Third Saturday for Families: Words and Landscapes

Utah Museum of Fine Arts is hosting Third Saturday for Families: Words and Landscapes on Saturday, February 20, 2027, from 1 PM to 4 PM. It's a family art activity that pairs a walk through the galleries with some time in the classroom, and it's built around the museum's exhibition From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez.

That exhibition brings together photographs and phrases from Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape, a reader's dictionary of geographic terms compiled by writer Barry Lopez and his spouse Debra Gwartney. The museum describes the show as a call and response between words and images, with the photographs acting as cairns that guide visitors through the landscape toward elegance, inspiration, and solace in the places we call home. It's the kind of thing that works well if you're in the mood to slow down and actually look at the walls rather than just breeze through.

The activity follows that same pattern. Families spend some time exploring the photographs on view, and then they head to the classroom to choose a word at random from Lopez's book and illustrate it. It's a straightforward way to get kids thinking about how a single word can turn into a picture, and it lets them make something of their own after seeing what's on the walls.

One of the best parts is the timing: the museum is free every third Saturday of the month, so admission is free for this session. It runs from 1 PM to 4 PM at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City.