S1,E24: Anthony's Antiques & Fine Art - Micah Christensen

Embarking on a familial legacy can be as daunting as it is rewarding. Micah Christensen of Anthony's Fine Art Gallery joins me to recount his transformation from an art-averse scion to a thriving art historian and connoisseur, particularly of the Spanish artist Joaquin Sorolla. Our conversation weaves through the cobblestone streets of Spain, the scholarly halls of London, and back to the surprisingly rich art scene of Utah, where local mastery commands global attention.

Every family has its stories, and Micah's is no exception. We trace his lineage back to a Jewish immigrant with a penchant for antiques, leading to a tapestry of tales that span continents and eras. As Micah reflects on his journey through art and academia, inspired by luminaries like Dr. Vern Swanson, you'll feel the passion for his craft and the serendipitous encounters that shaped his career. This chapter of his life underscores the unpredictable excitement of the art world, and how embracing one's roots can lead to unanticipated respect and recognition.

We round off our exploration with discussions on art patronage in the Utah Valley, the spiritual connection between humans and objects, and the personal touch that makes art stewardship so much more than a transaction. Micah's narrative is an invitation to view art as a conduit of history, education, and soulful engagement, challenging the digital detachment of our times. So, join us for this inspiring session, and perhaps you'll discover a newfound appreciation for the art that surrounds us and the stories it carries through the ages.

Please be sure to like, review, follow, subscribe and share the podcast with your friends and family! See you next time 

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Transcript

Erik Nilsson: 0:10

What is up everybody and welcome back to the Small Lake City podcast. I'm your host, eric Nielsen, and for episode 24 we have one of the most fascinating guests we've had so far. Now, if you're from Salt Lake City, especially close to downtown, you've probably driven past a peculiar building on 4th East and 2nd South dozens, if not hundreds of times called Anthony's Fine Art Gallery. Now, if you're like me, you've driven past accounts of times but have never gone in. But inside there's a man by the name of Micah Christensen who is a fourth generation art dealer and curator of art that has one of those fascinating stories and understanding of not only the broader art community but also the art community within Utah itself. Now he's been mentioned by two guests before both John Darley.

John Darley: 0:56

A great guy to have on would be Micah Christensen over at Anthony Antiques.

Erik Nilsson: 1:01

They just bought a painting for me, so obviously they had good taste. He just developed a book about Utah artists specifically. And Howard Lyon. So I have a good friend, Micah Christensen. Okay.

Howard Lyon: 1:15

And he is one of the owners of Anthony's Antiques and Fine Art. He's studied opera. He has a PhD in art history. He works with some amazing clients.

Erik Nilsson: 1:27

But it was fantastic to hear his story about growing up here, not wanting to be in the family business, going to London to get his masters and then PhD in art abroad, spending a ton of time in Spain studying art from that region, which also has led him to write a book currently about Joaquin Sorolla, a very famous Spanish artist, and also was able to get some of his pieces to the BYU Museum of Art for an exhibition that is currently going on right now. So it was great to sit down with him and talk about not only his understanding of art and how he plays a role in the international art community, but also his intimate understanding of the local Utah community of art, his time that he spent with the Springfield Art Museum, how important it is to the Utah art scene and also has helped support and build a lot of local artists into who they are today and why Utah is such a special art community. So sit back and listen to Micah talk about it all. If you want to watch the video, there's a YouTube video available. Come listen and watch him actually drink his favorite beverage of all time some of your bama te, and we can hear from all of the great stories and tales that he has. So let's jump into it.

Erik Nilsson: 2:45

But, Micah, okay, so it's been so funny with the podcast because when I first started guests it was a lot of people within my own community, my own network, and it's been fun because I always kind of like pulled the string, like, oh, if you could have someone on your, who would it be? And it's interesting because so John Darley is one of my childhood friends, known him forever and you were the first great artist and I'd like be coming to actually like appreciate how great of an artist it is, as I've started painting more and then followed him and seen kind of the awards he's won, do more research on him, like all right, like amazing. And so he mentioned you to have on the podcast and then I we talked about how I met Howard and then he mentioned you. It was funny because they both mentioned you and Jeff Hine in almost the exact same way. But then it's fun to hear these stories and like I mean we're actually recording this afternoon with Ben Hammond down in his studio in American Fork and so it's fun to get to know.

Micah Christensen: 3:35

It'll be an adventure for you.

Erik Nilsson: 3:36

Oh, like retreat? Yeah, so it's. I get to meet all these amazing people and then, to their detriment, I picked their brain about painting techniques and how to go about doing this stupid. You're learning to paint huh, yes, and it is going to be a lifelong journey.

Erik Nilsson: 3:51

Yes, it will be, but there's nothing wrong with that, oh I just bought a like a 50 by 70 inch canvas or something around there, Cause I just bought a house and I want to have like something I painted in it that I actually like. So it's the first time I've actually painted something for myself.

Micah Christensen: 4:06

What do you paint?

Erik Nilsson: 4:08

The thing I've liked the most has been flowers. So I love the colors, love the saturation, love the process of like looking at a picture of a flower. I mean like I have no idea how I'm going to do this and then by the end you're like, oh, like you see here on the set, here in the light has to hit, like just understanding it more.

Micah Christensen: 4:21

Do you have any background in art?

Erik Nilsson: 4:23

No, my family is probably the one of the least artistic families I could ever come from A lot of doctors, a lot of athletes, but no one with that. Actually, no, no, that's I should take that back my sister, my oldest sister, britta. She's a photographer but kind of taking a sideline to motherhood.

Micah Christensen: 4:39

It's a great origin story. Just just run with it, go for it. I encourage you as much as you possibly can do it. Go out and do it. It's there's.

Micah Christensen: 4:49

No, my only advice is and my PhD was in how artists were trained from the Renaissance until the end of the 19th century my advice to you is are we recording already? Oh, yeah, okay. My advice to you is paint, paint, paint, paint, paint, paint, paint, paint. Don't intellectualize it too much. Just painting is problem solving.

Micah Christensen: 5:14

Yes, and you will come across problems all the time, and the way you're going to solve it is not by talking about it as much as painting and then looking at other people who do it well and talking to them, maybe talking to them for sure, finding your heroes dead and alive. Yes, you've got a pretty good slate of people that you've got in your pocket that you can go to Totally and just fail often. Right, keep going and you'll look back at the things that you painted now, five years from now, and you'll say what was I thinking? And I meet artists who I have admired for 20 years and the work they were painting year one when I met them was fantastic. The work they're painting now is great, arguably even better, and they think that the work that I like, that they did early on, is complete garbage. I congratulate you. You're on a journey.

Erik Nilsson: 6:17

And I've already recognized some. Obviously it's not the 20-year versus one-year difference. But even now I look back and I'm like, oh, I would have done that different. That color is a little too saturated, things like that. Which is great because you realize you're learning. But I love what you said about constant problem solving, because that's one thing I've realized in my own painting is I love the first 5% of the journey and the last 5%, but the middle 90% to me can sometimes be very agonizing because your point it's all just like conflict resolution, conflict resolution, conflict resolution, conflict resolution. Because you'll look at part of it and be like, oh, there's an issue here, whether it be composition value, whatever it might be, and you have to resolve that. But then you look at another part of it like, oh, here's another problem to solve, until it starts to come together.

Micah Christensen: 6:57

In the era before radio, television, movies we're talking 19th century and back painting, drawing were a much more widespread skill, and so if you read Jane Austen almost anything that's by her women of a certain middle class or higher education level or status, they're expected to know how to draw and how to do watercolors, and it's an activity that everybody participates in, so it's something that we think of. I think today, as this is so far beyond my scope, there's no way I'll ever paint. There's no way I'll ever draw. That's for people who are like surgeons, who are like doctors. You have to go to school for that for a very, very long time and then maybe, maybe, if I dedicate myself full time to it, I think that it's a healthier attitude to say you know the way that we think about sports, right, not everybody's going to be in the NBA, but it doesn't mean that you don't enjoy intramural or you know casual sports with your friends. I think that the world would be a better place if we all participated in making and viewing beauty a little bit more.

Erik Nilsson: 8:15

Yeah, I agree. Life has become so pragmatic and to your point, like fail, often in painting, is how you learn the most in painting. And because there's this perception of, oh, I can't be perceived as being bad at something, I'm not going to do something unless I'm the best at it, I can't fail. Which I mean you apply that logic to anything in life and it's not going to work. Like it's not. Like you just went to med school the first day and you're an orthopedic surgeon. Like there has to be some learning process.

Micah Christensen: 8:39

There's a great quote by Picasso who says who was otherwise a pretty awful person. But Picasso has this great quote who says that art is a window into a person's soul. And I think in this world, when we're buying so much to express who we are, it's what I'm wearing, it's what I went out and bought, that somebody else made and that maybe is mass produced. Even that's how I'm going to identify a little bit, send little signals about who I am to the world. When you run into somebody who's making art, it's like they're wizards on some level and it should be more widespread.

Micah Christensen: 9:27

I'm not an artist, so I get asked all the time to judge our competitions and you know I've got an eye and I am also extremely humble when I'm in the presence of artists and I write a lot about art and I think I've earned the trust of a lot of artists over the years, but I am not an artist. It's almost like I'm a food critic who doesn't cook. I can draw a little bit, but really my output is writing. So I write and that's my creative output and I think that you know for you at what are you in your 20s?

Erik Nilsson: 10:12

Oh, thank you 33. Actually my half birthday was yesterday, so 33 and a half.

Micah Christensen: 10:16

Congratulations, your half birthday.

Erik Nilsson: 10:18

Yeah.

Micah Christensen: 10:18

You celebrate your half birthday. It's the first time I've remembered it, so I did it. I want you to know everybody celebrates my half birthday because my half birthday is Christmas. Lucky.

Erik Nilsson: 10:26

You're like, oh, how nice of everybody to show up.

Micah Christensen: 10:28

Equidistant presence right Every year. It's amazing, but the you know to start in your 30s. Some of the great artists out there did not start until their 30s or 40s.

Erik Nilsson: 10:43

No better time to start than now, no matter what it is.

