The parking lot off Campus Drive was half-empty on a Tuesday afternoon, which is either a sign that locals are sleeping on the place or that everyone else had already been there and figured they’d seen enough. I walked in expecting the usual university-gallery experience: earnest student work, a few donated oils of dubious provenance, maybe a bronze bust of someone important. What I did not expect was a Remington, a Renoir, and a genuine Minerva Teichert that stopped me mid-stride.
The BYU Museum of Art sits on the south end of Brigham Young University’s main campus, free to enter, and almost aggressively undervisited by anyone who doesn’t have a class assignment forcing them through the doors. That’s a shame, because the permanent collection alone justifies the ten minutes it takes to find parking on campus. More than seventeen thousand works in total, spanning American illustration, European masters, and a serious holding of Latter-day Saint historical art that you won’t find concentrated anywhere else in the country.
On my visit, the main galleries were rotating between a traveling photography exhibition and the permanent pieces, so the layout had that slightly improvised quality museums get mid-shuffle. Still, the Minerva Teichert paintings were up, and if you don’t know her work, she was a trained New York artist who came back to Utah and spent decades painting the Book of Mormon and pioneer history in a loose, almost cinematic style that looks nothing like what you’d imagine from that description. Her figures move. The colors are warm and strange. Standing in front of a large Teichert feels less like looking at religious art and more like watching a film still from something you’d actually want to see.
The Carl Bloch collection is the other anchor. Bloch was a Danish painter commissioned by the Scandinavian church in the nineteenth century, and the museum holds a significant set of his religious paintings — detailed, almost photographic in their rendering, with light that behaves the way light behaves in actual rooms. Whether or not the subject matter is yours, the technical execution is worth the trip on its own terms.
There’s also a small gift shop near the entrance that sells better art books than most places in the valley, and a surprisingly pleasant lobby space where students occasionally sit doing homework with noise-canceling headphones on, completely indifferent to the Impressionist print on the wall above them, which felt very college.
Admission is free, though some special exhibitions carry a small charge — typically in the five to ten dollar range, which is reasonable. The museum is open Monday through Saturday, with shorter hours on weekends. Summer schedules shift a bit, so check before you drive out. The BYU campus itself can be confusing to navigate if you’re not a student, but the MOA is well-signed from North Campus Drive, and there’s usually metered visitor parking nearby that won’t break you.
Give yourself ninety minutes minimum. An hour goes fast when the Teicherts are up, and you’ll want time to double back to whatever painting you thought you’d seen enough of but actually hadn’t. That’s the thing about this place — it has the slightly unfair quality of rewarding return visits more than it rewards a quick look around. Which is, to be clear, the correct way for a museum to work.
