SALT LAKE CITY – A new traveling exhibit to be displayed in Zions Bank lobbies around the state this year tells the fascinating story of how three Utah Navajo families saved their dying craft of basket weaving by reinventing it into a bold contemporary art form.

Art and culture intertwine in Weaving a Revolution, a lobby exhibit set to open to the public Wednesday, March 6th, at the Zions Bank Pioneer office, 460 North Main Street in Logan.  Members of the media are invited to the bank from 1 - 5 pm to see the objects being placed into the cases.

Traveling Treasures, a long-standing partnership between the Natural History Museum of Utah and Zions Bank, brings Museum collections objects and their stories to communities for residents to explore.

To celebrate the exhibit opening, the bank will host a Curator’s Chat with Museum Paleontologist Mike Getty will take place March 21^st at the bank from 6-8 pm.  Getty has worked all around the world, but will focus his presentation on recent discoveries from the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.  One in particular will be the Utahceratops Gettyi, found by and named after Getty.  The Museum will bring a 30-foot cast of the Utahceratops skull, as well as some fossil specimens from the collections.

The lobby exhibit relates of a design revolution that has been underway for the past 30 years in an isolated area of Monument Valley known as Douglas Mesa where a cluster of families—the Blacks, Bitsinnies, and Rocks—quietly continued to make ceremonial baskets, generations after basketry died out elsewhere in the region. To help the weavers survive, the owners of Twin Rocks Trading Post, located in Bluff, Utah, collaborated with the families and made available to them a young computer graphics designer who helped the weavers to explore new designs and colors.  Today, traditional ceremonial basket making still continues, but these families created an explosion of design and imagery that has now been embraced by the national and international art markets and fellow Navajos.

As the families brought their new innovative baskets into the trading post to sell, Twin Rocks supported the weavers by collecting their various designs, and, over time, amassed nearly 250 unique baskets.  This collection, recently acquired by the Museum, is the foundation of the traveling exhibit as well as a 7,000 square foot exhibition of the same name now on display at the Museum through April 28^th

“Weaving a Revolution serves to interpret the authentic stories of the people who created the art, and provide insight on the environmental, cultural and spiritual influencers on the creative process,” said Executive Director Sarah George.  “And best of all, it showcases the beauty of the art itself.”

The Traveling Treasures exhibit will be on display in Zions Banks in the following communities in 2013, with several special events planned, including family festivals:

March: Logan                                                                        August: Kanab

April: Orem                                                                        September: Vernal

May: American Fork                                                            October: Duchesne

June: Blanding                                                            November: Castle Dale

July: St. George                                                            December: Centerville

The Traveling Treasures program also offers one free Museum admission with a special coupon to community members on the exhibit schedule.

“This is an incredible survival story of a Utah cultural art and will be of great interest to our clients and community members,” said Scott Anderson, CEO of Zions Bank.  “We are proud to be part of sharing that story and preserving it for future generations.”