Erik Nilsson: 10:46

But I want to go to the beginning because I'm so curious about your story and just for a little bit of context in you, like I've come to realize that if anybody in the western United States wants a piece of me quote real, unquote art you are someone that they probably have to go through, especially live in Utah.

Erik Nilsson: 11:03

But then it's interesting, so like even meeting you for the first time down at, I mean, the store the Anthony's, which I've driven past for I mean literally at least 25, 28 years of my life, remember going past it, seeing it, recognizing it, but never actually going in and going in having some appreciation of art, being like there are a lot of really real things and they're everywhere and it's fast. Like I just sat there and walked around after we talked, but I love when I walked in your assistant showed me where you were and you were on a zoom call talking to someone in French and like I know enough I mean I speak Spanish so I can pick apart a lot of like the little things and I could kind of tell and try to be if I'm wrong, but I don't think French is your second or third language, if I had to guess.

Micah Christensen: 11:43

It's my fourth.

Erik Nilsson: 11:44

I knew it. Yeah, because I could kind of tell just the way that you, like, I could feel, the way you thought about things and put things together, that it wasn't you understood the structure of how it should be, but the language I mean sorry, the vocabulary wasn't quite there to be super confident like a second or third language.

Micah Christensen: 12:01

You know it's true for you. You're right on. I've been, I have spent a great deal of time in Spain and Spanish is my first second language, and that I've spent a lot of time in Italy and studied that intensely for about three years, and I've been able to read in French for many years now. I've had to for my work, but I've always felt like it was the language that I should have learned earlier and didn't. I'm 44 now and I've started taking. What you walked in on was one of my intensive French lessons. Oh, okay.

Micah Christensen: 12:36

So I have a tutor. He's the greatest. If you want the name of a great French tutor, give me a ring. And he's a. He's a Fulbright scholar. He's from France, young kid, and he speaks Spanish fluently, which is helpful for me because you know, I can, I can say to him how would I say this? And I'll say it in Spanish instead, right? But yeah, it's sort of go back to your question about the origin. Yeah, the origin of this, and I don't know how far back to go, it's because I mean it's.

Erik Nilsson: 13:40

It runs in the family, because it was your dad or your grandpa that started, like quote, the family business.

Micah Christensen: 13:45

Well, Anthony's it's called Anthony's Fine Art and Antiques was started by my father in 1984.

Micah Christensen: 13:51

This is our 40th year of being here in congratulation, and it's changed a lot over that 40 year period. I have been a well before I get into my role into it my great grandfather, philip Fitzler, or fishler, who was a Jewish immigrant from the pale of settlement Eastern Europe in the 1890s to he was fleeing the pogroms, the persecution of Jews in in Eastern Europe. He moved to Chicago and was the son of a rabbi and he came to Utah as a traveling cigar salesman.

Erik Nilsson: 14:33

And no better way to walk into Utah than a Jewish traveling cigar salesman.

Micah Christensen: 14:36

Yeah, yeah, he's, and there was surprisingly at the time that he came three different congregate, three different synagogues in Salt Lake. In Salt Lake was has had a buzz, a buzzing religious community at the turn of the century, and my great grandfather was part of that and he married the daughter of one of Joseph Smith's bodyguards and the sister of the governor of Utah, charles Randall maybe. So on my father's side, and he also had a second hand and furniture or antique shop, of course. So my dad grew up in his grandfather's antique shop, who is Jewish, and my father is. His mother also married a Jewish man named Mordecai, of Laiwais, called Max, and so, even though my name is Micah Christensen, it's probably more accurate because I never knew my dad's stepfather, who was Christensen and we're not related by blood Interesting, so it's probably more accurate. I've been going more and more by the name Micah Bligh, wise Christensen, to kind of collect, correct the genealogical record. Yes, and I guess I'm fourth generation antique dealer, dang, as a result of that.

Erik Nilsson: 15:52

It reminds me so have you ever so? One of my favorite novels. And I'm not a big like novel reader, like I love psychology books, economics books, autobiographies, biographies but have you ever read the?

Micah Christensen: 16:02

Goldfinch, I know of it and I, I and I've met the author. I met her in London a couple of times. But yeah, I know of it, tell me, but I haven't read it. I apologize.

Erik Nilsson: 16:13

So I mean, like the TLDR is, this kid goes to skip ahead if you're going to read the book, but let's be honest, if you haven't read it by now you probably won't. So this. So this kid and his mom, single mother, dad had left. They live in New York together and they go to the Metropolitan Art Museum and he always wants to go back to see this painting, the Goldfinch. And while he's there a bomb goes off, kills his mom. He's alone, but he sneaks this painting under his shirt and he goes and it like it's his like thing that he essentially saves it Exactly and steals it, and because his mom exactly.

Erik Nilsson: 16:52

I'm sure there's no stories of any of that through the history of art, but I mean, then he goes and like connects with his dad, has to go out to Vegas, he ends up dying and has to come back to New York but doesn't know anybody.

Erik Nilsson: 17:02

And then I can't remember the story of it all, but anyway he gets connected with this guy who used to work for an antique dealer, is like that was restore furniture, and yeah, he's like, well, do you want to just take up, like pick up where he left off and becomes this antiques dealer and then writes all the wrongs he had made and ends up finding a home for the Goldfinch painting at the end of the day. But it's like this tale of, just like every chapter, like this is just painting on my soul of everything this guy has to go through to get where he wants to be. But like and it's so interesting because, like going back to it, like you have this history of family of antiques dealers, I mean from almost like the beginning of Salt Lake in Utah, the way that we know it. I mean how did and assume you grew up? I mean being in that world, seeing Anthony's come to life.

Micah Christensen: 17:50

I did everything I could to avoid it.

Erik Nilsson: 17:51

Okay, I was going to ask because it's usually one or the other.

Micah Christensen: 17:53

either you're drawn completely, so I'm the youngest of four children and I was by far the youngest, my nearest siblings about seven years older than I am, and so by the time all my siblings were out of the house and I was 11 or 12 years old, I was traveling with my father because they didn't know what to do with me going to auctions, going to sales, arranging shipment from Europe for pieces, and then went, and all the while I was performing and I was, I was a vocalist, so I did my. I had scholarships at various schools to for opera opera performance.

Erik Nilsson: 18:32

Amazing.

Micah Christensen: 18:33

And I studied at the University of Utah eventually and went to, I was in the opera chorus with Dr Peter Bro and Dr David Power and it's it's. It's funny, you know I've got I mean I've got a great voice, but not a musician. That's just, it's a different thing. Honestly. Yeah, I would spend three to four times the amount in the practice rooms to get the same result as the real musicians and the performing arts is really can be very easy for a man on some level, because if you can sing there's there's just not the same supply of men as there are women in the fine arts, especially in opera and voice.

Micah Christensen: 19:23

So you know they were scraping the bottom of the barrel with me, essentially, and I could walk in and get parts pretty quickly, whereas the women who I'd be singing alongside were 10 times what I was. Yeah.

Micah Christensen: 19:37

And I kind of I realized this and I went to Robert Brown. I said I don't know if this is for me. He said Well, look you're, you've got a great voice and, yes, you're going to have to work harder than most people. And he said but you'll probably specialize in a few roles and do those roles your entire life hundreds of times at various opera houses here in Europe, latin America, wherever they'll hire you, and you'll have to work on the side. And I saw that future in front of me and I said no, thank you. Yeah, that's, that's probably not for me.

Micah Christensen: 20:14

And all the while I was moving furniture summers at the antique shop Right, and at that time the gallery was mostly importing from France and my father and brother-in-law, who are my business partners, they were traveling to France. I'd go occasionally with them and they were buying things and then importing them and it was 80% furniture and mostly 18th and 19th century beautiful, well-made French furniture that you could buy for less than what you'd pay for furniture at RC Willey. It was crazy. So I switched my major to business. I was at the University of Utah and I was elected the senator from the business school, essentially the president of the business school, God interesting.

Micah Christensen: 21:00

And then I got hired by Stephen R Covey, out of college, the author of the Seven Havids. Finally, effective People for a couple of authors who he was promoting Steve Smith and David Markham, who had started a new business called Markham Smith Consulting and they were doing I was promoting their book and their consulting services. So for five years out of college I was doing marketing, consulting and regularly meeting with Covey and these other people. It was a real education. Oh, I bet. Then I go to In between there I explored things. I went to Harvard for a semester to study constitutional history. I really didn't know what I was going to do.

Erik Nilsson: 21:47

Also, I love how much of I know. We talked about this when we first met, but you know so much about so many things and it's usually way more than surface.

Micah Christensen: 21:54

I fooled you. I fooled you then.

Erik Nilsson: 21:56

Then I am amazingly fooled.

Micah Christensen: 22:00

So I had one of my friends from that semester in Harvard who said you know, there's this wave of digitization and an optical character recognition which means you can search through all of these scanned documents. There was a technology that was new in the early 2000s and we know people in this world. We know people at Mount Vernon, at Monticello, at the National Archives, at Harvard, at Yale, and so why don't we go and start a non-profit that is digitizing all of the founders' papers? So we raised $8 million in two years and started this group called the Constitutional Sources Project, and I was working out of DC most of the time and I was about to put money down on a home in DC and quit my job with Markham Smith and I get a phone call that my father had collapsed outside the gallery.

Erik Nilsson: 22:56

Oh jeez.

Micah Christensen: 22:59

He called me from the hospital and said I don't know how long I'm going to live. It could be weeks, the doctor's telling me, at most it's months. And there are a lot of people depending on the gallery, and of all of my children you're the one who probably has got the most knowledge in it. You haven't really been involved in it for seven, eight years, but I don't want to pressure you. But if you want to, could you come over and take over the gallery?

Erik Nilsson: 23:29

Yeah, and at this point are you still like this is literally the thing I don't want to do, or by now you start to appreciate it a little more?

