Perspectives on Image and Meaning: Mormon Art from Its Founding to the Present

By Laura Allred Hurtado

 Overview:

The purpose of this course is to expand a definition of Mormon art through readings, careful looking, and discussion. In each session, students will explore a case study—an in-depth exploration of one or a handful of works that stand as an example of a larger idea, concept, or theme—that will be explored each week, with the support of scholarly text and research, approaching each work with formal and critical analysis.

Objective:

By contextualize the works within a contemporary frame and/discourse to understand how they continue to function within (or to produce) Mormon culture today, students will:

• Gain a more robust visual literary regarding Mormon art and Mormon visual culture;

• Gain awareness of the major artistic movements and themes in Mormon art;

• Will come to understand how and why images function the way they do in Mormon culture, who shapes the visual landscape, and what’s at stake; and overall

• Learn to understand how to analyze art in relationship to specific histories, values, languages and culture.

Week One - Pioneer Artists and the Emergence of Mormonism and Mormon Culture: Dan Weggleland, George Ottinger, and C. C. A. Christensen  

Case Study: Mormon Panorama and the Untitled Huntington/Lamanite Panorama 

Class will explore the function of panoramas as instructional tools for pioneer-era Mormons, in particular, and how they fit into the large scope of early Americana, in general. The C.C.A. Christensen Untitled scroll (Huntington/Lamanite)—one of the only known intact Christensen panoramas—depicts the creation of the world in 11 panels, highlighting Adam and Eve, to Book of Mormon subjects, concluding at Joseph receiving the plate. It was used to teach native American nations in Utah. \

Recommending reading: Richard Oman & Richard Jensen exhibition catalog (C. C. A. Christensen, 1831-1912: Mormon Immigrant Artist, 1984), the Art in America article on Christensen (“A Panorama of Mormon Life,” May/June 1970), & Ashlee Cook’s 2009 published University of Utah research on Christensen.  

Week Two - Documenting Identity: From Charles Savage, Charles Ellis Johnson to Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange to the technological sublime of Daniel Everett  

Case Study: The Wedding of the Rails (Charles Savage), Three Mormon Towns (Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange), and Sky I & Sky II (Daniel Everett)

Class will explore the role of photography to document, create, shape and resist forms of Mormon identity, and will look at how Mormons used photography to shape narratives of themselves and their values, priorities and culture, and how on-lookers, especially in the 19th century, used photography to exoticize the Mormon experience.

Recommended Reading: excerpts from Bradley Richards, The Salvage View: Charles Savage, Pioneer Mormon Photographer (1995); excerpts from Mary Campbell, Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image (2016); and Throughout the Universe in Perpetuity (2015) by Daniel Everett. 

Week Three: Outside of Isolationists: the Paris Art Missionaries & The Church as Patron

Case Study: Selected work from the Paris Art Missionaries; Jeff Hein, As a Hen Gathereth Temple Art Evaluation Committee

Class will study closely the Paris art missionaries and then expand the topic to include close examination of how Church commission worked function today, including through the Temple Art Evaluation Committee, inviting the Chair of the TAEC to discuss the process, the problems, and the purpose of art as a function of religious devotion, and temple worship. 

Recommended Reading: Linda Jones Gibbs, Harvesting the Light: The Paris Art Mission and Beginnings of Utah Impressionism (1987).

Week Four: The Gospel of Beauty: Mormon Women Artists in New York and Abroad 

Case Study: selected work by Mabel Frazer & Alice Merrill Horne  

Read Heather Belnap’s essay on the topic of beauty as a gospel principle. Contrast the experience of Mormon women artists and that of the Paris art missionaries, exploring the role and function of gender identity in shaping discourse, subject matter, and artistic practice. Expand the topic to include how artists today are grappling with notions of gender roles, and/or concepts of Mormon feminism. Look at how the rhetoric of beauty continues in discussions and closely held beliefs on the “morality” of realism.  

Recommended Reading: Heather Belnap Jensen. “Aesthetic Evangelism, Artistic Sisterhood and the Gospel of Beauty.” Mormon Women’s History: Beyond Biography, edited by Rachel Cope, Amy Easton-Flak, Keith A. Erekson, and Lisa Olsen Tait, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017, p. 141-165.

Week Five: Outside of the Ensign and Gospel Art Kit: Expanding the Canon & Exploring the Territory of Definitions 

Case Study: Joseph Paul Vorst, John Held Jr., & LaMonte Young

Class will look closely as artists whose practice existed outside of the Mormon corridor, expand the definition of Mormon art, and ultimately expand the traditional scope, and discuss what’s at stake with such expansion and what’s to gain with revisions and inclusions such as Vorst, John Held Jr, and others.

Recommended Reading: Read excerpts from the monograph by Glen Nelson, Joseph Paul Vorst (2017); read the essay included in Immediate Present (2017).

Week Six: The 1964 World’s Fair & Exhibiting Mormonism

Case Study: The New York 1964 World’s Fair Mormon Pavilion and the Commission of Harry Anderson Whose images became mass-reproduced iconic symbols of Mormonism

Mormons began presenting themselves at World’s Fairs in the late 19th century. Through selected reading of passages from Reid Nielson’s Exhibiting Mormonism students will gain an understanding of the way public affairs and the missionary department helped shape a standardized (and correlated) visual culture for the church. Students will also learn about the ways the Church’s World’s Fair exhibitions morphed into visitor’s centers and look at the material culture that develops within that context and how it continues to shape the Mormon visual identity today. 

