Nearly two years ago, the Salt Lake City Arts Council was awarded its “single largest grant ever” to raise awareness about the state of the declining Great Salt Lake through public art.

So, how has the money been used?

Andrew Shaw, lead of the ensuing Wake the Great Salt Lake art series, said the word “wake” has several definitions in this context: “a wake is what happens when you move through water, your wake is a celebration of life, but of something that’s dying … and then also just awakening consciousness.”

Shaw said 125 artists responded to the project’s call for proposals and ultimately 12 were chosen to fit the $1 million budget allotted to them by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the organization that awarded the city the money. Each of those projects, or activations, reside in Utah’s seven City Council districts.

And each of the 12 artists are either from Utah or have ties to the Beehive State, Shaw said.

“What we were really looking for was maximum diversity,” he said. “We wanted to have as many artistic genres and mediums in the project.”

From a podcast to a dance performance — these creators came together to deliver art that encourages Utahns to consider the lake in different ways.

The Salt Lake Tribune looked at five of the 12 total activations:

Great Salt Lake Hopeline

For childhood friends Han Calder, Nick Carpenter and Ben Doxey, hearing the authentic sounds of the lake at the Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve became the inspiration behind their bright pink phone booth: what they call a “hopeline.”

“It was just so phenomenal and loud,” Calder said of the preserve.

The Great Salt Lake Hopeline is a dial-in phone booth where visitors can share their stories or hopes and fears for the lake. The trio of friends, Calder said, wanted to focus on hope rather than the “doom and gloom” of the state of the lake, and make the activation as interactive as possible.

(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Headphones sit on a table as part of a public art event hosted by Wake the Great Salt Lake and the Great Salt Lake Hopeline at Fisher Brewing Co. in Salt Lake City on Monday, March 24, 2025.

“This hopeline [is] a connection between the lake and the community,” Calder said.

So far, the hopeline has received stories and memories of the lake and Antelope Island. People can also call 979-GSL-HOPE (979-475-4673) to listen to stories from other people and sounds of the lake and the birds that flock to it. Some of those stories are also turned into podcast episodes, available at gslhopeline.org/podcast.

“We’ve tried to make … the lake an active participant,” Calder said, “We have slogans like, ‘She is listening,’ and we do try to kind of personify the lake and make her a part of the community.”

The booth has previously made appearances at Fisher Brewing Co., the Utah Museum of Contemporary Arts and Kilby Block Party. You can find out where it will be next through Instagram under the account @gslhopeline.

(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Gabriel Moreno listens to voicemail messages other people have left for the Great Salt Lake during a pop-up event hosted at Fisher Brewing Co. in Salt Lake City on Monday, March 24, 2025.

Outdoor site-responsive dance

Other artists, like Mitsu Salmon, took a more interpretive approach with their activations.

Salmon used to live near the Miller Bird Refuge and Nature Park, walking its path daily. It’s a space where she would see all kinds of birds that stopped while migrating. What she observed on that daily walk is what served as the inspiration for her outdoor, site-responsive dance.

“I was also very interested in the birds of the Great Salt Lake. I’d think, ‘I would love to do a piece here in this Miller bird park sanctuary, and have it connect to the Great Salt Lake and the birds and ideas of migration,” Salmon said. “It started through just walking on this path and imagining dancers popping out of trees and on bridges.”

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Mitsu Salmon directs a rehearsal for a dance performance in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, April 22, 2025.

A site-responsive work is connected to the environment it is set in. In Salmon’s piece, the music for her dancers was nature’s soundtrack: songbirds. Some parts of the performance required headphones for audience members to listen to recorded music.

The performance was meant to showcase the crucial role the lake plays for migratory birds, while also drawing attention to how humans migrate. To respect the environment and bird’s habitat, only nine audience members at a time were allowed to see the 40-minute performance, which happened a few times a day over a handful of days.

Audience members followed the dancers along on the hiking path and were immersed in the environment.

“[I’ve] found it exciting and inspiring,” Salmon said, “to look at bird movement and work with the dancers to develop our own interpretation of that.”

