Backstage with Selma Chugg & Myron Bouwhuis
The cameras are off. The band has packed up. But the show’s just getting started…
If this show has an origin story, it starts with Myron.
And if this show has a secret weapon, it's Selma.
Selma Chugg
The Zine
Selma's process, by her own description, starts with printing out at least a million pictures.
Then: cutting, gluing, spilling something, starting over. She loves learning about these figures and trying to fit even a fragment of their influence onto a page in a way that makes people actually think.
Most visitors will walk into the show and head straight for the portraits. What they might not expect is the thing they get to take home.
Selma is the artist behind the zine — the handcrafted publication waiting for every visitor who walks through the door.
It's not a brochure. It's not a program. It's its own thing entirely: a carefully assembled, hand-built piece of work that gives every person in this exhibit a page, and every page a story.
She's spent months on it. Reading excerpts of books. Going through every available photograph. Watching old interviews. Disappearing down Wikipedia rabbit holes at odd hours. Trying to find the right fragment — the right image, the right combination of words — for each person in the show.
Outside of the zine she plays viola, attempts guitar, scream-sings in the car, and loves ballet. She contains multitudes, and the zine pages reflect that — eclectic, researched and deeply human.
She hopes visitors walk away with a new perception of these people and, by extension, a new way of seeing the world.
Also she just hopes you think it's cool. 🤙
Myron Bouwhuis
Painting Jim Henson, Pablo Picasso, Rogers & Hammerstein, Bart Simpson, and Oprah Winfrey
This whole thing started with Myron.
The idea that a community art show could take TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people of the 20th century and hand them to local artists — people who aren't necessarily famous, people who have day jobs and families and full lives outside of a studio — and see what they made of them. That was Myron's idea. He built the first chapter of Influencers Over Time entirely on his own, painting every subject himself, and then asked fifteen other people to join him for the second.
They said yes. And here we are.
For this chapter Myron ended up with five subjects: Jim Henson, Pablo Picasso, Rogers & Hammerstein, Bart Simpson, and Oprah Winfrey. What was left after everyone else chose. He'll tell you that himself — and he'll tell you it without a hint of complaint, because that's not really the point.
The point, for Myron, has always been the same.
He describes portraits as biographies you can see.
Heartache beside hope. Fatigue beside achievement. Flaws beside greatness. He's drawn to the way a single face can carry competing truths — and still move through the world and shape it. His work in acrylics and oils is an attempt to sit with that complexity rather than smooth it over.
So he dug in. Autobiographies, biographies, the full complicated record of five very different people who each changed the room they walked into. A puppeteer who made childhood feel safe. A painter who broke reality apart and rebuilt it more honestly. A songwriting duo who shaped the American musical for generations. A cartoon kid who accidentally became a cultural reckoning. A woman who built a media empire on the radical idea that ordinary people's stories were worth telling. What they share, underneath all of it: none of them did it quietly.
He hopes visitors walk away with a better understanding of what his subjects did to influence others — and an honest awareness of their weaknesses too. Room for different perspectives. The full picture.
That's the only kind of portrait worth making. And it's the only kind of show worth building.
Outside of the studio, Myron skis, runs, and loves the mountains. He's been the heartbeat of this project from the very beginning — and there's something right about him being the last artist spotlight before the doors open.
He started this. He gets to finish it.
What This is All About
Selma and Myron are two of 15 local artists creating portraits for:
Influencers Over Time — Part 2: Artists + Entertainers
This five-part exhibition is inspired by TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people of the 20th century — exploring the people whose ideas, creativity, and courage shaped the world we live in today.
📅 May 1–3 📍 West Point, Utah 🎟 Free tickets — reserve your time slot:
