This article is published through the Great Salt Lake Collaborative with funding from Love the Lake, an initiative of the non-profit Great Salt Lake Alliance. Editorial decisions are made independently by the Collaborative and partner newsrooms. This story was written by Zane Poss for the Collaborative as part of a partnership between Amplify Utah and The Daily Utah Chronicle.

When people consider the Great Salt Lake, Annika Miller said, it’s through a scientific or political perspective — but “looking at it through art [helps] us understand it in a different way.”

“Art can provoke thought, inspire creativity and create an emotional connection to a place,” said Miller, the environmental education coordinator for the nonprofit Friends of the Great Salt Lake.

The group this summer ran its 13th annual Alfred Lambourne Arts Program, aimed at fostering community, connection and awareness around the lake. An exhibition showcasing the works created in that program is now open at the Sorensen Unity Center’s art gallery at 1383 S. 900 West, Salt Lake City. The exhibition runs through Nov. 13.

By documenting the lake at a specific moment in time, the artists in the Lambourne program hope to showcase “the many different ways people interpret, value and connect with the lake,” Miller said.

At the exhibition’s opening on Aug. 28, some of the artists talked about their work and its connection to the Great Salt Lake.

Picturing an uncertain future

Nicholas Ioan Lazaroae won the Lambourne program’s Visual Arts award for his “Way of Life” photograph, which he took last October and the national climate photography journal Flare recently published.

The inspiration came from working with ranchers, Lazaroae said. The shrinking lake affects ranchers because they spend more resources fetching water and driving longer distances, he said. “Diesel is expensive right now because of the war in Iran,” he said. “The effects are very compounded.”

The photo, he said, has “a lot of visual symbolism in the photograph.” The women in the picture are from the Ute Mountain Tribe and work with state officials to herd antelope and cattle on Antelope Island. “They impart their Indigenous wisdom and knowledge managing those bison herds,” he said. “There’s some barbed wire in the composition of the shot, and it seems they’re heading towards an uncertain future.”

‘Elevation Poetry’

In her poem “Elevation Poetry,” Penelope Heaton placed text inside two representations of the lake at different water levels. She said she wanted to show how many words fit in the lake’s shape “at its healthy level versus its smaller shriveled level.” .

An excerpt of the poem reads, “We give her water rights as though she must earn her right to herself, as though she is not automatically deserving of it. And we forget: she was here first.”

Heaton took a trip to the lake during a college course and felt connected to it, she said. “It gave me a new perspective on the lake,” she said. “It doesn’t just serve us with water and [supports] our community, but I think it also has a strong spiritual impact on everybody.”

Leave a message

Nick Carpenter, Han Calder and Ben Doxey created The Great Salt Lake Hopeline, a free phone booth on which people can record a message about the lake, listen to previous messages or hear bird sounds from the Great Salt Lake. Their project, which won the Visual Arts and Hybrid Form awards, is for “lake-minded individuals.

In one recording, one person apologized for not coming to visit Great Salt Lake more often. She said it’s the last shard of the ancient Bonneville lake and reminds her of the ocean.

Another person said they’re not local, but someone they care for “loves the lake so much that every time he talks about it, it makes [them] smile.” They don’t have anything like the Great Salt Lake in their hometown, and they hope the lake will survive. “[It’s] a real point of pride for locals and is something that connects people,” the person said.

A third person said the lake is a national treasure and shared their memories of it. They said they hope the lake “can survive and that people will rally around the lake and try to provide the legislation we need to bring more water into the lake.”

Inspiration for the hotline came from the artists hearing bird sounds at the lake. “We were at the Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve in the spring. It was such an audio experience to be out there,” Carpenter said.

Every summer they do a sunrise float. “I love to float in the lake,” Calder said, “getting her sunrise.”

Carpenter, Calder and Doxy said they hope people will leave a message for the lake. They care for the environment, the water and the animals. “If we don’t save it, all of that is going to be gone,” Calder said. “The whole ecosystem will be — it’ll be devastating.”

A lake anthem

Rachel White wrote a new anthem for Great Salt Lake, called “Let’s Take the High Road,” to the tune of “Loch Lomond,” a traditional Scottish folk song.

The chorus reads, “So let’s take the high road / and give up the low road / and we’ll fill the Lake again before long! / For once the Lake is gone, will it ever come again? / Oh the beauty, the beauty of Great Salt Lake.”

White said a camping trip with folk musicians inspired her to write some lyrics about the Great Salt Lake.

She has been a part of the Lambourne project for three years and considers Lambourne’s book “Our Inland Sea” a classic. Lambourne, who died in 1926, painted landscapes of the Great Salt Lake in different seasons during his lifetime. Anyone who “dedicates art to the Great Salt Lake knows Alfred Lambourne,” White said.

Community engagement

Lazoroae said he’s proud and thankful to be part of the art community in Utah. “[We’re] willing to promote and have these difficult conversations through art,” he said. “If we’re not furthering art, we’re not furthering ourselves, both as individuals and as a society.”

After the exhibit’s festivities had died down, Miller said there’s a lot of negativity surrounding the Great Salt Lake — and programs like the Lambourne Arts Program offer some useful positivity.

“Our organization is doing a lot of work to promote public awareness to get people educated on why the lake is shrinking and what we can do to fill it back up,” she said. “We hope to broaden the ways our community thinks about and experiences Great Salt Lake.”

Miller named a community of organizations — including Grow the Flow, Utah Rivers Council and Stewardship Utah — that are “working to protect the lake more now than ever,” she said. “I think that’s really positive and great.”

Submissions to the Lambourne Arts Program are open April through July and Friends of the Great Salt Lake hosts the exhibit every August. They “encourage community members to submit artwork inspired by or connected to Great Salt Lake,” Miller said.

This article is published through the Great Salt Lake Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative that partners news, education and media organizations to help inform people about the plight of the Great Salt Lake — and what can be done to make a difference before it is too late. Read all of our stories at greatsaltlakenews.org.