Recommended Reading: Read sections of Reid Nielson’s Exhibiting Mormonism: The Latter-day Saints and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (2011)

Week Seven: The Art & Belief Movement

Case Study: selected work from Trevor Southey, Gary E. Smith, & Dennis Smith

Students will come to understand the vision, ambition and hope of the art and belief movement and what was at stake in its utopian vision and how it struggled to be realized within the reality of commissions, and culture.

Recommended Reading: Primary Source materials on the founding of the Art and Belief movement held at the Harold B. Lee Library in Special Collections.  

Week Eight: Festival of Mormon Arts: Kimball’s Education for Eternity

Case Study: Mormon Arts, Vol. 1 

By reading primary source materials associated with the Festivals of Mormon arts, students will come to understand the movement, the goals, the hopes, and the failures of the Festival within the context of the doctrinal backdrop and effect of Kimball and Packer.

Recommended Reading: Selections from Mormon Arts, Vol. 1 (1972); Kimball “Education for Eternity” (1967) or “The Gospel Vision of the Arts” (1978); and Boyd K. Packer’s “The Arts and the Spirit of the Lord” (1976).

Week Nine: Scholarly magazines: The Impact, Influence, and Dissemination of Art through Exponent II, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Irreantum, and Sunstone 

Case Study: selected Exponent II and Dialogue   

The development of Exponent II and Dialogue also meant the emergence of a publicized non-corporate, non-academic, more rhizomatic art movement. This week will look closely at the impact of scholarly magazines and their development of artist through articles, scholarship, criticism, and reproduction. The session will also look at the impact and function of art on blogs, websites, and the web at large. 

Recommended Reading: Sampling of articles from Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Exponent II, Irreantum, and Sunstone from their earliest days of publication to now.

Week Ten: Making Museums:  From the Bureau of Information & Florence Jacobson to the Church History Museum’s International Art Competition  

Case Study: The Art, Belief, & Meaning symposium, International Art Competition catalogs and web archives, & the BYU Carl Bloch exhibition; Review binders full of exhibition lists, collateral material and research (available at the CHM library),

Examine the appeal of Carl Bloch-busters and the rise of Minerva Teichert as a result of scholarship led by specific curators (Marian Wardle, Dawn Phesey, Robert Davis, among others). Look at the history of museums that developed as part of the Mormon art experience. Learn about the Bureau of Information, the International Art Competitions as they related to the rise of the Global church, and the founding of two museums, Church Museum of History and Art (now the Church History Museum) and Brigham Young University Museum of Art. 

Recommended Reading: Selected textpanels from International Art Competitions; selections from The Master’s Hand: The Art of Carl Heinrich Bloch (2010) by Richard Holzapfel, and selection from The Book of Mormon Paintings of Minerva Teichert (2009) by John W. Welch and Doris R. Dant. 

Week Eleven: The BYU Effect

Case Studies: Hagen Haltern, Wulf Barsh, Bruce Smith, the continued influence of European coverts of Mormon art, and the rise (or construction of) “third-wave Art & Belief”

Students will look at the influence of professors such as Bruce Smith, Hagen Haltern, and Wulf Barsh throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, and examine what happens to Mormon art at BYU as the festivals end and it’s effect and discourse within the wider-Mormon community and its reception at church headquarters. Students will also examine the rise of faux-naiveté as a style for religious subject matter (and its implication regarding an anxiety or erasure of the body) and the persistence theme of women in patterned dresses as a popular subject matter; and they will look at the role of geometric or sacred abstraction (the Celestial style) as a way to explore religious devotion obliquely or indirectly.

Recommended Reading: selects from Hagen Haltern’s Art Intergration: The Spiritual Foundation and Anagogical Level of Meaning of the Celestial Style (1989)

Week Twelve: The Deseret Book & Mormon Kitsch Effect  

Case Study: From Greg Olson calendars to Matt Page Latter-day saint candles  

Students will examine the effect of commercialism and mass-produced religious art as an overall aesthetic. Additionally, they will visit the Church History Library and view the culture capsule—a collection of Mormon Kitsch—and the acquisition documents that discuss why such a collection exists and what kitsch says about culture, values, and priorities within the larger Mormon culture.

Recommended Reading: “The Canonization of Kitsch” (2009) by John F., bycommonconsent.com; sections from Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (1995) and closely study the exhibition A Matter of Taste: Art, Kitsch, and Culture (2016) at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum.

Week Thirteen:  Mormon Artist Group, The Mormon Art Center Festival & Definitions in Summary, In Dialogue  

Case Study: Ultraviolet, Jared Lindsay Clark & Hildebrando De Melo 

Students will wrap up the course with art now—lookiing at specific projects produced by the Mormon Artist Group—Palimpsest by Jared Lindsay Clark (for example), discussing the role and function of collaboration, and examine the philosophy behind the foundation of the Mormon Arts Center. Finally, students will review, debate, and reexamine their definition of Mormon art.  

Recommended Reading: Glen Nelson’s e-book, The Glen and Marcia Nelson Collection of Mormon Art (2016) and Glen Nelson’s essay, “Where Are the Mormon Art Critics?”