Micah Christensen: 23:36

You know, I think I did start to appreciate it a little more, and I think it's. You get involved in academia and in large corporations. I was working with Fortune 1000 companies on the Markham Smith Covey side of things and I was working with large educational institutions on the constitutional sources project side of things we call it consorts and it was the relief of every day working with interesting people and beautiful things and having control over it, rather than being dependent on large bureaucracies. That decisions made, yes, was appealing, but working with my father was not appealing because he's kind of a difficult guy. He could be. At least that was my perception as a son. I'm sure all sons feel this way about their fathers. Right, definitely. So I go.

Micah Christensen: 24:26

We made the decision, my wife and I, and my wife is unbelievable. I mean I married way above myself. She is from Florida, she went to NYU and studied theater at the Stella Adler School of Fine Arts. I mean, her classmates are our Academy, tony award-winning, emmy award-winning actors and we met as missionaries in Chile. And then she went to law school at BYU and she's a pro bono lawyer who works with people who are abused and under the poverty level. I mean you couldn't find somebody who's like more of a genius, who's doing more of a good work. She just said you know, I can do what I'm doing wherever Right, so we go to, we go to, we go back to Utah and start working at the gallery and my dad, over a period of about six months, gets better.

Erik Nilsson: 25:23

I was going to say, because you talked about how you still own with your dad and your brother and brother, I was like there's a recovery story. I can feel it gets better.

Micah Christensen: 25:31

And I'm young and I've got all kinds of great new ideas, I think. And he's an old dog who doesn't want to, he doesn't want to try anything new. And I'm a young guy who, who feels rejected at every turn and thinks I know everything Right.

Erik Nilsson: 25:48

Naturally.

Micah Christensen: 25:49

And into that walks Vern Swanson. Now Vern Swanson is kind of legendary in the arts here and in the UK actually Interesting. He's Dr Vern Swanson. He's originally from Oregon, but he was the director of the Springville Museum of Arts for 32 years. Okay.

Micah Christensen: 26:05

And he was a world-renowned expert on Victorian era art and painting especially, and had written a number of books and he had done his master's degree in the UK and he was. I've known him since I was a kid and he took me under his wing and said hey, I understand that things are kind of rough at Anthony's right now and I've got an idea. Why don't you go to the UK and get your masters Do what I did? So I did, I went to I go on a trip with him, the first, the first real estate office. I walked into broker's office. They'd called. There was a was was right across the street from the British Museum which is by where my school was. I went to Sotheby's Institute of Art, and that's another story. Sotheby's, which has been around since the you know, the, the, the, the 17th, the 18th century, really as an auction house and based in London, is one of the premier places to buy and sell art in the world and has been for over 200 years and I called a friend who had gone there.

Micah Christensen: 27:25

His name is Warren Weinegger and he used to be the VP of customer service for Sotheby's worldwide. Oh, wow. And he's from Provo.

Erik Nilsson: 27:32

Interesting.

Micah Christensen: 27:33

He's about 10 years older than I am and I called him up. I said look, I don't know if this is really for me. My undergrad is in opera and in marketing, right, but I grew up doing this. I don't know if they're going to accept me into a program. So he pulled out of. He said to me well, what are your goals, what do you want to do? And I told him what was going on in my life and he said okay, well, you know, I think it'd be good for you. I said well, who would I interview? He said me. I'm on the admissions committee.

Micah Christensen: 28:03

Of course, he said you're going to have to have one more conversation with the director of the of the school. You can do that in New York or in London. So I said I'm going to London with Vern Swanson. He said oh, that's a great entree. Vern is good friends with the, with Lord Mark Poltimore, the head of Sotheby's, with Christie's, with. He said we all know Vern. So I go to go to London and Vern's presence, red carpets are rolled out for him and I meet with Dr Megan Aldrich, who's a world renowned expert on Big Ben and you know many of the country homes in the Royal Collection and furniture in particular. And she pulls out a hundred small picture cards they're like postcard size images, but they all have paintings and furniture and buildings on them and she says she holds one up at a time and says what error is this from? Who did it? What can you tell me about it? And I guess I got enough of them right that she said how did?

Erik Nilsson: 29:04

you feel at that time? Did you feel like you're like oh, that's been Victorian area, blah, blah, blah, blah? Or was it like, oh, I'm sweating a little bit, you know I?

Micah Christensen: 29:10

was kind of a little prepared for it. I knew it was going to happen, warned and warned me a little bit. So I went to the Salt Lake Public Library and I got the Sister Wendy videos. There were 10 hours of world civilization history and they were a refresher course for me. I mean, I'd grown up around it but maybe I didn't know the vocabulary. I was familiar with it. So here I was, cramming with an English nun's tapes, videotapes that I'd gotten from the Salt Lake Public Library and I meet the people at Sotheby's and I got, like you know, 90 out of 100, right, go to the school graduate. While I was there I flew to, I would fly on the weekends to Madrid, you have to.

Micah Christensen: 29:55

The program was based on four categories. It was Asian ceramics, the world experts on these subjects right, I mean, we're talking like people who had found, helped found, the disciplines of these things in the Western world, right? So Gordon Lang, who was over ceramics crazy stories about Gordon. I could tell you he's just descended from the family that was Scottish, that gave up the throne to the Windsors, essentially, and he was essentially royalty himself. And the joke is that at Sotheby's they were at Christie's auction house, they were business people trying to be noble, and at Sotheby's they were no, that there were no nobility trying to be business people, and that's what it was like. We were dealing, basically, with people who had, you know, 10 or 15 titles or more. And then there was old masters, there was modern works of art and then there was furniture, and you had to specialize in one of them. And I decided to specialize in old masters and I went to the Prado one day. I spoke Spanish because I was a machinery chili, and just came into, walked into a gallery and there was a man who this amazing, amazing exhibition of works of Spanish arts that hadn't really been shown for over 100 years in Spain, and I immediately thought I want to figure out who these artists are, how they made these things. These are the equivalent of anything I've seen at the highest level in France, in England, in the United States, and almost nothing's known about these artists. What the hell's going on here? Right? So someone in the room says to me because I'm clearly the only non-Spanish in the room, and he says where are you from? And I say in Spanish I'm visiting from London, but I'm from Utah. And he says, oh, and he says with an impeccable British accent I studied in London. Where did you study? I said I'm studying at Sotheby's. He said I went to Sotheby's. He said what are you doing tonight? I said nothing. He said the royal family is coming for the official opening of this exhibition. Do you want to be my guest? So I came to it, met now the king of Spain and met various people, walked into the director's office of the Prado and basically was given the keys to their archives and for the next I did my masters on Spanish art and how they built their schools on the French model.

Micah Christensen: 32:36

I spent a lot of time in France and in Italy during that master's degree and it became such an exciting time that I and I'm buying and selling the whole time. I'm a student and the gallery goes from being 80% art sorry, 80% furniture and 20% art to about 50% art at this time and that's the things I'm sending from Europe. And I call my father and brother-in-law and I say, guys, I think I want to stay and do my PhD. And they said, okay, do whatever you got to do. And I got offers from Oxford and from Cambridge and from Birmingham and from Manchester and Lester.

Micah Christensen: 33:22

I toyed around with going to Salamanca and the Universidad Complutencia in Madrid and decided in the end, when you're doing a PhD in the humanities, it doesn't really matter the school you're going to on some level. What matters is who your advisor is that you're working with on a daily basis, and at that point that's like a dating game. So I went around and met all of these people and was accepted just on the strength of my masters and what I was working on and the guy at University College London, which at the time was one of the top 10 schools in the world. It's not really known in the United States very much UCL is what they call it and I just tell people at the University of London because you say University College London and they think you went to community college in London. But it was the guy who was my advisor.

Micah Christensen: 34:18

Tom Gretton was the head of the Oxford Art Journal at the time. He's a big deal and I was just honored to meet with him and he said I went to that exhibition too. He said that was an unbelievable exhibition. I would love to spend the next six years with you working on this. So that's what happened. That's amazing.

Micah Christensen: 34:40

I spent the next six years on it. I moved back to Utah and I spent about three to four months a year in Spain, italy and France and the UK, while co-running the gallery and raising a family in Utah, and that went on from 2007 to 2016. Wow, that was my life, and I caught pneumonia twice, shingles twice, several urinary tract infections. I was sleeping an average of, I think, four hours a night. It was an intense period. It was a really intense period and I also had a friend who became a colleague at Anthony's, eric Bigert.

Micah Christensen: 35:27

We founded a tech company called Urban Paddle, which is all about it's kind of like an IMDB for the restaurant industry that we ended up selling off and we basically both spent a third of our time in Silicon Valley trying to raise funds for it and eventually made our money back and closed it. But I mean, you ask, how did I get where I am at the gallery now, which I'm very happy to be only at the gallery? It was a crooked path and by the time I had finished my master's and PhD and also done that Urban Paddle adventure, I had had some of the cockiness knocked out of me.

Erik Nilsson: 36:15

A lot of humbling moments throughout all that, I imagine.

Micah Christensen: 36:17

I was a lot more knowledgeable but I was also a lot more measured in what I did and my father and who had been doing it for 40 plus years, and my brother-in-law had been doing it for 20 plus years. Then I went to school with them because they are as expert and as knowledgeable as any of the people I've worked with around the world in what they do and I still every day with them is an education because they really are. They really aren't places like Anthony's and we can talk a little bit about what Anthony's is and who our clients are and what we do. But before we do, I just got to say that as far as my education goes, I kind of see it in two parts. I see this book knowledge, this academic knowledge that came from the master's and PhD that I did, and then I see, on top of that, the real specialist knowledge that came from working with my father and my brother-in-law.

Erik Nilsson: 37:27

Yeah, and what a fun relationship to have. Because, to your point from your early childhood where you're like I buy the heads with my father, I would never want to go to business with my father. I feel similar with a lot of my family, love them, but probably not many I would or any that I would want to go to business into with. But then I like the term that you used I became knowledgeable and I became measured, because I think there's a part of it where it'd be easy for you to be like oh, my dad founded this gallery. It's been in my family forever.

Erik Nilsson: 37:55

I used to remove all the furniture. I know things. But then once you're like, okay, let's go get my master's, learning a lot going to Spain, then I'm going to get my PhD. That's when you start to understand how much people know about what and know exactly how much you know about that, especially in the fine art world. I feel like it's one of those know your lane, know it well and have a network of people that, to your point, like Anthony's, if someone comes in that's something outside of your lane. It's like I need to make a call because I know what this is to appreciate it, but I don't know it well enough to give it the attention it needs.

