Zion Art Podcast

This week we stray a little bit from work by LDS artists in pursuit of becoming a "Mormon Michelangelo" to look at the Michelangelo at his peak. The tomb of Lorenzo de Medici, his patron, friend and father figure is a part of the Medici Chapel in Florence, Italy where Hall studied marble sculpting and had a transformative experience in front of this renaissance masterwork. As the recent recipient of the Alex J. Etta Grant from the National Sculpture Society, Hall's work follows the traditional techniques started in Italy centuries ago. 

The Tomb of Lorenzo de Medici with Dusk & Dawn (1524-1531) by Michelangelo Buonarotti (Italian, 1475-1564). Marble. 630 x 420 cm. Sagrestia Nuova, San Lorenzo, Medici Chapel, Florence. 

Outside the Circle (Front) by Michael Aaron Hall. Bronze. 

Outside the Circle (Back) by Michael Aaron Hall. Bronze. 

Emily Larsen Boothe is the Assistant Curator at the Springville Museum of Art and is responsible for organizing exhibitions and shows throughout the year. Springville's collection of Utah and LDS Art may be the finest anywhere in the world, including Jesus Christ is the God of that Land by one of the most treasured and reproduced LDS artists of all time, Minerva Teichert. 

Jesus Christ is the God of That Land (c. 1940) by Minerva Teichert. Oil on Board. 47 ¾ x 23 ¾ in. Springville Museum of Art

We sit down with Ashlee Whitaker, the Roy and Carol Christensen Curator of Religious Art at BYU to talk about her favorite pieces of religious work in the collection at the BYU Museum of Art. A pair of triptychs by renowned LDS painter Trevor Southey reflect the life of Christ in a style completely unique to Southey and with a depth unparalleled in LDS art. 

Jesus and Mary: The Moment After by Trevor Southey. Currently on view at the BYU MOA "Magnifying the Lord" Exhibition.

Intercession at Gethsemene by Trevor Southey. Courtesy of the BYU Museum of Art

Part 2 of our discussion with Dr. Probert focuses on the specifics the Assembly Hall, its history and its role as one of the spiritual homes of the early Saints. Many of these buildings were a rare opportunity for leaders of the Church to express our beliefs through art and architecture. 

The Interior of the Salt Lake Assembly Hall

Detail of the Salt Lake Assembly Hall Ceiling

The artist Jeff Hein joins us to discuss how we use monumental religious painting in LDS culture. Much like Carl Bloch's series of paintings for the Fredriksborg Castle in Denmark, Hein is beginning a twenty year venture to create large scale depictions of the life of Christ. We discuss that process the challenges both technically and philosophically of such a task. 

Christ Healing the Sick at Bethesda, by Carl Heinrich Bloch (Danish, 1834-1890). Oil on Canvas. 111 x 126 in. BYU Museum of Art. 

Triumphal Entry (2016) by Jeff Hein. Oil on Linen. 54 x 72 in. LDS Church Collection. 

In this first half of a two part discussion with Dr. Probert, we discuss the dichotomy of Catholic-inspired and Protestant-inspired architecture and art. The effect that these influences have on our culture, generally have been pervasive. Our discussion focuses on this duality, manifest in a photo of Temple Square in Salt Lake City in the 1890s. 

Temple Square circa 1890. Photograph courtesy of Utah State Historical Society.

Artist Bryan Mark Taylor discusses one of his favorite landscape works, fortunately housed at BYU's Museum of Art. His work has built on the many varied techniques and teachings honed through years of training and exhibited right now in a new show at the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City. Along with two landscape artists Josh Clare and John Burton, the beautiful scenes experienced by the Pioneers in their trek west have been remarkably captured by oil on canvas for us to enjoy today.

William Bliss Baker (American, 1859-1886) Fallen Monarchs (1886) Oil on canvas. 30 x 39 3/4 in. Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo.

An introduction to the Saint's at the Devil's Gate Exhibit at the Church History Museum

Artist and teacher Ryan Brown discusses a recent commission to hearken to one of the most iconic images in modern LDS culture. He also discusses the role of educating patrons, artists and the public on the importance of arts literacy. 

Christ Healing the Sick at Bethesda, by Carl Heinrich Bloch (Danish, 1834-1890). Oil on Canvas. 111 x 126 in. BYU Museum of Art. 

Learn more about works by Ryan Brown here.

The Lord's Prayer by Ryan Brown. Oil on Panel. 32 x 24 in. 

And learn more about the Masters Academy of Art, lectures and classes here. 

Dr. Herman du Toit discusses one of the beast known artists among members of the LDS Church, 19th Century Danish painter, Carl Bloch. His works are nearly ubiquitous, but his role is much more pervasive than the reduced size depictions that are common in magazines and manuals. 

Christ and Child (1873) by Carl Bloch (Danish, 1834-1890). Oil on Canvas. 151 5/8 x 63 in. Collection of Skt. Nikolai Kirke Holbaek, Denmark.

Interior of the Skt. Nikolai Kirke Holbaek, Denmark.

You can pick up Herman Du Toit's book, Masters of Light: Coming unto Christ through Inspired Devotional Art on Amazon

Micah: Welcome to Mormon Visual Culture, the podcast presented by the Zion Art Society and hosted by me Micah Christenson. This year we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of President Spencer W. Kimball’s landmark talk, The Gospel Bison of the Arts through discussions with prominent artists, collectors and scholars about the art work that has inspired them and shaped LVS culture. Today we are very pleased to have Dr. Herman Du Toit, he’s the former head of education and research at the Brigham Young University museum of Art, he was the dean of what’s formally the school of fine arts at Durban Technical Institute in South Africa and holds post graduate degrees in art history, studio art and Sociology of Education. He has a PhD in Educational Leadership and was a fellow at the J. Paul Getty Institute. He is the founder of BYU Biennial Art & belief symposium. Dr. Du Toit has authored several books including most recently Masters of Light, Coming unto Christ through Inspired Devotional Art. Dr. Du Toit, we’re very pleased to have you, thank you for coming.

Herman: It’s great being here, thank you so much for inviting me.

Micah: Well, I had a chance to read your book and we’ll talk about that, there’s specific things that I want to ask you but first tell us about the work, art you’ve chosen.

