Artist Chris Peterson

Chris Peterson is a Salt Lake City-based artist who grew up fishing the Lower Provo. He earned a BFA from BYU and Kansas City Art Institute and earned an MPA and M.S. in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah. After a career in the nonprofit and public sectors working in water policy, local government and international development, a series of mural projects led him back into the studio to work on wildlife and landscape paintings.

Artist Statement

“Inspired by face-to-face encounters in wild places and the dreams that followed, my work is about the collective loss of wildness, nostalgia, and the residue left on the psyche by wild animal encounters. It is meant as both an elegy for—and celebration of—charismatic megafauna on the brink.”