Micah Christensen: 38:28

Yeah, I'll tell you two stories back to back that I had when I was living in Europe, so I don't know which one to tell first. I think I'll just choose one. I'll start with the first one. So I became a correspondent for Fine Art Connoisseur magazine, which is based in New York, and Peter Trippi, who is a really respected author, scholar and museum director back there, was coming to Spain and he knew I'd spent a lot of time in Spain and he wanted to sit down and do an interview with Antonio Lopez Garcia, and Antonio Lopez Garcia is one of the greatest living painters of representational art. He's not a household name here. He will be, he is in Europe and he usually takes once an artist dies and he's in his late 80s now they usually become famous.

Micah Christensen: 39:22

So I didn't think it'd be possible for me to get an interview with them. But I called somebody at the Prado and I said does anybody know Senor Lopez? And they're like oh yeah, you know, I'm sure he'd be happy to sit down with you. And there was this documentary that almost every artist I know is obsessed with, called El Sol del Membrillo, or the Quince Tree that I first saw from a rental that I got at the Salt Lake Public Library of him painting this Quince Tree in his courtyard in Spain. I call him and I say hi, this is Micah Christensen from the University of London and Peter Trippi would like to interview you and I can act as the interpreter. And he said great, let's get together. And I go into his courtyard in Madrid where the tree was.

Erik Nilsson: 40:08

I was going to say the Quince Tree is probably right there.

Micah Christensen: 40:11

And we're kind of waiting for Peter to get all of his stuff together. And you go into Antonio Lopez's studio and he's got he's got two reproductions on a pegboard on a wall as inspiration while he's painting. One is no three, one's Velazquez, one is Andrew Wyeth and the third is a painting by Sorolla, joaquin Sorolla, who I'm writing my masters on and I was working on my PhD on a little bit. And he says to me so you know where are you from? And I said I'm from Utah, but I live in London. The Quik Right Like, and he sensed that slight embarrassment Right, and he put his hand on my knee and he said you're from one of the great art capitals of the world. You're from where Camille Corry is, from where Bill Whitaker is, from where Jeff Hynes. He said, never be embarrassed to being from Utah, it's better than being in London.

Erik Nilsson: 41:20

Wow, that's got to be some powerful words to hear it was.

Micah Christensen: 41:24

It was the most embarrassed that I could. Even. It was one of those life changing moments, because I don't think you know if I had been from Los Angeles, if I had been from almost any city, right, I think we all naturally have this feeling like you know where we come from, we don't necessarily appreciate it Totally. We're on this small like podcast, right? And how many people have we met who come to Utah and are so excited about being in Utah and how great it is?

Howard Lyon: 41:59

Yes, and you think, eh you know like I'm from here.

Erik Nilsson: 42:02

I'm used to it. I'm used to it, yeah.

Micah Christensen: 42:04

Antonio Lopez popped that balloon right there. It was immediately. You come from one of the greatest places in the world for art, and he was right. And it was at that moment that you kind of realized the hidden threads that lead you to where you are.

Micah Christensen: 42:20

Why did I admire Antonio Lopez? Why did I admire the artists that I was writing about? Because I'd grown up around artists who were the modern day versions of them. I knew all the people he mentioned. I was friends with many of them and we live. I've since with Vern and with Donna Poulton, and I've co-written the latest version of the dictionary of Utah Fine Artists, which has 4,500 art biographies in it, dead and Living. I wrote about 900 of those biographies and about half of the 900 that I wrote were from living artists. We have more artists per capita fine artists and that's an important distinction per capita in Utah than anywhere else in the United States, more than New York, more than LA, and that is something that the world recognizes. When I judge shows in New York, in California, anywhere, there's always an award-winning Utah artist in the group and I usually find out about it afterwards.

Erik Nilsson: 43:26

Interesting.

Micah Christensen: 43:28

It's uncanny. So that's story one. Right Story one is I had to learn that where I came from, not to be embarrassed of it, and that was my fault, not anybody else's fault. Right.

Erik Nilsson: 43:42

I feel like I do it too. I feel like a lot of people can attest to that, Especially growing up in Utah. You're like, yeah, it's home, it's whatever. You take a lot of the things that people are gravitated to for granted, but then, once you leave, get that perspective, have someone you idolize to tell you how great it is. You start to come back and you're like oh great appreciation.

Micah Christensen: 44:02

Absolutely so. Then pair that with this story, which is one time I was flying from London to Madrid and I'm talking with the stewardess in Spanish on the way there. She was from Valencia and she knew a little bit about art and she'd seen me on that flight multiple times and this guy had overheard us and he's wearing this impeccable Savile Row bespoke suit Perfect received pronunciation, british accent and he says to me I'm not going to try and do the accent. I feel like I missed the opportunity, by the way, to fake a Kerry Grant-esque accent when I came back from London. I could have done it right, in the art world you can be eccentric, but I'd. Oh well, maybe it's not too late.

Micah Christensen: 44:52

But he says to me can I travel in with you? I don't know how to get a cab. Really. I'm here doing a real estate deal and I'm staying at the Ritz. And I am not staying at the Ritz, I'm staying at a business hotel and great, we'll drive in together. So 30-minute cab ride.

Micah Christensen: 45:14

And he tells me all about transcendental meditation. He's a practitioner of it, he's been leading a group, and I tell him all about being from Utah and the religious background I have and being Jewish and Mormon and or Latter-day Saint, I should say. And we get to the hotel and he says hey, by the way, what do you do? And I said I'm an art historian and our dealer. He says, great, where are you staying? I tell him, great, go to the archives of the Prado. Work all day in their archives. Get back to my hotel and my little hotel light that I've got. A message is blinking on my phone and it's from him and he says meet me tomorrow morning 9 AM breakfast at the Ritz Hotel. I've got a guy who's got a painting by Rubens, peter Paul Rubens who wants to sell it and maybe you can help us. So I think no way, that's not real. Why would he ask me A guy that he just Very important drive into the city.

Micah Christensen: 46:20

So I contact Johnny Van Heften and Johnny Van Heften is the world's leading dealer in Rubens. He's based in German Street, right around where Buckingham Palace is, and he's world famous as an old master's dealer. And they say, johnny, what do I do here? He said there are two options. He said option one is they really don't know who to talk to, and it could be Rubens. Option two is they've tried everyone and no one who's a real dealer in Rubens wants to deal with them, because they know that it's not the real thing.

Erik Nilsson: 46:58

Interesting.

Micah Christensen: 47:00

He said here's the test Bring it, ask them if you can bring photos of it or the painting with you to the UK and you want to show it to me and Lord Poltimore and the head of Christie's. And if they say no, you know they've already shown it to us and they already know they've already shopped it around. If they say yes, meet with me when you get back in town. So I go and I meet this guy. He pulls up in his 60s Ferrari we have lunch right next to the Crown Prince. Who's our brunch? That is next to the Crown Prince who's meeting with one of the Omani families and surreal, and here I am just working on my degree. And he pulls out this photo of the Virgin holding the Christ child and surrounded by angels and he's got all these chemical tests and these verifications on it and I say can I show it to Johnny Van Aften, lord Poltimore and Christie's. He says yeah, why don't you go ahead? Why don't you go ahead and do?

Erik Nilsson: 48:06

that OK. I'm sure it gets you a little bit more excited about it.

Micah Christensen: 48:10

Test passed right. So I take the folder. Three days later I'm in London, next to Bucketham Palace. I'm meeting with Johnny Van Aften. He picks it up, looks at it for three seconds. Three seconds. Not a Rubens. I said why not? He said it's of the right age. He said the face, the Virgin and the hands of the angels are wrong. It's not a Rubens. He said it's probably by the studio or an imitator who's living at the same time.

Micah Christensen: 48:35

Circle of Rubens. He said you don't believe me. Go across the street to my competitor Konjali, who just sold one to the Getty and to the Luth, and see what he says. So I go across the street. Don't tell Konjali that I just dealt with Johnny Van Aften. He looks at it for six seconds. Not a Rubens. I said why not? He said face of the Virgin, hands of the angels they're not right.

Micah Christensen: 49:00

Circle of Rubens or somebody working at the same time. That's what my father is in his categories. That's what my brother-in-law, brett, is in his categories. So I come back and that's who I'm trying to be in my category of painting of ceramics. Increasingly you meet these people who are Olympic athletes, who have seen not just 10,000, but 100,000 objects. You can hand a painting to me at this point in my career and I could tell you where it was made, within maybe 100 miles, 50 miles and within five years. And maybe I wouldn't be able to name the artist. But I could say, oh, that's Spanish, milan, sienna. That's Birmingham, that's Liverpool, that's New York, that's California 1820, 1860. I'm zeroing in on that three to six second goal where I'm getting there. But give me another 20, 30 years and I'll be there.

Erik Nilsson: 50:15

In my brain I was going to. So I always think very Jesuit-like and trying to find comparisons to metaphors of things that are similar to help gain an opinion on something else.

Micah Christensen: 50:26

Love the Jesuit reference. How many Jesuit references do I hear in Utah? Almost never.

Erik Nilsson: 50:30

Not enough, but my brain instantly went to wine and being like, oh, if you're a small, yay, you know that this came from this AVA, in this region in this time, because of this, isn't that? But so much more robust. And it's such a fascinating thing to be able to know, because I, as someone who respects art and is learning about art and to create art, but the thing that you kind of alluded to too, that history of art is so robust and there's so much nuance and understanding, and it's like why people have to kind of pick a category and get this depth in it, compared to knowing a little bit about everything, because that's not going to help you. I mean, in this Rubin situation.

Micah Christensen: 51:04

Yeah, and you know it's if you were to walk into Anthony's today, which you did recently. There's everything from Asian ceramics dating from the Ming dynasty or even the Tang dynasty, all the way, and we have a sarcophagus from the Talmayic era, of an Egyptian sarcophagus from 450 BCE. We've got a Roman mosaic from 450 CE. We've got a lot of French works of art.