Herman: Well the book I chose is the cover piece for the book, Masters of Light and it comes from the exhibition Sacred Gifts and opened at the BYU museum of art a couple of years ago. This was the culminated religious exhibition of these artists from Northern Europe and it was probably the most successful of these exhibitions. This particular work caught my attention because of its powerful full frontal engagement that it demands of the viewer. It is more than life size, it’s a large alter piece, Carl Heinrich Bloch and he painted 8 alter pieces in his life time and this probably the most distinguished one. Significantly the museum had the resources to actually replicate the architectural framework for this piece, so it’s presented very much in the same way as you would see it in the chapel that it came from in Denmark. 

Micah: I remember seeing it in person, it was quite impressive and one of the things that I want to ask about this is I think you’d probably agree that Carl Bloch along with Heinrich Hofmann are 2 of the most reproduced artists in church culture.

Herman: Well Hofmann definitely.

Micah: And both of them, most of their works are not seen in their full scale. They’re generally seen reduced to an 8 and a half by 11 or on a computer screen and there was a great deal of effort made during that exhibition which was opened I think in November of 2013, to bring about the originally pieces and to put them in their architectural settings.

Herman: As they were seen originally, exactly. So this particular painting is typical of Bloch’s very personable and direct naturalistic depiction of Christ as a corporeal figure standing upright with a small child to his right. It adds symbolism.

Micah: Let’s talk through the painting, almost a formal analysis of the work itself.

Herman: Let’s look at it, yeah, first of all you see the light, it’s lit by a sort of ambiguous diffused light, you’re not quite sure where the light source is but it emanates from the robe of Christ and it’s seen against the foil of this very dark background which is typical of the tenebrism that Carl was so adept to using in his paintings, specifically the use of light and shade for dramatic purposes that he learned from Rembrandt, from Caravaggio, so we see a very strong iconic image which would fulfill most of the requirements to what the gestalt sociologist would call a good gestalt. It doesn’t disintegrate, it impresses itself on the mind, it recurs in memory and it’s well integrated and it has a quite a starkly centralized composition. 

Micah: You bring up Rembrandt and Caravaggio who are 2 artists that Carl Bloch would have been well aware of, he was trained in the royal academy in Denmark, classical tradition and that school was dominated up until the mid 19th century arguably, maybe I’m wrong about this by the success of artist like Bertel Thorvaldsen who was where is Denmark was somewhat provincial arguably compared to a lot of other capitals in Europe and known for its art, Thorvaldsen put Denmark on the map. He went to Rome, worked in Rome, was world famous, kind of took over Canova position as the predominate neoclassicist and I assume that had a huge effect on Carl Bloch’s generation, which was a generation or two removed from Thorvaldsen but Thorvaldsen’s neoclassicism had fallen out of favor by the time Carl Bloch was in school. I think it was probably what 1850s, he went to Rome in the 1860s right?

Herman: Yes.

Micah: What was going on in Denmark when Carl Bloch was in school and when he went to Rome? Is this typical, is his work typical of what was going on there?

Herman: Politically Denmark had suffered a demise.

Micah: Okay.

Herman: Carl Bloch had an idea that it would be wonderful he thought if he could revive the glorious heritage of Danish art, again.

Micah: Okay, meaning going back to Thorvaldsen glory?

Herman: Actually, maybe to the baroque tradition, because Thorvaldsen was much more of a neoclassicist and I mean he’s on record for having said that his work devolves upon the Greeks, he said without the Greeks you have no basis for doing sculpture. So where is Carl Bloch has a very interesting relationship to the art of the day to the extent that he is a reformed baroque painter, he’s a protestant reformist, remember that there was a reformation against the excesses of the Renaissance by the Catholic church and this was replaced by the baroque art of Caravaggio and Rubens and Carl Bloch comes along when people are becoming disenamored with the remote stylizations of baroque art that didn’t really speak to the common people, to the laity, and Bloch comes on when the art of the Protestant reformation starts to impinge upon the homes of the common parishioners. They all had small paintings produced, Holland was particularly indebted at generating thousands of what they called little masters who produced small paintings that were much more in keeping with the understanding and the circumstances of people who more than likely illiterate and looked to these depictions as simple, pneumonic reminders of their faith and captured daily temporal occurrences that were domestic and close to their experience. So, Bloch benefits from the archetypal history painting of the day, remember that was upheld as the highest order of painting, when you depicted historical mythical themes and rolled into that was religious paintings. Religious paintings, religious themes, they were constantly looking at the Old Testament for themes that they could depict in their painting, along with mythology historical paintings.

Micah: Well this begs a question that I have about the environment that he’s working in, if he were in Paris the zeitgeist there was very different and Paris was arguably because of the salon system, because of the patronage of the state and of a commercial market there’s famously this idea that, it was said by a Spanish art critic but I think it could have been said of most of Europe, that you stay at home and paint if you love your country, you go to Rome if you love deep and spiritual things to study and you go to France if you love money and I think when I look at Carl Bloch’s work, he’s not doing French Parisian… There are a few examples of him doing genre scenes that would have been commercial in his early year, there are scenes of him doing a few beautiful women in a kind of impressionistic style, I’m thinking in particular of a painting that’s right now at the Hope Gallery of Art that’s kind of a toilet scene, which just means it’s kind of a bedroom scene of a women with her back towards us in a more impressionistic style, but he’s not doing small commercial pieces at this point in his career.

Herman: No.

Micah: He’s doing monumental on the ladder of genres, he’s doing the highest order of art in large scale and its commission work from the state and from churches. This piece in particular that you’ve chosen is in the church of Saint Nicholas in Holbæk and his 23 paintings from life of Christ that he did in Frederiksborg Castle. I don’t know if there’s anywhere else in Europe where one artist is getting commissions to do as much religious art from the state. Why is Denmark commissioning in the 19th century so much religious art?

Herman: Interesting question, remember that images were few and far between.

Micah: Yeah.

Herman: We are flattered with ubiquitous imagery all day.

Micah: Right.

Herman: They had a very limited exposure to images, they were very powerful and that’s why they were monopolized by the church at the time. They wanted to use that medium as a means of propagating their doctrine and that’s why images were very powerful however Carl Bloch was not commercial motivated. He could have painted faster, he would spend years painting one altar piece. I forget how long, 12 or 13 years to paint the 23 painting in Frederiksborg Castle.

Micah: How could he afford to do that, was it just because he was on royal salary?

Herman: He just made ends meet, like we all do. He wasn’t driven for high production and for maximizing his output. That wasn’t in his mindset, he was motivated by the purest desire to exemplify his God through his artwork, to give expression, the profound doctrines that he adhered too and he identified with these works.