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Roxanne Gray, Ai Fujii Nelson, Mitsu Salmon and Masio Sangster rehearse for a dance performance in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, April 22, 2025.

Billboards

Some activations explore what the future may hold, like Nick Pedersen’s Poplar Grove billboards. Pedersen is a photographer and digital artist who combines his photos to “make a statement, mainly about environmental issues.”

“I’m really interested,” Pederson said, “in thinking about the future and human impact on nature.”

Pedersen is from Utah but lived on the East Coast for 10 years. When he came back home, he went out to Antelope Island and was shocked by how much the lake had shrunk.

“It made me really want to create a project about that,” he said.

(Palak Jayswal|The Salt Lake Tribune) Billboards at the corner of 900 South and 900 West in Poplar Grove. The billboards were created by Nick Pedersen as part of the “Wake the Great Salt Lake” intiative.

His two billboards capture two different futures for the lake. In one, the “bright future” — where water in the lake is replenished, Pedersen shows a thriving ecosystem. On the other side is a more “apocalyptic” approach, he said, showing the negative consequences scientists have warned about — things like toxic dust.

“These two billboards could kind of be in conversation with each other and show two different opposing viewpoints,” he said. The billboards are located near the International Peace Gardens on the banks of the Jordan River, a tributary to the Great Salt Lake.

Pedersen spent six months working on the billboard collages, pulling different images from his database to create the multilayered works. Each image is made of dozens of separate layers of photographs he pieced together.

“It’s this sort of intervention into people’s daily routines,” Pedersen said of the billboard format. “Getting them to think about this huge issue, when a lot of times, people don’t know enough about it.”

Pedersen’s works are still up at the corner of 900 South and 900 West in and will be until someone else rents the Reagan billboards.

By a Thread

Artist Kellie Bornhoft created an interactive sculpture piece called “By a Thread” that directly connected viewers to the plants and animals that rely on the lake for survival.

Bornhoft started by talking to local experts, like scientists from the Department of Natural Resources and Bonnie Baxter at The Great Salt Lake Institute, to get a better visual understanding of what some of these species might look like.

“All the species included on that list are dependent on the Great Salt Lake, some are endemic to the Great Salt Lake,” Bornhoft said. Of the 64 species that she digitally illustrated, some of them had never been visualized before, like a new species of algae that Baxter discovered in the lake.

(Salt Lake City Arts Council) Kellie Bornhoft’s “By a Thread” artwork on display at the Utah Capitol. The artwork is a part of the “Wake the Great Salt Lake” art initiative.

After she finished illustrating, Bornhoft submitted the images to Creative Commons, a license system that allows creators to share their work with others.

The illustrations were then printed on 40-inch by 40-inch panels of transparent fabric that Bornhoft sewed into banners. Those banners were added to a tree-like structure that rotates 360 degrees, letting viewers come up and touch them and learn about the species. The piece is no longer on display.

“The most impactful thing that we can do as artists is partner with truth, which is the scientific facts that predict the kind of outcome, but then find a way to tell that story in a way that is kind of tangible,” Bornhoft said. “By just representing those species, they’re able to stand up for themselves and have an image and have a presence.”

Of Salt and Sand

Ashley Finley and Jeri Gravlin are part of the team called Of Salt and Sand that produces a multimedia project meant to elevate the stories of people who are directly impacted by the lake.

The stories are put in a podcast called “Stay Salty,” while Gravlin photographed subjects with objects from their stories that tied back to the lake. The podcast, available at lakefacing.org/podcast, features stories from members of the Shoshone and Ute tribes, lake advocates like Nan Seymour, and an incarcerated person at the nearby Utah State Correctional facility.

“The main goal,” Gravlin said,“is to lift up voices that maybe aren’t always heard.”

Raising awareness of these stories, the team hopes, can help bridge feelings of being removed from the lake. Finley said leaning into “the transformative power of narrative storytelling” is key to the project.

(Jeri Gravlin) Rios Pacheco, left, cultural and history adviser for the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, talks to Olivia Juarez, co-host of the podcast “Stay Salty: Lakefacing Stories,” at the Antelope Island State Park Visitor Center on March 11, 2024, discussing Shoshone connections to the Great Salt Lake.