Micah Christensen: 51:32

I mean, I couldn't do that in London, I couldn't do it in Paris, I couldn't do it in New York, because I'd have to specialize, right, and I'd be dealing with people who were largely longtime collectors and I'd be filling holes in their collections. So I'd have to stay in one lane, right, and my job would largely be working with people who were also specialized, like I am. You know, maybe if I were a Picasso dealer, I'd be working with people, or a modernist of some kind, I'd be trying to get chased down that one that my client wants from that blue period of Picasso, right, yeah, but because I live in Salt Lake, I've got this 25,000 square foot gallery and my only criteria is that it's quality and I like it.

Erik Nilsson: 52:14

I like that criteria.

Micah Christensen: 52:15

It's quality and I like it and my audience. About half of my buyers are in Utah, about half are out of the state or out of the country and I hate the term art dealer. I hate it because it makes it about business and I know that may sound like I'm not trying to get away from the fact that I'm buying and selling things, but really how I see myself is as a steward.

Erik Nilsson: 52:39

I like that one.

Micah Christensen: 52:40

I've been reading a great book. It's a novel called Piranesi, and Piranesi was an artist who lived in the 18th century. But the book starts off by saying some people think I'm a philosopher or an anthropologist, but a better description is that I'm an amnesiologist. I specialize in finding out what has been forgotten and my job is to be a steward a temporary steward of these objects and to build them up in esteem and importance among the people, to pass them on to the next generation. Sotheby's has a saying that the world, the art world, revolves around the 3Ds death, divorce and debt. And there's a fourth one downsizing. And you see those generational changes all the time in the gallery. A lot of our buying comes from things that I'm going out and seeking elsewhere. But I have people walk in every day and you say my mom died, my grandfather died, left me this. I really don't have space for it.

Micah Christensen: 53:44

I don't know what to do with it, I don't know what it is and I really see that as a critical conversation because it's my job to not only take this thing that you lose. Sotheby's also had this statistic that you lose about 30% of objects each generation, 30% of art, because it gets destroyed, it gets forgotten, it gets devalued and people just throw it away. They don't care about what it is because they don't understand it, and that's what it?

Micah Christensen: 54:11

comes down to. It doesn't come down to whether or not it inherently has changed its value. It's whether or not people understand its value, and my job is to charge it with that value. When somebody brings in an object to me and they no longer want it, or if I see it in obscurity in some house in Lyon, france, like if I'm there, I will take that, bring it back, research it. And most of my buyers are not the whale-heeled European East Coast West Coast collectors. They're often the nouveau riche, they're people who've moved to Salt Lake, who, I mean, we've got a lot of wealth in Utah, but it's not multi-generational wealth usually. So I spend most of my time teaching clients who come in the door and I say to them you've probably never seen something like this before. Let me tell you why it's important, let me tell you what it is. And then they become the new caretaker. They're the new steward, I'm the temporary steward, they're the long-term steward. That's my job.

Erik Nilsson: 55:24

Yeah, and I'm sure it creates such a fun relationship because they come to you being like hey, I have this newfound wealth. I've heard about buying art, I want to have nice art for my house, but not using very subjective terms, where you come in and you fill in that nuance, you give that objectivity, you help educate. So then it might start with this little wiggle of like oh well, if you're interested in this, here's where I would recommend investing your money. And they're like oh well, I learned about this and now I'm interested in this. Do you know anything about this? You're like yes, I do, if you're interested. And I feel like there's this relationship that starts to build and grow into something super special.

Micah Christensen: 55:58

That's right. I was just on a panel at the Springfield Museum of Art.

Erik Nilsson: 56:02

I've been on the For actually I want to stop there because I do want to talk about the Springfield Museum of Art, because I feel like it's one of the best kept secrets in Utah, for what it is, but a lot of people don't know about it. So if you give like a quick summary of it, oh, absolutely.

Micah Christensen: 56:17

And it's an important time to know about the Springfield Museum of Art because it's the 100th anniversary of the Spring Salon, which is the major art competition that they have there and that is essentially the Super Bowl of contemporary art in Utah and regionally. So the Springfield Museum of Art was founded a little more than 100 years ago in Springfield, utah. Why Springville, utah? And it's because there were two artists there who became renowned. One was Cyrus Dowlin. Yes.

Micah Christensen: 56:47

And Dowlin's a sculptor who was born in Springfield to pioneer parents and he ended up going to Paris.

Micah Christensen: 56:56

He did the famous Mazazoid sculpture that's in front of the state capital of the Native American who welcomed the pilgrims who arrived in the Americas and Massachusetts, and he also did a famous Paul Revere sculpture and he established eventually his studio in Boston where there's a museum dedicated to Cyrus Dowlin, and then his friend John Hafen, who was a landscape artist who really wasn't as productive as a lot of other painters but ideologically he was the philosophical founder of a lot of Utah art.

Micah Christensen: 57:34

Because if you go to other places in Utah, like I said, we have this disproportionate number of artists that come from our small population and I would say that seven out of 10 artists in Utah are landscape painters. Why are they landscape painters? Because we live in one of the most amazing geological regions in the world and why would you be a history painter or an abstract painter in Utah? I mean not saying anything against that right, but you're going to get, as the majority of your artists in this environment, landscape painters. And John Hafen basically imbued landscape painting, which was largely seen as one of the lower art forms. The higher art forms were epic stories.

Micah Christensen: 58:25

History painting big you know multi-figure, multi-figure right and his work was no, no, no, no. God made mountains. Mountains are the most important thing you can paint. I mean, that's a reductive way of looking at it.

Erik Nilsson: 58:38

That's kind of how John Hafen is, but it does sound like someone who grew up near Springville.

Micah Christensen: 58:41

That's right, and he was a very eloquent advocate for landscape painting and he founded the Springville Museum of Art as a as a ambitious project.

Micah Christensen: 58:52

If you go there, it's this incredible Spanish mission style revival building that was built in about the 1920s, a little earlier than 1920s. It was dedicated by David O McKay when he was an apostle, even though it's not a religious space, as a temple of beauty and contemplation, and whether you're religious or not, it's a special place because for 100 years plus they've been buying contemporary art made and submitted to their shows and they have six times the viewing space of the next largest museum in the state, which I think is BYU, and so here's a building BYU's museum was built in 1994. There's like 70 years separating the two, right? Yeah, springville says six times the amount of viewing space still, and you go there and they've got everything. This is the 100th anniversary and they used to draw and they still do artists from around the country for their competitions. And I've judged the Spring salon three times, which is a huge honor and a terrifying experience to judge, because you have so many people who submit to it that are a big deal and you have to reject so many people.

Erik Nilsson: 1:00:13

Yeah, this could only be a couple of winners.

Micah Christensen: 1:00:15

Right, but they've had major artists from around the world judge that show. So that happens in April and anybody who when I was sitting on. So what got us starting about this started on this is that there's an exhibition right now of Larry H Miller and Gail Miller's art collection and Kim Wilson and Kim Wills. So Larry H Miller died about I don't know, was it 10 years now, maybe 15 years, I think and several years after he died, gail Miller remarried Kim Wilson, who was also, who was a widower, and he has an unbelievable taste in art. Kim Wilson, he's really one of my heroes. So here you've got this power couple of Gail Miller and Kim Wilson, whose art is on exhibit while their house is being remodeled. Currently it's on view at the Springville Museum of Art and I was invited, along with Kim and Gail and Vern Swanson and Ellie Sontag, who's helping them with their remodeling, who's been involved in the art world, to talk about collecting art in Utah and we had a lot of conversations about this idea of you'd mentioned the idea that maybe I'm objective when I help people who are decorating or putting together their house and Anthony's isn't purely about collectors.

Micah Christensen: 1:01:46

I mean, the pandemic was a lot of people were coming back to their house and they hired somebody who was a decorator to decorate the house. And now they're living at it during the pandemic and they've got money because they're not going on vacation. And now they want to make a house more personal, less of a decorator's idea picked out of a catalog, and we had some of the most interesting conversations at Anthony's at that time, because I'm not a snub, I don't think the price determines the value of a piece or a name to put in terms of the price I mean even going back to what you have you're like needs to be good and I need to like it, which is obviously very subjective, so I like that.

Erik Nilsson: 1:02:27

There is no Very subjective.

Micah Christensen: 1:02:28

You know, art is so personal and I can never tell somebody you have to like this, damn it, because if you don't, there's something wrong with you. And I like all kinds of art. I tend towards traditional, but I love Rothko. I love abstract, some abstract work, some I absolutely hate. It's complete nonsense, exactly. But I also some of the worst art I've ever seen is traditional figurative art. There's no one answer towards it. But if you came into Anthony's and this is what I'd hope your experience would be First of all, we live in a world where so much of our experience of outside of our home is digital. You know we're buying things online, ordering it. It shows up the next day. You don't really have an experience with it. Sometimes you buy things and it's not what you thought it was. You go to work and you go to church and you're stuck in the same. You know three or four walls right Every time. Three or four places, that is. And you come to Anthony's and hopefully you feel a little awe and wonder, which are scientifically measurable things.

Micah Christensen: 1:03:42

Yes because you experience on wonder and it creates hope, hope that there are people making wonders they used to make wonders too and that are people that were alive today that are making these things and it makes you feel your humanity and other people's humanity, and it makes you feel like Not only is this here, but maybe I can take a little bit of that home. Yeah, you know, and my job is to Amplify that as much as possible, and I, I, I think that that's that awe and that wonder is the goal of what, of what I'm doing on an everyday basis, and To not get in the way of it with my ego either. Can I tell you another story?

Micah Christensen: 1:04:33

that I had yes, so this is a supernatural story and I like the idea of it, even if I don't know if I believe the the. You know the supernatural element of it. But I Was a little. I was not just a little, I was very upset when they remodeled the Salt Lake temple, which they're currently under, and I'm not, you know, I don't want to cast dispersions on anybody's intent, but I know for a fact that they destroyed a lot of the pioneer woodwork interior and are replacing it with, you know, fiberglass reproductions of some things.