Micah: Did he write about them?

Herman: No, he didn’t write about them but it’s on record that he did say that he denounced the impressionists when they showed 1880 in Paris, he said “what do they think they teach us”.

Micah: Now that goes to the question and maybe we should back up a little bit, let’s talk about his training.

Herman: Yes.

Micah: His parents wanted him to be I think it was in the navy, right.

Herman: His mother wanted him to be in the navy.

Micah: I mean the 3 traditional stable places are lawyer, military or at the priesthood and they wanted him in the navy and did he show some proclivity at a young age?

Herman: Yes. He would actually use paints that he got from house painters that were painting in his village so that he could. He would beg, borrow and steal bits of paint, pigments that he could paint. He was at an early age, he was converted to the notion that he wanted to become an artist and when he failed the entrance to the naval academy it was a sigh of relief for him so that he could rather pursue his admission to the royal academy.

Micah: Now the royal academy after going there, he received what I would imagine was a pretty standard education at the time.

Herman: Very rigorous.

Micah: He would have copied from old masters, studied compositions, studied tones, studied the human figure would have been the basis for his works.

Herman: Only after they’d spend about a year or so just drawing, they wouldn’t even touch a paint brush until they had progressed sufficiently.

Micah: So, this was typical with the French model, that they wouldn’t until after they’d left, famously Ingrs who was the professor at the academy in both Rome and in also taught at the Ecole de Beaux Arts of art said it takes you 20 years to learn to draw and 3 days to learn how to paint. Is this the kind of mentality that he received at the academy?

Herman: Basically yes, remember he was functioning at the apogee of the academic system and it’s significant that the whole system went into decline almost immediately and during his own lifetime. During his lifetime, the impressionist took over the focus of art interest and the laborious training of the academies was seen as passé and new movements and the avant garde took over the interest of the critics and the consuming collectors.

Micah: He really was one of the few that made it all the way through this system to what its conclusion would be, Ingres also famously said for every 10,000 artists we produce 9,999 copyists and one true artist. He graduated from the academy, he goes to Rome on a kind of prix-de-Rome.

Herman: He goes via Holland, where he studies and gets a lot of inspiration from Rembrandts works.

Micah: So, does he go and live in Holland after graduating from the academy? 

Herman: He travels through Holland.

Micah: So, he stops on his way to Rome?

Herman: Yes.

Micah: And this is where this idea of where the Protestant masters of the reformation in the 17th century have an influence on him. Do we know specifically who he’s looking at, you mentioned Rembrandt before, is he looking at Hals I imagine?

Herman: Probably.

Micah: And maybe Jan Steen and some of these others?

Herman: Probably, the protestant artists in Holland who are very prominent and well displayed. I mean they were flooded with thousands and thousands of these paintings.

Micah: It’s interesting because there seems to be in Germany, and I don’t know as much as Denmark, I know it was true for the Munich school which becomes quite dominant at the end of the century. They kind of add to this, if you were to say every school of art has a pantheon of artists, so if you’re Spanish Velasquez, Ribera, Cano if you’re French you’ve got Poussin,  you’ve got all of these other artists, but all of them add Rome to it, right.

Herman: Yes.

Micah: If you’re Danish I imagine and you’re German, was it typical to stop into Holland as a pit stop?

Herman: No, not necessarily.

Micah: It wasn’t necessarily.

Herman: No, it wasn’t.

Micah: This is something that he adds.

Herman: This is something that he adds and he had gone extensively to Rome to look at how the old masters during the Renaissance period had depicted Christ and religious iconography, so this was a bonus that he got and was obviously very influential for him.

Micah: I know that in the exhibition that was done on Carl Bloch, Spiritual Gifts, that they had a few of his genre works that were there. Is that how he’s making a living in the beginning, before he starts getting these big state commissions. Is he making it doing genre scenes of everyday life, of children, of families?

Herman: You know he was constantly concerned with the anxiety of providing for his family through his work. It would seem that he always scraped by, and I’m sure that the Frederiksborg Castle commission that really gave him a prominent name.

Micah: And that happened after Rome?

Herman: Yes, that happened after Rome.

Micah: So, he’s in Rome, I understand that he gets married while he’s there.

Herman: Yes, to a wonderful woman.

Micah: She sounds like she has a Russian name but I couldn’t find much about her.

Herman: Yes, you’re right.

Micah: But I don’t know much about her but they’re very happily married, right?

Herman: Very happily married and he’s devastated when she passes away.

Micah: She passes away after they’ve not even been married 20 years. Is that right?

Herman: That’s right.

Micah: Do we know what she died of?

Herman: No, it was something like an consumption, maybe it was tuberculosis.

Micah: Which would have been a common death at that time.

Herman: Yes, it was a common death.

Micah: But after going to Rome, and I’m just trying to get this timeline ordered out, he goes back to Denmark and as an artist who’s graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and then gone to Rome, he would have immediately been at the top of the food chain I imagine, right?

Herman: Well yes, he was never very pushy, he never pushed himself and he was very fortunate in getting the commissions that he did and that made his name but he was never really a celebrity artist to the extent that maybe Thorvaldsen was, Thorvaldsen was better known than he was.

Micah: And Thorvaldsen made his name at a distance.

Herman: Yes.

Micah: He was the big fish in the big ocean.

Herman: Yes, very interesting man. I mean he arrived in Rome without being able to speak a word of Italian or Greek and he was denounced for that and they said how can this Philistine possibly learn to produce fine art when he can’t even speak the classical languages but he proved himself and he was a maverick to the extent that he was a loner. He worked on his own, he was very productive, he produced an enormous body of work and he was not as openly religious as Hofmann or Bloch were but he was obviously totally dedicated to producing religious iconography, particularly the Christus statue and the 12 apostles.

Micah: So, I want to ask about, since we’re talking about Thorvaldsen and Hofmann and Bloch and it seems like for us as members of The Church of Jesus Christ’s of Latter Day Saints as Mormon’s in general, that these are names for us that are often said in the same sentence.

Herman: Yes.

Micah: I don’t know if anywhere else in the world they’re always said in the same sentence and for this podcast we’ve done, we’ve told guests that we want them to choose a work by a Mormon artist and some people that we’ve talked to said I’d really like to do Sergeant or I’d really like to do another artist and I said no, not LDS but we made an exception, clearly for Bloch. He’s what I would put in this camp of non-Mormon, Mormon artists.

