Material
Address: 2970 South West Temple Street
Telephone:
Website: materialartgallery.com
District: South Salt Lake
“We didn’t start with a business plan or a brand. We started with trust and respect,” said Jorge Rojas. “And a shared belief that artists need each other.” That quiet foundation is what makes Material feel so different. Tucked into a modest building in Salt Lake City, the artist-run space opened with a clear and deliberate mission: to support, exhibit, and elevate other people’s work.
“It is about generosity,” Jorge Rojas said. “It is about giving our time, our resources, our relationships. That is the core of why we built this space.” Opened in 2023, the gallery is the culmination of a decade-long collaboration between Jorge and Colour Maisch - two deeply respected artists and curators who share not only a creative sensibility but a belief in building community. Their own artistic practices are rich and distinct, but Material is not about their work. It is about creating a platform for others - thoughtfully curated exhibitions that provoke, uplift, and start conversations. From the beginning, they made a conscious decision to showcase only other artists’ work. “We’ve both exhibited widely, and we will continue to do so,” Jorge explained. “But Material is about the experience we can offer others.”
The most recent show in the summer of 2025, titled Les Chingones, featured Andrew Alba, Horacio Rodriguez, Sara Serratos, and Kelly Tapia-Chunning, highlighted Latinx voices in the American West. Through sculpture, ceramics, photography, textiles, painting, and mixed media, the artists explored identity, resistance, and the political threads that shaped their experiences. Each piece was carefully chosen. Colour and Jorge both spoke about how they curate with an intuitive understanding of materials and the emotional resonance of the work itself. “There’s a power in not needing to over-explain a piece,” Colour said. “Sometimes, what moves you doesn’t need to be verbalized right away.”
Colour grew up in Utah and spent several years of her childhood in Los Angeles before returning to Salt Lake. Her given name, “Colour,” came from her father’s love of art and design. It was a name her parents dreamed up together, a reflection of creativity from the very beginning. She comes from a family of artists: her grandmother was a painter and her father a ceramicist. Her mother ran small businesses but also had a strong appreciation for the arts. Still, Colour’s path was not direct. She moved back to Utah in her twenties and took a painting class on a whim, an experience that changed everything. “I was self-taught at first,” she said. “But once I started, I knew this was what I wanted to do.” She later earned her MFA and began showing her work widely.
Colour's work, often rooted in sculpture and unconventional materials, explores “the hidden world that is around all of us all the time - the life beneath the surface.” Colour believes in what she calls “material animism” - a reverence for objects often discarded or ignored, and an understanding that they carry meaning. That philosophy informed the name of the gallery: Material. “We wanted something simple, open-ended, and unpretentious,” she said, “but also something that honored the physical and conceptual power of the things we work with.”
Jorge’s path to Material is just as layered. Born in Mexico, he moved to Utah with his mother and siblings at the age of six. “She brought us here to give us a multicultural experience,” he said, describing a childhood spent bouncing between Mexico and the U.S. - a rhythm that shaped his perspective. “It was hard, always trying to fit in, always feeling like an outsider. But it made me resilient. It made me adaptable.”
While his sisters pursued music and dance, Jorge found his way to visual art slowly. A few ribbons from a high school art competition gave him the confidence to keep going. After studying at the University of Utah and later in San Miguel de Allende, he had his first solo exhibition in Mexico and committed then and there to a life in the arts. He went on to live in New York, Seattle, and Alaska (where he worked as a commercial fisherman to support his creative life), before eventually returning to Utah. Here, he took on roles as a curator, educator, and arts administrator, all while continuing his own multidisciplinary art practice.
It was back in Salt Lake that Jorge met Colour. “I saw her work at a show at Nox Contemporary, and I was immediately enamored,” he recalled. “I didn’t know her yet, but I knew I wanted to work with her.” Soon after, the two became studio mates in a large, imperfect warehouse space - leaky roof, no A/C, but a lot of light and possibility. They worked side-by-side for nearly a decade, supporting each other through major creative and personal milestones. When they were priced out of their studio, they decided to find a new space together and Jorge floated the idea of including a gallery.
“We both walked away from steady jobs to make this happen,” Colour said. She had previously owned a successful catering company, The Blended Table, which is still active and run by her cousin. Jorge had left a comfortable role as Director of Education and Community Engagement at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Without loans or outside investors, they built Material with what they had: time, trust, and sweat equity.
What they created is something rare - a gallery run by artists for artists, where empathy is central to every decision. “We’re both very aware of what it means to be on the other side of the wall,” Colour said. “We’ve both experienced what it feels like to not be seen, or to be misunderstood.”
At Material, they do more than exhibit art. They mentor artists. They host workshops, performances, DJ nights, and kids’ activities. They open their own studio doors to visitors, creating a seamless dialogue between process and presentation. While they have made the conscious choice not to show their own work in the gallery - “We didn’t want it to feel like a vanity project” - they showcase artists they admire deeply. “We prioritize showing excellent work by artists who are also wonderful people,” Jorge said. “That’s our unofficial rule: no jerks.”
Material’s programming reflects a deep commitment to diversity and accessibility. “Art should be for everyone,” Colour said. “Not just people with art history degrees or deep pockets.” To that end, Material encourages artists to offer works at a range of price points - prints, drawings, small pieces - so more people can become collectors and form lifelong relationships with original art.
Despite the joy and energy surrounding the gallery, Colour and Jorge are clear-eyed about the challenges. “It’s a weekly, daily, monthly hustle,” Jorge said. “People see our openings, our shows, and it all looks great. But running a commercial contemporary gallery, especially in Utah, is hard.” They have chosen not to become a nonprofit in order to retain curatorial freedom, but that decision comes with trade-offs. Still, they are in it for the long haul. “We believe in this. We love this,” Colour said. “And we’re doing everything we can to make it work.”
They are also doing everything they can to help others. Between Colour and Jorge, they have decades of experience running businesses, teaching, curating, creating. And they have used that knowledge to lift others up, connecting artists to institutions, placing work in permanent collections, and building a culture of care in the Utah art world. "We want people to understand that this isn’t just art, it’s people’s lives. Their work, their stories, their voices. That’s what we’re creating space for. And that’s what makes it all worth it.”