Micah Christensen: 1:05:09

And you know I put up a stink about it in the news and you know it's I. I'm sure I'll be interviewed about it again, but I talked with the New York Times, talked a lot of others. I haven't talked to a lot of leaders of the church about it. I was the one who told a lot of leaders of church that weren't involved in the decision that it was happening and they were shocked and we decided at Anthony's that what we were gonna do is hold an exhibition on what it took to make the interior the Salt Lake temple.

Micah Christensen: 1:05:36

Interesting yeah and we tried to stay on the positive side and said let's honor their work, even if it's not all gonna be there. And, by the way, I don't think the people who did it Intended to do what they did, and I think that they're very excited about it and it's gonna be okay, I think, right.

Micah Christensen: 1:05:54

Yes and and there's still time to to honor a lot of their Contributions, of these ancestors. But in any case, I found myself in this really strange situation just after the pandemic, where we had this exhibition, where we'd blown up a lot of the interiors, we had furniture from the crap from the craftspeople who'd worked to the Salt Lake temple, these pioneers who were working with limited materials, making wonders in our region, that when the press came in the 1890s From New York, from San Francisco, to write about it, they said how are these people making this stuff in this beautiful building in in the middle of the desert? Yeah, so I. One day the head of this guy comes through the gallery and it turns out he's the head physician over Cedar Sinai in New York oh, one of the premier hospitals in the world. Yes, right, he oversees three thousand doctors and he's looking around and he stays for an hour and a half walking around and in the end of it he said Do you mind if I share with you a story that I haven't really shared with many people? And this happens a lot of the gallery people open Up in ways. Sometimes we'll find people in tears and he was crying a little bit. He said look, I don't know anything about the Salt Lake temple except for what I've read today. And he said.

Micah Christensen: 1:07:18

He said, you know, I, I was a resident in Paris, of all places for my from the last year of my medical training and I was at the general hospital in Paris and it was the 1970s and the the director, who had been the director for 35 years of the hospital, was retiring. And he said this is all. In French, he gets together all of the staff for one farewell talk before he leaves as the director of this general hospital in Paris. And he had gathered all of the life after death experiences that happened under his watch. Anytime somebody was on the table, had died and come back to life, he would interview them over at 35 European. Wow. And he said I, he, he gathered together all the stories, put him in a book and gave them as a gift To everyone who was at the hospital, including me.

Micah Christensen: 1:08:18

And he said I don't think it was published anywhere else. He said I've got a copy of it, I'll send it to you. And he said the I that. He said one of the people raised their hand and said Um, monsieur doctor, you know what was the? What was the Experience, plus comment, the De la mort. What was the, the most, the, the, the most common experience of death that you, that these people reported to you?

Micah Christensen: 1:08:46

Yeah and he said Everyone who said they left their bodies. They said when they walked through an object, they immediately knew who had made the object and who had used it over its lifetime. Wow, and he said. This doctor who told me the story said I don't know if that's true, but he said isn't that a?

Micah Christensen: 1:09:12

beautiful idea, yeah, and he said, isn't it a French idea? And at the same time, I just read a story in Japan that they have a similar tradition, that objects, as they get Handled by humans, the soul of the human gets rubbed onto the piece and eventually the object gains its own soul, and they're called Sakumogami and I, I think, I don't know if you know. Look, I'm not going to speculate on the metaphysical right, but I think that these, these objects that I'm the caretaker of, they have souls, some of them right, and in my Harry Potter Novel of my life, I am the caretaker of these souls and making sure that they get to somebody who takes care of them. Right, and they're alive to me. And they've got a story that is just as real as any humans. They've got a genealogy, they've got, they've got a life and I am a footnote in their life. Right, they have a much longer life than I do and much longer life than the person who I'm selling them to. So I'm a steward, that's my job. Oh, that's the I mean.

Erik Nilsson: 1:10:27

That's the perfect way to describe it to give the respect to the works themselves to you, and we want because, like I totally agree, art dealer is such a. It doesn't give the proper respect to anything involved in the process.

Micah Christensen: 1:10:40

It's such a slick term, yeah it conjures somebody who's a little too greedy. And you know, I live well but I don't live very high, you know, and it's because I put everything I've got back into the business Totally. Oh no, I love that and I can totally agree.

Erik Nilsson: 1:11:00

I mean, walking around Anthony's after we met, like it was, it was amazing to see what was there. You can, you can almost feel the energy of it, of Of how special a lot of the things are and like some you look at you're like, oh, how is this sitting here? But then there's some things I had to do a little searching just on my limited knowledge of art. But very cool place and it's amazing to see how it's grown with you, under your stewardship, and I mean obviously your Brother in line, your, your father, is still involved and still there. Yep, thankfully Couldn't do it with Adam, you know, if you know.

Micah Christensen: 1:11:29

I'm probably the the louder of the three of us.

Erik Nilsson: 1:11:38

That makes sense. I can. I could picture that yeah and um, and I think that um.

Micah Christensen: 1:11:41

It's, it's. It'll be interesting to see what happens. The next chapter of Anthony's. I'm not entirely sure what it is yet. I think that we'll my taste keeps evolving, our audience keeps evolving. We'll grow with Salt Lake City. We're very lucky to have a lot of people who are interested in Growing with Salt Lake City. We're very lucky to have this building. We live in a. We say I live, but we we have this building. That's on fourth east and second south. That's the was originally founded as the first Emmanuel Baptist church interesting and it was built by by an architect His name is John Head, who came to Utah as part of the competition To build the capital and he eventually he didn't win the the competition. He wanted to build a kind of um? Uh gothic revival, vila la duke style, um sandstone capital yeah, could have been and um would have been interesting.

Micah Christensen: 1:12:40

What it looks a little. It would have been the same material that the city county building is made out of. That's what he wanted to use and um instead. And he was a classmate of frank Lloyd Wright and a friend of frank Lloyd Wright. Oh, interesting and he's an interesting guy. He did the walker building. He did a, which is, you know, the one that's got the tower on top of it. That's not too far away.

Micah Christensen: 1:12:59

He did a lot of other buildings in salt lake and churches, but the baptists there was a contingency in Utah where, uh, you know they're the Latter-day Saints and there were the Gentiles right and the Gentiles were just everybody who wasn't a Latter-day Saint, but there was a group of baptists who were part of the fort douglas troops and fort douglas was is up at the university of Utah now and they decided that they were going to raise funds from all across the united states to build a Baptist temple in quotation marks in salt lake and they were going to reconvert the Mormons to Christianity and they they recruited John John head to build it and they occupied it from 1911 to the 19 early 1960s and then that they sold their building to the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who turned it into a rec center and then it was a bank and we bought our building in 1994 For it's 25,000 square feet, modernized, earthquake-proofed Elevators.

Micah Christensen: 1:14:16

It had been an office building but it had been vacant for five or six years. We bought it for 600,000 dollars. You couldn't buy that building for 10 million today.

Micah Christensen: 1:14:25

No, not even close no we were very lucky and it's what makes us competitive. So we're able to um, you know, we own it entirely and our competitors are in new york and paris and london. In new orleans and a few years ago we competed on a bid for to redo the flats of the royal family of oman in london and they got bids from people in london, paris and new york and us and we under bid for the same quality um everyone else, but we were 30 less Because we don't have the overhead. Yeah, we, we, we had everything brought over from france. We have our own warehouse on redwood road and we've got our own craftspeople, who are largely latinos, because they have an amazing, um unbroken chain of woodcarvers going back, europe lost its woodcarvers in world war one and world war two. Latino americans didn't Right because they didn't have world war one interesting.

Erik Nilsson: 1:15:29

I never thought of it like that interesting right.

Micah Christensen: 1:15:31

So we have, we were able to do that Recarve, fix everything, customize things here, send it back to london and beat our competitors, because we're in salt lake and we don't have overhead.

Erik Nilsson: 1:15:45

Yeah All comes back to. That's the business side. It's a couple that's like, yeah, if you can, and that's that's not what I built.

Micah Christensen: 1:15:52

That's what my brother-in-law and father built. You know that's, that's the magic of it.

Erik Nilsson: 1:15:58

Yeah, I'm curious about the future too, because I feel like there has been this Reemergence of art and appreciation for it. Maybe it's just me and the way I see the world recently, but I feel like there has been more of appreciation for it. Um, I mean, do you see similar things or like, where do you see like your world is just um In art and where do you see it going?

Micah Christensen: 1:16:18

It's interesting. You know, utah is a, it's always in flux and it's always growing. I've I'm equally parts frustrated with utah and really optimistic about it. Um, we had I've read a statistic that, um, around the time of the pandemic, we had more millionaires per capita and more passports per capita than anywhere else in the united states in Utah Valley. Is Utah Valley a bastion of culture, even though they've got money and more passports? No, no, no, it's not. We have fewer museums per capita than anywhere else in the united states. Secondly to west virginia in utah Right, more artists per capita. Most of those artists have to sell outside of utah.

Micah Christensen: 1:17:06

Yeah, yeah and um, I hear that frustration all the time from artists, right, I, I, um, I had an experience a few years ago and I'm gonna go down a negative route here, but it's going to be redeeming at the end. So stay with me, guys, right? But I started this nonprofit called design art society and the whole idea was we were going to promote Contemporary artists, and it was. This was essentially the tagline. The renaissance was made of the of of michael angelo and the medici. We have enough michael angelo's, we need medici's.

Micah Christensen: 1:17:40

Hmm, we need patron right, we need patronage. So we got this family in utah valley, probably worth two or three hundred million dollars. Um, we, I remember they said I want to have that told them what we wanted to do. We wanted to have a fire site at their house. Essentially, pick the artists, I'll pick them. If they didn't want to pick them, they picked five great artists. Um, we flew a couple of them out, one from new york city, one from california. How did our all work? The work set up in their house? We, um, they invited all of their wealthy friends. This is at a time when the when the model x tesla had just come out. Okay.