Herman: He’s a co-opted artist.

Micah: He is and let’s talk about why he’s been co-opted.

Herman: That’s what intrigued me about this whole thing, that’s why I eventually wrote this book. These exhibitions were the first exhibitions under the auspices of the church, at Brigham Young University that brought these artists out of obscurity. It was only when the healing at the Pool of Bethesda was donated to the museum by courtesy of the Wheatley’s who purchased it when it became available for sale in Denmark that we got a glimpse of the spectacular and impactful painting of Carl Bloch.

Micah: He had been used by the church in publications long before that.

Herman: Yes.

Micah: I believe that it even dates back.

Herman: In 1962.

Micah: It probably dates back to the beginning of the Improvement Era, right?

Herman: Yeah, the Improvement Era. It was the first color publication by the Improvement Era by works that were then obtained from the Frederiksborg Castle. We don’t know how the church came by those images.

Micah: So that’s still unknown as to why he was adopted.

Herman: Yes, we don’t know who it came to under the purview of the Improvement Era editors but they saw his work, they latched on to it, the church obtained the copyright for those images and they’ve been promulgated through the church ever since.

Micah: This begs a question for me that I’ve had, so if you were to look back at the history of art in the church, the images that we think of that have been produced or commissioned by the Church, of Christ are probably not until 1964 with the world’s fair and Harry Anderson. So, if we were to try and look back at what images of Christ we had before that period, you have a copy of C.C.A. Christensen’s maybe, you’d have a J.T. Harwood but there isn’t a lot to speak of and it seems to be that this Improvement Era and the world’s fair in 1964, so 62 is the Improvement Era, 64 is the world’s fair, coincides with a new effort by the church to say we’re not just the Mormons, we’re member of the Church of Jesus Christ, all in caps, Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints.

Herman: Exactly.

Micah: All right, and the question then is if we don’t have our own imagery who do we borrow imagery from, how do we get that imagery, which we don’t know exactly how they got Carl Bloch but there are so many religious artists we could have use. We could have gone to, the vast majority of converts to the church were English. We could have used some of the pre-Raphaelite works, what is so useful and I’m not contesting it, it’s just a question, why Carl Bloch?

Herman: Again, this is what intrigued me, I mean I came into this culture, this Mormon culture specific to Utah late in my life.

Micah: How old were you when you came?

Herman: I’ve been here 25 years, so it must have been about 45.

Micah: Did it seem odd to you when you came in and saw it? What is a very distinctive culture in your opinion artistically?

Herman: Yes, it was. That’s another podcast but what caught my attention was how powerfully these works impacted the church members in this spot of the world. I mean these exhibitions were seen by over a half a million people and they were thrilled by them, they made meaning of these images.

Micah: Are we talking about the exhibitions in 2013?

Herman: Yes, beholding salvation.

Micah: Which beholding salvation featured the pool of Bethesda.

Herman: Yes, and then The Master’s Hand which was Carl Bloch.

Micah: Carl Bloch and then Sacred Gifts and these all happened within about a 10 year period, right?

Herman: Exactly.

Micah: From 2006 or 2007 is when the first one happened at the pool of Bethesda, even though the painting had been acquired in 2002?

Herman: Yes, 2006.

Micah: So, 2006 and then successively almost every 3 years there was an exhibition after that.

Herman: Yes, and they built on each other and they cemented the impact that Carl Bloch’s work has. As I said with the signature piece that we chose for this discussion Christ looks out at the viewer as a psychological injunction, it’s as if He is looking directly at you, He is not judgmental, He’s not a God of wrath, He’s not a suffering Christ, He is a resurrected Christ, fully corporeal with compassion and intelligence and engaging. He gestures to the little boy to His right indicating the scripture from Matthew that we need to become as children to enter into the kingdom of God, also indicating that He’s not a respecter of persons, even a child can enter the kingdom of God. He’s very attuned to symbolism, Carl Bloch is, you look at the palm frond held by the little boy, signifying the victory over death by Christ. He puts in this classical column as a nod to the classical tradition.

Micah: As I’m looking at images of the physical space of the Saint Nicholas Church in Holbæk , it seems to be not an exact copy of the physical space but somewhat a continuity.

Herman: It gives a clue to the ecclesiastical space.

Micah: It also seems to me contextually this piece sits right behind the baptismal font for the church and it seems like because they baptize their children in that font, this would have been a direct reference to that.

Herman: Exactly.

Micah: It’s not a narrative scene necessarily, it’s more of a symbolic allegorical.

Herman: It’s very iconic depiction. They both stand with bare feet symbolism sacred ground that they stand and what is significant to me about this painting, what caught my attention and you may think this is an interesting aspect, when you look at the original work, it doesn’t come through the original work but if you look at the craquelure in the dark folds of the Savior’s robe you’ll see evidence of craquelure, there is also craquelure in the nimbus around his head which doesn’t come through in that photograph. But in right light that craquelure in the nimbus looks like a crown of thorns. It was unintended by Carl Bloch obviously, because it hadn’t cracked at the time of his painting it but over the years the craquelure has developed significantly around.

Micah: So, it was somewhat unintended iconographical…

Herman: Unintended, I don’t want to make it into a Mormon scared icon but it’s so interesting to me to see this manifestation over time in this painting that again speaks to the divinity of Christ, almost as if the Lord had said don’t paint me with a nimbus, I’d rather put in a crown of thorns.

Micah: It seems on a material level one of the things that would have made this very difficult to paint is the huge amount of dark space that’s in it because dark paint is famously more transparent, even thought that would seem for non painters to be a contradiction and artists usually had craquelure problems because you’d have to do several layers and you’d do different levels of thinking out that paint, it would dry at different rates. That would mean that he’d painted over the dark paint, that nimbus or that light around his head and that would have eventually lead to that cracking. What a happy accident that would have taken place.

Herman: That’s a good term for it.

Micah: one of the questions I want to ask you about the exhibitions and people’s experience with the exhibition is that when these works were shown in their full size and architectural setting, I imagine that it’s the first time that people saw them in full scale, they were used to seeing them as small pieces we mentioned before. What do you think that effect has had on us, that we’ve been seeing these mainly as small works rather than large images?

Herman: That’s why we have museums, so we can show people the actual artworks.

Micah: Yeah.

