in 1890.

The building, located at 249 S. 400 East, hasn’t been a synagogue since the 1970s. It had a brief life as a restaurant, then a high-end furniture sales office, before it became the home for the Salt Lake Art Museum.

Historic records from the synagogue will become the first addition to the museum’s permanent collection.

Bringing the building up to code, Jensen said, was done in a way that honors the historic architecture, including the stained glass, mouldings and arches.

“I always tell people when they walk through the building. I want them to see the history, that this place was once sacred for the Jewish community, and it is sacred for art now,” said Jensen, who helped museum founder Micah Christensen buy the building.

Christensen said his inspiration for the museum came from his work on a book called “Dictionary of Utah Fine Artists,” which features 4,500 biographies of local artists.

During that time, he came across two statistics. First, according to the latest U.S. Census Data, Utah had more fine artists per capita than anywhere in the country.

“Then separately, I came across another statistic that Utah has the fewest number of museums per capita of any state in the country other than West Virginia,” Christensen said.

So, Christensen decided to do something about it. When the temple became available, he jumped at the opportunity.

“What we needed to do is have a museum dedicated to showing and teaching Utah about its own artists, past and present,” Christensen said.

As such, he wants the museum to be a “soil sample” of Utah art over time, no matter the medium, so people can get to know all types of Beehive State artists.

“There aren’t always exhibitions that are reminding us of who these artists are,” Christensen said. “My goal is that we’ll look back [at] 20 years of the museum being opened and people will be astonished at all they learned about their own artists from it.”

The museum is kicking that idea off strong with another opening exhibit on artist Pilar Pobil, which is modeled after her home and full of the vibrant colors, like bright yellow and grape purple, which she used in her work.

The fourth exhibit is the first of its kind — a look at German-American painter Albert Bierstadt’s Utah landscapes, juxtaposed with recent photos of the sites he painted.

“We want to do stuff where you’re not just experiencing the art, but you’re experiencing the artist as a whole. When you walk into a gallery, we want you to feel their essence,” Jensen said.

The Salt Lake Art Museum will open on Pioneer Day at 3:30 p.m. to honor Utah artists and Utah history.