Micah Christensen: 1:18:21

And so this family, like for sure, had their two x-wing cars In the driveway as everybody showed up. Of course, they had a swimming pool with with a waterfall. They had a an italian imported gas range In their kitchen. They had a hundred thousand dollars stereo system. You know, there's there's a statistic that we have more square footage per person In our homes in utah than anywhere else other than Saudi Arabia. This was definitely like one of those homes, right? No art on the walls, none, right.

Micah Christensen: 1:18:56

So my friend, warren winiger, former vp of sotheby's he's from provo he happened to be in town. I said come to this event, we're gonna, we're gonna rope in a bunch of medici, right? Yeah, come and see it, it's gonna be awesome. You're gonna be amazed, warren. I have the event and the artist speak. Not a single work of art sold. I get everybody's names. Two or three weeks later I'm sending out Um emails to people. I mean hell, they'd picked the art and the artists, right, not even the people who hosted it bought the art, bought any art Interesting, and I was angry.

Micah Christensen: 1:19:32

I thought and I was mostly angry because I'd wasted the artist's time yes, not my time, right, but because I had gone out and said to these artists this is what we're gonna do. There's a little naive on my end, looking back right To think that a one-off event was gonna do this. But I said, warren, what's going on here? And he said look. Um. He said look, you're a ladder. To say I'm a ladder, to say they were ladder to saints. He said you go into their house and the cars, they're for the family, it's for me, paul, it's for the kids and grandkids, the range, it's for the family, the house for the family, the stereo system, it's for the family. Art, that's an indulgence. That's an indulgence. He nailed it. He nailed it Because if you don't grow up around art, if you don't understand its inherent value and we've been talking about this the whole time right, art is a window into the soul, it's your temporary steward of it, it's the greatest of what represents our values and our humanity.

Micah Christensen: 1:20:44

But if you grow up in a home where you don't see it and you don't understand it, it's very hard to appreciate and understand it right. And I think that there are other art forms we appreciate in Utah. We understand music. Everybody takes piano. We understand dance. We've got all of these great dancers right. We've got these great singers, we've got great performers in Utah, right. We don't have a lot of people who hang art in our home, even the wealthy, and my goal is to try and overcome that. But when it comes into the future of Anthony's which is what you and I are talking about in this part of the interview right, it's that I've seen more and more people move to Utah who do have that ethic. They've come from places where they grew up with art. They come from Europe. They come from places where they have multi-generations of families who have had wealth and understood what painting are.

Micah Christensen: 1:21:49

I had the craziest experience last week, holy crap. So I am. I wrote a letter to this woman, knowing that she had put something up for her sale in Chicago that she inherited from her parents, and I knew her parents were art collectors because I'd met them years ago in Basadena at the Norton Simon Museum Another story. I'd never met her, though, and I didn't even know she was in Utah until I saw in a catalog entry at this auction from the collection of So-and-So Salt Lake City. So I look her up on like a private IAP Sounds creepy and I write her a handwritten letter, right, that says hey, so-and-so, I saw that you put this work up for sale in Chicago by a great American artist who's works in the Met at the Art Institute of Chicago at the Smithsonian, and I said I don't know if you've got anything else by them, but I would. Either way, I would love to meet you one of these days. Please come to Anthony's and we'll have lunch together. Yeah, that was two years ago.

Micah Christensen: 1:22:51

I get a phone call from her last week and I didn't even recognize her. She said hi, micah, this is So-and-So. I got a lovely letter from you two years ago. I would really like it if you could come to my house and help consult with me on some of the things that I have. I'm looking to sell them. So I get. She gives me her address and it's up Immigration Canyon. Now, I grew up going to Immigration Canyon. I did not know immigration went up that far.

Erik Nilsson: 1:23:20

Oh yeah, there's the whole parts that.

Micah Christensen: 1:23:22

It goes way up there right, I mean, it was like it was eight miles up Immigration Canyon and we were up where the ski resort used to be, right, there used to be a ski resort up there. And I go into her house, which is a cabin, essentially that's modernized, that doesn't have any air conditioning because it doesn't need it, right, and it's got a fireplace which seemingly heats most of the house. And she's from LA, comes from a family that goes back to Boston, a Jewish family, and she married a professor of physiology at the University of Utah, and above their fireplace is Amiró and next to it is a Gogang and in their bathroom is a John Singer, sargent, and then they've got five photographs that are originals by Ansel Adams that were given to her grandparents by Ansel Adams. Right, this kind of thing happens all the time. Now to me, and it's because these are. I mean, we have some of these families in Utah, but they're increasingly moving to Utah, right, and the future of Anthony's is one where A our main job is to teach a new generation of people who have new wealth, who don't have a tradition of art, the understanding and the use of art in their lives, and why they should have it. Maybe for investment purposes, but less that than just the idea that living with it is a life-changing experience. Right, and then it'll affect them and their children, and then it's also more and more.

Micah Christensen: 1:25:09

I find myself in the position of being an art consultant for these people who have major works of art, who have Picasso's, who have I mean, there are very few places like Anthony's in the United States and, strangely enough, I was one of the last generation of people at Sotheby's who was learning from those multi-generation nobility experts.

Micah Christensen: 1:25:37

Sotheby's, christie's, bonham's, phillips, freeman's, hindman Heritage all of these auction houses are increasingly run on a corporate system and they cater to People don't work there for 30 and 40 years, they work there for five years on their resume and they're not real experts. So there are very few real experts in the art world now and I find that I am consulting with Sotheby's and Christie's in London because I'm more of an expert than they are on their subject. And there's now I've got friends who are classmates, who live in Valencia, who live in Bordeaux, who live in Vancouver, who live in Fairbanks, alaska, who we're the new network of knowledge, and when somebody has something to sell I'll say you know, I'm not the expert on that Talk to my friend in Fairbanks, alaska. Why would I talk to somebody in Alaska, not London? Because London isn't the expert Fairbanks is.

Erik Nilsson: 1:26:44

This specific person who knows this, about this, and they live in Fairbanks now.

Micah Christensen: 1:26:48

And that's the world we live in now.

Erik Nilsson: 1:26:50

Which I mean makes sense from like the globalization perspective and I mean, like you said, it's just not the same thing that used to be anymore and the experts are ulterior motives, whatever that might be. But it's nice to be part of this last of a dying breed that gets to have the stewardship over everything else. And so I mean kind of thinking about you and what else keeps you in Utah, I mean outside of art, meeting with people about it, what else occupies your time?

Micah Christensen: 1:27:16

Well, I really see it as my stewardship to be here. I could. I was offered jobs in in Spain and in London and have been elsewhere, but I don't think I have the same impact in those places as I would here. I am working on a book on an artist named Sorolla, who is not a household name here. He is increasingly in Europe. I, when I was in 2008, when I was a student, I was offered a Sorolla. You got to remember like this is, this is the height of the, the recession, right 2008. And this guy comes to me and he says hey, I've got this quaking Sorolla painting and I understand you're writing about it. Would you like to buy it for $30,000? It's like, no, I've got like a pregnant wife and a four year old and and I'm not really generating income and my gallery is supporting me in Europe I can't really buy it right now. Well, that work just sold at auction at Christie's in London for $2.1 million and it's like. It's like one of those. Everybody has stories like this in the art world right.

Micah Christensen: 1:28:34

Where you just think you know if I had. That's who I'm writing about, though, and he's increasingly becoming famous. There's a great show right now at BYU Museum of Art called Hispanic World, and it's a collaboration with the Hispanic Society of America, which is in New York, and they've got a few sorollas there. So you know, I'm spending a lot of time in Spain, because it was the 100th anniversary of his death and there were 42 exhibitions. I saw 39 of them over the past year, so I was in Spain four months last year. I'm going back again in a few weeks, and I'll be going back again a few weeks after that, as I'm wrapping up the research on the book, and then I'll really start writing, and I think that a big part of what I'll continue to do is I'll be an advocate and probably organize, help organize shows for contemporary artists that are in Utah.

Micah Christensen: 1:29:27

You've had on the show Howard Lyon and John Darley, and I'm sure you'll have other artists we know on the show, people who are known as giants outside of the state. They're my friends. I mean, I've got a built a sauna in my backyard this last year, one of the wood-fired cedar sauna. I mean we're talking old school Swedish sauna and three times a week artists are in that sauna with me. We're sweating. It's not pretty, but you're middle-aged guys right now hanging out in the sauna and talking about art.

Micah Christensen: 1:30:05

I've never been more optimistic about the art world in Utah. We have so much talent and we increasingly have an audience of people who are buying it. So I've been a little pessimistic on some level about things, but I don't think it's pessimistic, it's realistic. It's something we have to overcome. We've got Springville and a story about Springville, and I don't know if it's the last story. I don't know if we've got more time. Is there any? If I share this story, of course, please.

Micah Christensen: 1:30:42

So Kim Wilson, who's now married to Gail Miller, he shared a story while we were on this panel at Springville that he was from Cache Valley and he came from a place that had a population of 20,000 cows and 2,000 people. Sounds like Cache Valley, right. He's now in his late 70s and his brother broke his their father's heart and went off to become an artist and then an art professor, and he's taught at major schools around the country and kind of gave his younger brother, kim Wilson, this bug for art. So Kim goes to law school like a responsible kid and he gets hired by Snow Christensen and Martin, which is a law office. It's an art gallery masquerading as a law office.

Micah Christensen: 1:31:39

Got it Because Christensen I think Tal Christensen, who is one of the founding partners of it loved art and he would go down to the Springville Museum of Art and he would buy out of almost every annual salon they had of contemporary art. He walked in there and they've got Leconte Stewart, jt Harwoods, john Havens, they've got Al Rounds, they've got Gary Ernest Smith all you know, just every. You go every five years. Every major artist that the state's ever produced was hanging in that law office and Kim eventually became a partner in the law office. Yeah.