Herman: Because reproductions do not capture the full impact of an original artwork when you confront it as the artist would have seen it at the same distance that the artist would have been exposed to it as he or she painted it.

Micah: Do you think that our reducing those to smaller size and most of us having that experience with them needs to be corrected?

Herman: It’s difficult to correct. I mean our iPads are limited in dimension, although we get bigger and bigger TV screens we never really see these things in their full scale. So that’s why we have museums so we can actually confront these works in the scale that they were produced and in the manner that the artist would have produced them.

Micah: So, a question that I’ve also got about the exhibition, were you involved in the exhibition by the way?

Herman: Which one? In the first 2.

Micah: In the first 2 you were, okay and so maybe this isn’t a question for you but I’d be interested in your opinion because I don’t know if you had control over it so much, when I went to the exhibition Sacred Gifts and saw these pieces with their labels, the museum labels, one of the things that was so interesting was BYU Museum of Art which is an institution owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints and in a way it’s got a relationship with it, they had a small label with the title and the original location and media and then a much longer label that accompanied it that was usually a quote by a general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints talking about its doctrine and I found myself wondering a couple of things, one was I wondered how would a Lutheran painter or a Protestant painter feel about us not only reducing the artwork in the way we’ve usually seen it in print but then when we get it there in person putting our doctrine next to it, as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. It would be the equivalent of let’s say 300 years from now or 100 years from now a Mongolian religion really loved Minerva Teichert and called Minerva Teichert a proto- Mongolian artists and took this art, is that something that is problematic in your opinion

Herman: Oh, it could be problematic, it’s a matter of interpretive things. However, these artists have gained their prominence not by happenstance, they have in their own doctrinal approach to the doctrine of Christ, they are amazingly aligned with the LDS perspective.

Micah: So, you feel like their art, it’s continuity is with us.

Herman: It’s congruent and that is why they’ve been so popular and I have no doubt that Carl Bloch, Heinrich Hofmann would probably have already embraced the restored gospel.

Micah: So, for you, you feel like they were painting in harmony with doctrine?

Herman: Yes, and I think it’s significant that they were painting at the time of the restoration of the gospel in the United States. Their main production was simultaneously with the establishment of the church in the mid 1800s.

Micah: So, I have a question about how we use their art and you talk about it a great deal in your book. I was really fascinated in the sections where you talk about how we use art and the use of art in the church and you talk about 3 aspects in the way that we use art. The first is you say that it invites us to think of a particular time and place, this is one of the uses of a religious work of art. So, we’ve talked a little bit about that but let’s talk specifically to it when it comes to this work of art. It gets us to think about a particular time and place or person, how does Carl Bloch do that uniquely well in your opinion? In this or in the 23 works that are in Frederiksborg?

Herman: Because he uses body types or facial expressions that are common and even universal. His art is of the kind that are universally recognizable and that’s another aspect of their epistemology. Carl Bloch and Heinrich Hofmann and their cohort have an epistemological perspective of reality that’s congruent with the LDS perspective. It is their attempt to give expression to the mind and will of God, which is the meta principle which postmodern philosophy rejects in favor of situational and modulated social realities. So they speak in the same way as Tolstoy, as Charles Dickens speak, as if there is a universal reality.

Micah: A very classical tradition notion.

Herman: Exactly and the LDS church has coopted their very classical perspective in expression of the mind and will of God, it’s as simple as that.

Micah: When I look at works by contemporary representational artists who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, they seem to borrow very heavily from Carl Bloch and Heinrich Hofmann, what do you think their influence has been, Carl Bloch, Hofmann too, their influence has been on contemporary artists?

Herman: Contemporary artists walk a very precarious line between sentimentalism and illustration and more profound depictions that evoke illicit and spiritual responses.

Micah: There’s a lot in what you just said, keep talking but I want to break down aspects of it.

Herman: The fact is, and we don’t hold it against the average viewer, the average MOA.

Micah: Museum of Art.

Herman: Museum of Art attendee but these people you would classify probably as uninformed by these heavy topics of aesthetic literacy. They respond in the way that Gustave Courbet would have couched it in the democratic vision of realism. That is why these artworks are so popular, it is the way the people see the world, it communicates across a broad swath of humanity, it’s not specific to cultural or language differences. Carl Bloch and Heinrich Hofmann and Frans Schwartz paint images in the way that Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines what realism is, the way that people actually see the world.

Micah: So, it sounds like you’re saying something is lost in translation in a way, that these artists who are working today often, and we’re speaking very broadly, look at a Carl Bloch, look at a Heinrich Hofmann and they take that work and they’re missing, they’re reducing it to something and missing a fundamental. What are those fundamentals?

Herman: That is the sacral nature of inspired devotional depictions. Remember in accepting these works at museum worthy, exhibition offerings we accept the notion also that art is instrumental, that this kind of art specifically has a value in achieving some change in the viewer. It can engender compassion, dedication, strength in testimonies, it can edify, it can uplift, it can help people who are depressed, it can soothe, it can make people feel uplifted and instrumental of art and instrumental function of art that has been denied by modernism. In the first aesthetic we know that art is perhaps interesting and important and that’s where it stops, we don’t attribute any other value to it and that’s because the very notion of beauty has been eroded in post modernism to a sentimental subjective idiosyncratic warm fuzzy feeling.

Micah: If I were an artist today, and I know they’re out there, artists who want to achieve and paint in a way that would have the same sacral as you used, the same deeper feeling that comes across in these works. What would your advice be to that artist?

Herman: Repent and cleanse yourself.

Micah: That reminds me there used to be in the middle ages a prayer for the icon maker and the icon maker was supposed to say a prayer before he picked up his tools, he was supposed to pay his debts, forgive his enemies, make sure that he was in perfect, basically he repented and was in complete order before he could receive inspiration but here’s a question that I have. In your book, you talk about there was a certain decadence by Rubens who I love by the way, and I’m sure that you love him too on an artistic level and Catholicism had kind of reached an apogee of decadence that was the antithesis you believe of what inspired art needed to be and then you championed Caravaggio and boy there’s a guy who needed repentance. He was in to prostitutes, he was into fighting, he was in to all kinds of problems.

Herman: Yes, he killed somebody.

Micah: Yeah, he killed somebody in the process of a fight and he was on the run and I think he died of a venereal disease after fleeing Rome because of it and the question then is, do you believe that these artists, that it is as simple as being devoted or can great art be created by evil people?

