Adam Bateman: Mormon Artist

Adam Bateman is an artist and curator. He is the executive director of the Central Utah Art Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.

In 2015, he walked the Mormon Trail from Florence, Nebraska, to Salt Lake City, a journey of 1,132.53 miles that took him 74 days. In an interview with the Deseret News, Bateman said, “these trails serve as a major artery that made the settlement of the West possible. The travel across the landscape has so much to do with who we are as Americans.”[1] He has sixty-two pioneer ancestors who made the journey West. He is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

As an artist, he saw his walk as “performance art—a symbolic and cultural exploration of the past.” To share his performance art with others, as most art is, he documented his journey by means of photographs, social media updates, and mapping software.

Bateman earned his bachelor’s degree in English and Spanish from Brigham Young University and his MFA in sculpture from the Pratt Institute. He has exhibited his artwork internationally at such shows as the Benrimon Contemporary in New York City, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Akureyri Art Museum in Iceland, and the Jancar Gallery in Los Angeles. He has curated projects in Los Angeles and New York City as well as for a few venues in Utah, including the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and the Central Utah Art Center.

He is the 2008 recipient of the Utah Division of Arts and Museums Visual Artist Fellowship and the 2013 Joan Mitchell Fellowship. His art ranges in medium and dimension, as seen by the gigantic sculptures of stacked books he compiled for the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Cantastorias” in 2012.