Micah Christensen: 1:32:16

And there's always a partner who's in charge of taking care and continuing to buy art for the art collection and that was Kim. So Larry H Miller dies. Kim happens to be in Latter-day St Parlins, the home teacher of Kim and Kim sorry of Gale and Larry H Miller and he knew and was close friends of them and Kim's wife dies and he very hesitantly contacts Gale, I think five years after Larry dies and says you know, there's an art show at the Springville Museum of Art. You want to go on a date? They go on a date. She's a billionaire. Yeah, had never been to the Springville Museum of Art in her life. It's their place. Now, right, I hear this all the time. People have never been to the Springville Museum of Art. It's not a surprise that you've never been to the Springville Museum of Art. It's an hour south of Salt Lake City. Yeah, definitely not on the beaten path. It's not on the beaten path, but it's something that and we have fewer museums per capita than everywhere but West Virginia right.

Micah Christensen: 1:33:29

Right. So you know this is our challenge and this is my challenge to everybody on this podcast. Right, Go and go to Springville. Go to UMOCA, Go to the UMFA these are all names of museums, by the way. Right, Go to the Church History Museum off Temple Square, even if you're not LDS, because it's got a lot of history of the region and contemporary artists in it. Go visit, strangely enough, the conference center that the church has, which probably has more art up than their own museum does.

Micah Christensen: 1:34:04

Go to Phillips Gallery, go to Erickson's Gallery, go to Anthony's Fine Art. Right, we have gallery stroll every first Friday of every month in Salt Lake City, where you can go. Type into gallery stroll Salt Lake City and you'll see a list of every exhibition that's going on, and you will be shocked at the profusion of talent that exists where we are. We are crowned with great art and you can buy reasonably good art for a few hundred dollars. You know, you can, I do it, I've got and my. We have a saying that a great art, that a collector is not defined by what's on their walls, but what's in their closets.

Micah Christensen: 1:34:51

And what I mean by that is if you're a collector, you don't have room to hang everything. No, you know, you know. Take a page from the Chinese and the Japanese which they had seasonal art in their house. They pull out the winter scroll. Yeah, it's time to change it up again.

Micah Christensen: 1:35:08

Yeah, that's what my house is like. I don't have a big house. My house is only 2,000 square feet. It's in Alpine. I have a tiny house and I'm switching things up all the time. I'm buying more art than I need. Part of it is to support the artists, but part of it is I just can't. Can't help it. I'm so excited about what people are making, right.

Micah Christensen: 1:35:27

Yeah, you can't even imagine, and I'm also buying historic art that I love all the time. It's, you know, it's. There's so much beauty and so much to be said that I am learning all the time and I am humbled by where we come from. Yeah, I'm humbled by that conversation still with Antonio Lopez where he said you come from one of the great art capitals of the world and I, you know, if I was to bear a testimony of anything, that's what I'm going to bear my testimony on. Yes, we come from one of the great art centers of the world, where we are.

Erik Nilsson: 1:36:07

So it's time for everybody to start appreciating a little bit more.

Micah Christensen: 1:36:08

That's right.

Erik Nilsson: 1:36:09

So go down to the Springfield Art Museum, go to Yumoka, go to go to everything, Take it all in because it's everywhere. Yeah, Marcos has been absolutely amazing. I want to end with the two questions I always ask everybody at the end is one if you could have someone on the Small Lake City podcast and hear about what they're up to and their story, who would you want to hear?

Micah Christensen: 1:36:27

from. Who would I want to hear from? Well, I would want to hear from. Let me give you one arts answer and one non-arts answer.

Erik Nilsson: 1:36:40

Sounds right.

Micah Christensen: 1:36:42

Actually, let me give you three answers. Perfect.

Micah Christensen: 1:36:46

First one is that came to my mind was Doug Foxley. Doug Foxley is a lawyer, a lobbyist I know that's a dirty term for a lot of people but he is at the center of everything, from the celebration of the Golden Spike to the. He's behind the scenes making all kinds of wonderful things happen in this state. He's behind the scenes in helping solve the crisis with the Great Salt Lake and he is a patron of the arts. But he's also a very practical person who's involved in legislation, and he also I think he's got a goal to travel to every country in the world. I think there are 170 something and I think 20 of those you can't go to as an American.

Erik Nilsson: 1:37:34

Makes sense.

Micah Christensen: 1:37:36

So he's going to do 140 something.

Micah Christensen: 1:37:38

Sounds like a fascinating person, so I mean sit down and interview him and talk to him about not just his legislative work or his advocacy for the arts and for his putting together of the Golden Spike, which has been a national program he's put together, of the joining of the rails in Utah and the Transcontinental Railroad, but also just his journeys around the world over the past 20 years where he's gone to 150 countries plus, and every year he knocks 10 more off the chart. And he just came back from the South Pacific where he chartered a boat and planes to go to six small island nations and he's unbelievable. So that's one. Number two, jeff Hine, who you've mentioned already. He's a good friend of mine. He's one of the world's foremost figurative artists, especially portrait artists. He's from New York and he has a very influential school of art in Utah.

Micah Christensen: 1:38:34

I joke with him because he told me that he has. I said how many students do you have? At any one time? He said I cap it at 12. And I said, oh, so you're Jesus and they're the 12 of fossils. And he says, well, maybe I should add 13 or knock it down to 11. I said no, no, no, no, ok go here.

Erik Nilsson: 1:38:49

Yeah, 12 has been tried.

Micah Christensen: 1:38:50

Keep it there, I just hope you don't have a Judas among them, right.

Erik Nilsson: 1:38:53

What happened to Jeff. You're never going to believe this.

Micah Christensen: 1:38:55

You'll never believe it, but he's still. So. Jeff Hine would be up there and then somebody who she would be shocked. Is this going to go public, what I say? Probably OK. I think an interesting person to talk to would be Julie Freed.

Erik Nilsson: 1:39:10

Julie Freed.

Micah Christensen: 1:39:10

So Julie Freed is part of she's one of the people who manages her family are the founders and management of Lagoon.

Erik Nilsson: 1:39:23

OK.

Micah Christensen: 1:39:25

And Julie's young, she's dynamic and she is a very passionate person who is behind one of the great institutions in Utah. Her father was a longtime friend recently passed away and I didn't know her very well until her father passed away and, frankly, I don't know her super well now. Right, she's about 10 years younger than I am, maybe even more, but every time I interact with her I'm shocked at her maturity, her energy and she and Lagoon when I was a kid was interesting, but not as huge of a deal as it is now, and it's just gone from strength to strength, and a huge part of that is Julie.

Erik Nilsson: 1:40:18

Interesting.

Micah Christensen: 1:40:18

So I talked to her.

Erik Nilsson: 1:40:20

So I'm trying to remember if this is true or not, but I think I actually met Julie here on New Year's Eve via some other friends, so I'm curious if it's the same.

Micah Christensen: 1:40:31

Wouldn't surprise me. She's probably evolved a lot in the community. We don't necessarily go in the same circles. Her dad was a collector and that's how I got to know her. There are a lot of people that you should probably think about over time. Scott Anderson, the president of Zions.

Erik Nilsson: 1:40:50

Bank just announced you retired. Yep just announced you retired.

Micah Christensen: 1:40:52

They're celebrating their 150th anniversary as a bank and he may be interested in talking about the legacy of that bank, and Kim Wilson would be an interesting person to talk to.

Erik Nilsson: 1:41:04

Definitely. Yeah, I didn't know his history and art but yeah, that's fascinating.

Micah Christensen: 1:41:10

And another person. I said three, but I'm not on like six. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Micah Christensen: 1:41:15

Is, I would. Robert Bro. He is the director of the Opera Department of the University of Utah and he used to sing for the New York City Light Opera and he's been a major influence in the world. Here. I don't mention one more person, my friend, who I grew up with, wendy Brin Harmer, who's a principal opera singer at the Metropolitan Opera. She grew up in California and Bountiful and she lives in New York, but I think she was recently announced to be one of the leads in Utah Opera's production coming up, so when she comes to town, I mean she's a world-renowned soprano who's especially known for her Wagnerian roles, and she's about as big of a deal as it gets in the opera world, you know, fascinating.

Erik Nilsson: 1:42:12

Yeah.

Micah Christensen: 1:42:12

And she spent a good part of her teenage years here in Utah and I was her friend growing up. There you go.

Erik Nilsson: 1:42:18

Yeah, who knew you both would have ended up singing opera?

Micah Christensen: 1:42:21

Hers went a little further than yours, I don't know if I'd claim next to her that I sing opera, right, my dabbling in it leads me to appreciate what she does. Yeah, I like that. But she's the real deal.

Erik Nilsson: 1:42:34

Yeah, and then the last question I always ask people is if people want to find out more about you, micah, or about Anthony's, what's the best way to find out?

Micah Christensen: 1:42:42

Go to anthonyisfineartcom and go to our Instagram page, but I got to tell you there are people we don't post some of our art online Because I don't want people to have a digital experience with it. I want them to come in person. Yes, so we're on 4th East and 2nd South in Salt Lake. It's the huge pillared Greek revival building that's there and you probably have driven by it, like you have many times, and if you know where Crown Burger is, in 7-Eleven in that area.

Erik Nilsson: 1:43:14

Two birds, one stone.

Micah Christensen: 1:43:15

You know where Anthony's is. Come in, don't be intimidated by it. And it's a cheap date. It doesn't cost anything to go in there and you'd be surprised how many people we see on their anniversaries, birthdays, After someone's died in their family. They come in just to be surrounded by beauty. So if you're looking for comfort, if you're looking for on wonder, if you're looking for an uplifting experience, come to Anthony's. We'd love to have you.

Erik Nilsson: 1:43:45

Absolutely and can attest Not only because I studied architecture as my first major in college. So I love a great building, especially interior and exterior. Then you throw in amazing people and it truly is a special place in Salt Lake. So if you haven't been, don't make my mistake and wait as long to go, because it's absolutely amazing. But, micah, thank you so much. This has been everything I wanted to be, and more. I now understand why everybody loves you and the community that you've created in Utah to help you, more of a steward of this art that you support and love. So thank you so much for coming on and I'm excited to see what else happens.

Micah Christensen: 1:44:21

It's very kind of you, thank you. You're welcome and thank you.

Erik Nilsson: 1:44:24

Yeah, I will be in soon because I need to show off Anthony's to more people.

Micah Christensen: 1:44:27

Love to have you Absolutely boss.

Erik Nilsson: 1:44:29

Thank you, oh man.