Herman: Now remember, Caravaggio is used for a special case.

Micah: Okay.

Herman: For his tenebrism, he brought a technique to the form.

Micah: Right, and you do in the book do that and I’m glad you clarify that.

Herman: Yes, I don’t celebrate him as an example of a righteous living person. Sacral art can only be produced through a process of sanctification.

Micah: So, you would say that he has a useful technique but you feel like his rapscallion nature would somehow come across in that art and it does for you.

Herman: Yes, he made his impact because of the technique, this dramatic technique of tenebrism, chiaroscuro and his use of everyday figures. The people that he painted, the subjects that he used in his paintings for models, for the apostles, for Christ and so on were people of his own experience from everyday workaday experience and that’s what made his work powerful. I’m not saying that he himself produced art that was, we don’t use Caravaggio’s paintings in our liturgy, in our canon of approved works.

Micah: Do you feel like that’s part of it?

Herman: I think so. It doesn’t come through in his work in the way that it comes through in Carl Bloch and Heinrich Hofmann.

Micah: So, rule one is be a good person, repent.

Herman: Yes, be a good person.

Micah: That makes me wonder to your second point, the first point you talk about and how the use of art and you don’t put it exactly in those terms, but the use of art is you say, it invites us to think about a particular truth and or place, second it can reveal new truths, it can challenge your ways of thinking and reveal new ideas. It’s almost an aid to revolution and this would seem perfectly harmonious with the idea that the person making it then.

Herman: Yes, remember that art work, particularly narrative art work which is what we’re talking about his relies on the suspension of disbelief. When you look at a painting you’re actually looking at a piece of canvas that has paint splotched over it. It’s the suspension of disbelief that allows your mind to reconcile those blotches of paint into a recognizable image to start with, and then when you see that image you apprehend it in a manner that either confronts you negatively or positively and you must decide whether you accept what the image is telling you or not. If you are of the mind that is teachable, humble, open and believing, you will accept the attitude in which the artist painted that image, if the artist is of the same disposition.

Micah: So, for you this work of art is, it reminds me of this notion in the eastern orthodox church when it comes to icons, for the longest time they didn’t claim that the pieces were made by an artist, they claim that they just appeared and they were kept in spaces and covered when they weren’t in use because they were seen as literal windows to heaven. I don’t know if we would consider Carl Bloch a window to heaven but you’re almost using similar terminology, this idea that Bloch, he was worthy of insight.

Herman: Yes, spiritually inclined.

Micah: And spiritually inclined and you have to meet him on that level, am I right? You have to meet him on that level and if you do there will be a magical meeting of these places where you’ll have a spiritual insight from it.

Herman: Exactly.

Micah: That transcends the time and culture between the two of you, in a way. Is that something that you witnessed doing these exhibitions?

Herman: Oh, definitely so.

Micah: How did people react when they were face to face with these works?

Herman: Some very poignant moments that I’ve captured just a couple of them in my book. In one case, we used volunteer docents as guides in the galleries to help people through the exhibition, direct them from one gallery to the other and they encountered people in the most poignant and interesting situations. One volunteer came across a man who was weeping in front of the painting of Christ being accused with the crown of thorns on his head and a man spitting in his face and there’s a drop of blood falling down the Savior’s forehead and the man is standing there and he’s weeping and the woman comes up to him, the volunteer lady comes up him and asks if she can help him and he just looks at her and he says, “He did this for me”. That was a moment of realization where the reality of that message impinged upon one man’s heart to the extent that he was probably brought to a moment of conversion in his life. We’ve had Chinese tourists, a tour bus arrived at that exhibition and on one occasion one of the members of that tour group came up to one of the volunteers and inquired “who is this man, Jesus?” You know they were touched, they don’t know the doctrine, this must be on Tuesday, they were on a Utah tour and they came into the BYU museum of art and this was on exhibition, they don’t know anything about Christianity and they encountered these painting to the extent that they now want to know who is this man called Jesus. On other occasions, you see touching moments of shared testimony when a grandfather shows a painting of Hofmann’s Garden of Gethsemane, Christ being strengthen by the angel to his granddaughter.

Micah: A work borrowed from the Riverside Church in New York.

Herman: Yes, and there’s a poignant moment when he looks down at her and she looks up at him and they share the immediacy of that painting. That is touching and goes beyond, and it’s non-discursive, it isn’t something that you can put in writing, it’s a moment that touches the art conveyed through the instrumentality of an inert painting of pigment on canvas and that’s the magic of this. I’m not saying that any of Carl Bloch’s paintings are being considered as icons or that modern Latter-day Saint artists should paint people revere for their sacral value, notwithstanding the fact that some of them do choose to frame them in tabernacle frames. 

Micah: It is interesting, I’ve noticed that it’s a trend that seems to be going on.

Herman: It is a cultural trend.

Micah: Which seems to be a reference to when they were made for homes or personal chapels.

Herman: Yes, personal chapels.

Micah: It was a representation of the church itself.

Herman: But then many LDS homes are built as personal chapels. 

Micah: Wow, that’s an interesting insight. We’re running up close against the end of our conversation and I feel like we need to have a follow up. I have so many things that I’d like to talk about and you’re such a rich resource but I want to end with the question that we’re asking everyone and that’s 50 years ago this year President Spencer W. Kimball said that we had the potential to have a Mormon Michelangelo, which in so many words is somebody who would be able to express our greatest values in art. 

Herman: Yes.

Micah: And the question that we’re asking everyone, number one do you think we’ve been able to do that as members of the church?

Herman: We’re not there yet.

Micah: And if we’re not there yet, where are we in the process do you think and what role does Carl Bloch play in getting us there?

Herman: As a mile marker, he’s showing us the direction. I think to the extent that his work is now so dated really, these are old works and yet they still carry so much physiological and spiritual content, they point us in that direction and we still have to find the artists who can carry that baton forward, that’s how I feel.

Micah: Thank you so much Dr. Du Toit for being with us.

Herman: It’s been a pleasure.

Micah: It really has been and I feel like we could do 2 or 3 more. We didn’t do justice to all of the ideas that we shared here, but it’s a beginning. Let’s agree to that, it’s a beginning to more conversations.

Herman: Thank you so much for having me.

