Art educators are often understood first through the work they do for others: teaching technique, guiding critique, encouraging experimentation, and helping students develop confidence in their own ideas. But behind that work is another sustained practice—the educator’s own life as an artist.

Artists Who Teach brings together art educators, many working in Utah’s colleges and universities, whose studio practices remain an essential part of their creative and professional lives. Their work reflects the ongoing process of inquiry, experimentation, discipline, and discovery that they ask of their students every day.

Teaching and making are deeply connected. The classroom can introduce new questions, perspectives, and ways of thinking, while the studio provides educators with a place to test ideas, take risks, and remain engaged in the challenges of contemporary artistic practice. Each role informs the other.

These artists also occupy an important position within Utah’s cultural landscape. Through their classrooms and studios, they help shape how future artists learn to see, question, communicate, and participate in a larger creative community. Their influence is not limited to individual students; it extends outward through generations of artists, educators, designers, and cultural contributors.

Presented alongside BDAC’s Statewide Emerging Artists’ Annual, the exhibition offers a glimpse of that influence in motion. Emerging artists are developing their voices and finding their place within the field, while artist-educators continue their own creative work and help cultivate the conditions in which new artistic voices can grow.

This exhibition celebrates educators not simply for the artists they help shape, but as artists themselves—makers whose own curiosity, rigor, and creative work remain vital to the communities they serve.