Art News

Exhibition of Lithographs by Pablo O’Higgins at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts

SALT LAKE CITY, UT.- The Utah Museum of Fine Arts presents Pablo O’Higgins: Works on Paper, an exhibition of lithographs by an artist who — though virtually unknown in his home state of Utah — is widely celebrated throughout Mexico. Born in Salt Lake City in 1904, Paul Higgins studied under acclaimed local artists, James T. Harwood and LeConte Stewart at East High School. By the age of twenty, the gifted art student had moved to Mexico City, changed his name to Pablo Esteban O’Higgins, and secured a position as a mural assistant for the famed Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera. O’Higgins joined the Communist Party in Mexico and never spoke of his bourgeois childhood in Utah, nor of his father’s role as the sentencing judge in the controversial death of union organizer, Joe Hill, in 1915. Biographers have speculated that O’Higgins’s political views and lifelong commitment to social justice w