Micah: It’s a pleasure, we’d like to thank Dr. Du Toit for joining us for this episode of Mormon Visual Culture presented by the Zion Art Society. You can see the works that we discussed here on our website zionartsociety.org under the podcast tab, along with information about Dr. Du Toit’s book Masters of Light, Coming unto Christ through Inspired Devotional Art, I recommend you read it. For more interviews with artists, collectors and scholars subscribe to Mormon Visual Culture on iTunes. I’m Micah Christensen, thank you for listening.

Author and Scholar Richard Bushman joins us with Glen Nelson, founder of the Mormon Artists Group to discuss their upcoming Mormon Arts Center Festival. They also discuss a work chosen from the Church History Museum Collection by Daniel Everett, a photographer who captured an abstract image of the Provo City Center Temple. 

Daniel Everett (Utah, 1983) Untitled (2014) inkjet print. 42 x 34 in. Church History Museum, Salt Lake City.

The Mormon Arts Center Festival will run from June 29-July 1 in New York. Click the image to visit their website to buy tickets, see the schedule of events, and get updates from the Mormon Arts Center.

Micah Christensen: Welcome to Mormon Visual Culture, a podcast presented by theZion Art Society and hosted by me, Micah Christiansen. This year, we’ll celebrate the 50th anniversary of Spencer W Kimball’s landmark talk, the Gospel Vision of the Arts through discussions with prominent artists, collectors and scholars about the artwork that has inspired them and shaped LDS culture. Doctor Richard Bushman is the Gouverneur Morris Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University, where distinguished himself as a scholar of American history. He is the author of the book, Joseph Smith - Rough Stone Rolling, among others and is 1 of 3 editors of the Joseph Smith papers project. He is joined today by Glen Nelson, a poet, librettist, publisher, writer and a ghost writer of several New York Times non fiction best sellers. Nelson is also the founder of the Mormon Artists Group. Together, Richard Bushman and Glen Nelson are the founders and organizers of the Mormon Arts Center Festival, which will be held in New York this summer and they are joining us via Skype from New York City. Well, as is our tradition with this podcast, we start off talking about a work of art by an LDS fine artist and you chose a work by the Photographer Daniel Everett. It is Untitled 2014 and it is located in the church history museum collection. Can you describe the work for us? Either one of you.

Glen Nelson: Okay. Richard’s nodding at me, so I get the nod on this one. So, it’s a manipulated image to start with. It’s the temple in Provo when it was under construction and wrapped in construction materials, so it’s covered with sort of a Mylar fabric that’s a blue and white stripes. When I say it’s manipulated though, it has a series of Photoshop manipulations to it, so it’s kind of a built up image. It looks like a minimalist painting from a distance and then when you get closer, you realize it has set backs where the eves of the temple appear and other construction materials, like a fence to keep things from falling onto the workers and so forth. It’s fabulously disorienting in a way, isn’t it? It’s one of those things that, when you look at it, it begs you to look and keep examining to find out exactly what you’re looking at, at first. In playing a game with people, we show this to them and ask them what they think it is. We don’t tell them the subject matter and a few people have figured it out just by looking at it. There are some clues to it. On the top left corner, there are these turrets of the temple, if you’re familiar with the building, they kind of become pronounced, even if they’re covered this way. Some people have had an ah hah moment when they figure it out.

Micah: So, when you say you’ve shown it to people, in what context?

Richard Bushman: Well, we’ve been talking to various groups that are interested in knowing more about the center and to illustrate what we’re up to. We use this as an example of the kind of art that artists are doing. That’s a departure from the usual devotional art of scriptural scenes or Mormons at worship. Instead, it approaches church materials from a bleak angle. We tossed this out to them and had them guess what’s going on and then asked them, is this Mormon art or not?

Micah: What are the kinds of answers you get?

Richard: They fumble around a little bit, but I think there’s kind of a yes, probably. I think they’re willing to go along with it.

Glen: There’s no question that it is different than the kind of thing that when Mormons are asked to identify Mormon artwork. I think that we probably all agree that we’re used to seeing representational art of gospel narratives. Those kinds of scenes. To show them this kind of art to put it in the same category would be, for some, a little bit of a mindset change, but probably a welcome one, right? It is the kind of thing that you find people are curious and positive about when you have a conversation about it.

Richard: You know, I would be curious to know what the docents of the Church History Museum have to say about this. This work has been hanging for about 2 years across the street from Temple Square, in the museum there and it’s on the 2nd floor with a bunch of other contemporary artworks. My guess is that people read the panel to describe it and find themselves being more attracted to it than they thought they might be.

Glen: Yeah. I would imagine and it’s probably part of the artist’s game. It’s playing into the idea that it’s, and Daniel Everett’s work in general, as far as I’m familiar with it, is one of playing on people’s curiosity. He photographs pieces. He makes some things that are familiar, somewhat abstracted. He’ll give a title, like Untitled that doesn’t give a great deal more information, but then the description leads to more of a context and that seems like a journey for the viewer. It would be, you look at this scene, which is beautifully composed, which has a lot of interesting things to look at, but is somewhat abstracted and then you look at the title. That’s not necessarily helpful and it makes you look even closer, but then you look at the description and I show this to 5 or 6 people as we were preparing for this interview today. For every one of them, they went through that journey. When they learned that it was the Provo City Center Temple, their feeling was one of absolute delight, like they had been rewarded for all of the work they had done leading up to it.

Micah: I agree with that because you can picture a photograph of the temple with aspires and the sunset behind it and people would look at that and say, isn’t that beautiful or pretty? But what you have here is you’re going at the temple from a strange angle, but you still end up saying it’s gorgeous. He’s shown us beauty where we wouldn’t expect to find beauty. It’s sort of a happy moment to see that beautiful things can be discovered in new ways. 

Micah: Daniel Everett. Do either of you know him personally or have had any experiences with him?

Richard: Yeah, I do.

Micah: Can you tell us a little bit about him?

Glen: Well, I mean, one of the reasons I was interested in choosing this piece for our discussion today is I own a few of his works and he’s part of an important group in Mormon art history really. He’s part of the first generation of students who have gone en mass to grad school in art. So, he and his brother Peter both teach at Brigham Young University. Daniel is an Associate Professor there and they’re the first ones to both participate themselves as students in grad school and then encourage an entire new generation of young Mormon artists to aspire to that kind of career. I think the consequence of that is these younger Mormon artists are much more engaged in what’s going on in contemporary art with their peers, nationally and internationally, than they had been before. That’s one of the reasons that I sort of was drawn to him just sort of from a historical point of view, but his work is just all over the place. He does things with photography. He’s involved with video games and installation. He’s mostly, to my mind, kind of a conceptual artist really. They all have an elegance to them and a formal presence to them, but what they really are inviting the viewer to do is puzzle it out. Try to figure out why someone is reacting to a work in a way that’s a part of their own device.

