Ray Boren is a native Utahn and lifelong journalist – writer, editor and photographer. His interest in Robert Smithson's iconic landscape artwork, "Spiral Jetty," made of black basalt boulders, took root over 30 years ago. However, the now-world-famous piece was submerged by the rising waters of the Great Salt Lake before Boren ever got a chance to find and see it on the lake's remote north shore, at Rozel Point, near the Golden Spike National Historic Site. Tragically, Smithson himself died in a 1973 plane crash.

In late 2001 Boren at last found the exact site (which he had visited before, without seeing the drowned jetty), 100 miles northwest of Salt Lake City, where he glimpsed only a curling shadow beneath the water's surface. In 2002, he and several journalist friends were among those who first told the world of the gradual re-emergence of the "Spiral Jetty" as the level of the Great Salt Lake continued to drop. By 2003 the jetty was fully exposed, and bright white, with a thick coat of salt. With the chronicling impulse of a journalist, Boren has visited the site at least once, if not several times, in each of the intervening years, witnessing the erosion of the boulders' temporary salt icing, the ebb and flow over time of the water's edge, and the play of light, mood and the pastel colors of the desert lake and its algae- and bacteria-tinted pink-to-purple waters. Boren's "Spiral Jetty" images have been featured previously in newspapers, magazines and books, from the New York Times and Utah's Deseret News to Landscape Architecture magazine and "Icons of Twentieth Century Landscape Art." Several were shown at Colorado's Museum of Outdoor Arts.

The new UTAH Artists Hands exhibit features more than two dozen of photographs captured over the past nine years, the most varied presentation yet of Boren's scenic images of one of modern art's, and Robert Smithson's, most intriguing – and often difficult-to-find – masterpieces.

learn more of the history of the Spiral Jetty at: www.spiraljetty.org