(upbeat music) - Utah Museum of Fine Arts has two complementary exhibitions on view through December 29th.

Senior Curator Alisa McCusker is here to tell us about both of them.

Hi, thank you for being here, Alisa.

These are very interesting ones because the complementary didn't mean complementary like free.

They complementary each other.

- [Alisa] Exactly, yes.

- Yeah.

- They work very well together, even though they're two completely separate exhibitions.

So, one is a group of paintings from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and that's in an exhibition called "Blue Grass, Green Skies: American Impressionism and Realism from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art."

And the other is works from the same period, from roughly 1880 to about 1920, but it's all photography.

And that show is called "Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography."

- Wow, okay, and I'm very curious about how you see them complementing each other because it shows how they influenced each other.

- Absolutely, so early photographers who were trying to establish photography as an art form in its own right were really looking to painting to try to establish a new form of image-making, and the innovations of photography, and the development of new and different media over the course of the 19th century.

Influenced painters who really actually saw the world very differently because of these new imaging technologies.

So, it's a really wonderful kind of circular dialogue between painting and photography that we're able to highlight right now with these two exhibitions that are up through the end of December.

- I think that's great.

I like that they saw the world differently.

- Yes.

- When they looked at the photographs.

- Yeah, absolutely.

Just completely new ways that people had never seen the world sort of stopped in motion like that.

- [Mary] Yeah.

- Including, in some cases, with blurriness in photography that... You know, things that we'd never perceived the world that way before.

- [Mary] Oh, wonderful.

- Yeah.

- I am looking forward to seeing that.

It's very interesting.

Thanks.

- Yes, and the selection of paintings is really extraordinary.

- Great.

Thank you.

- Yes.

- And if you'd like to know more about that upcoming exhibit, there are actually two exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts through December 29th, go to umfa.utah.edu.

I'm Mary Dickson, thanks for watching "Contact."

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Hi, I'm Mary Dickson.

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