Micah: I familiarized myself with his work a little bit in past contests that I had been involved, in either organizing or judging and I learned that he had studied at BYU initially and then as you say, initially gone to graduate school at the University of Chicago. But it was in between those 2 periods that he became very close with the very celebrated photographer, Edward Burtynsky, who himself, has kind of taken on the mantle of, I don’t know if it’s fair to say Ansel Adams. Burtynsky says Ansel Adams and several other artists who were known for doing large landscapes. I kind of wonder about how that connection happened. Burtynsky isn’t necessarily, I don’t know if he has any connection to the Mormon community. I haven’t been able to find anything that would, but it seems like some of the artists that are graduating from BYU, Jethro Gillespie would be another example of this, have gone on to form relationships with prominent artists, photographers, outside of, and I would put photographers and artists in the same group. They’ve put themselves in lead with artists who aren’t associated with the LDS community. I don’t know how he made that connection, but it’s notable. It’s very notable. 

Richard: Well, you know Daniel is exhibited all over the place.

Micah: Right.

Richard: He’s had group shows and one person shows throughout Europe and in the US as well and is published by some very powerful players in the photography world. He’s not an unknown entity to other people. I just don’t know if he’s that well known to us yet.

Micah: Well this touches on a topic that I’ve seen you write about Glen. You recently wrote an article for the site, By Common Consent, and you said that many Mormons don’t know who their own greatest artists are. You compared it to a student at a historically black college not knowing who Langston Hughes or Ella Fitzgerald were. Do you think that that’s true of Daniel Everett in particular and how does that show up in general?

Richard: Well, I can’t speak to Daniel’s, you know, I haven’t done a poll to see how well he’s known, although the Church History Museum owns multiple works by him. I would say, generally speaking, you could go to any church house in the world and ask anybody sitting next to you who their list of artists would be and I don’t think there would be a lot of overlap. I think we all know people, but the question is we’re not really communicating between ourselves who it is that we know and admire.

Micah: So, who are some of the Langston Hughes and the Ella Fitzgerald and the unknown artists that you think that we should know as a community even better?

Richard: Well, I think I won’t tell you what I think on that. There are people that probably should form a baseline of, if we want to call in Mormon arts literacy and I think those would include people who are well known and loved, but in addition to those, there are people that others outside of the church know in the arts. For example, if you were to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Museum of Modern Art and ask them, who are the Mormon artists in your collections? They would list, first of all, the early Mormon photographers, like C R Savage and others. So for them really, photography is kind of Ground Zero for art scholarship. But with all of us, I think we have relationships with individuals that have not been as effective in sharing them with others.

Micah: Well, this gets a little bit to the, not just a little bit, but it goes directly to the Mormon Arts Center Festival that you will be hosting this summer in New York. It runs from June 29th to July first. What is the website where people can go to find out more information about this, first of all?

Richard: It’s simply mormonartscenter.org. That will give you all the information about the events that are being sponsored. Some of the events require tickets, so you can buy tickets and some things about the purpose of the arts center. It’s really a way to sort of get the whole picture in one package. 

Micah: Terrific. Let’s talk about, well tell us about the Art Festival. Either one of you.

Richard: Well, we think of the Arts Festival as sort of the kickoff event for what we hope will be a permanent arts center that will last and continue to sponsor events into the future, but the aim is to bring together Mormon artists, Mormon scholars, Mormon patrons and people who are influential in the Mormon community to talk. We think that one of our main aims is to foster conversation, so that art is something that we can work into our ways of thinking. We have a symposium that’s going to go all day, bring together art historians and philosophers. Historians, generally. Then we want to display art, so we have this terrific exhibit that Laura Hurtado is sponsoring and all the artists were paid for all the artists to come, hoping they will meet patrons and get questions asked. Then we go on with singing and a concert, so it’s a variety of things representing the range of art, especially art as it is being produced now. Hoping that this will be a starting point for lots of talk. 

Micah: If I were to go to the festival, it sounds like there is various aspects of it. There’s one, is the symposium, which is somewhat scholarly. Would that be accurate?

Richard: Yes. We tried to get some very good scholars there and we’re giving them President Kimball’s famous declaration from 50 years ago and asking them to meditate on that and ask where we’ve gone.

Micah: Who are some of the figures that will be speaking and presenting in the symposium section of the festival?

Richard: Well, Glen Nelson leads the list. He knows more about Mormon art than anyone. We also have Michael Hicks, Eric Samuelson, and John Durham Peters, recently moved to Yale. We have Jana Reese and Christine Haglan. It’s a range of people who have done various things in various parts of Mormon history and philosophy. Adam Miller will be there. It’s quite a range.

Micah: This, as you mentioned, is the year that is the 50th anniversary of the Gospel Vision of the Arts originally given in 1967 by Spencer W Kimball. Is that the theme of the symposium? People’s discussion of the 50th anniversary?

Richard: Yes. We propose that is sort of the thematic starting point, but of course when you get together 11 scholars with their own points of view, they’re going to go all over the lot. It’s not narrowly focused on measuring exactly how far we’ve come or what we have to do.

Micah: That’s part of the delight of these events, isn’t it? That you give people a theme and then they go with it in directions you may have not been able to anticipate, right?

Richard: Exactly right. One of the speakers is Campbell Gray, who is the curator of the University of Queensland Museum and the title of his talk is, “Is it Possible?”

Micah: Is it possible?

Richard: Is it possible.

Micah: Meaning?

Richard: Well, yes. What does it mean?

Micah: Well, we’ll find out, I guess. Those of us who go to the festival. I guess we’ll find out. Let me ask about what your goals are. Well, before I ask about goals, who are the kinds of people, in addition to those presenting and the artists being shown, who do you hope will come?

Glen: Well, attendance is one metric, but we’re also concerned generally with participation. I don’t want to underestimate the value of having all of these people in the room. I think it’s going to be pretty exciting, that part of it. There are 23 visual artists who are participating in the exhibition and then 23 writers wrote works, essays and poems and other things based on those works for a catalog. That takes us almost up to 50. Then we have symposium speakers and other presenters. We have musicians and curators of concerts. Craig Jessup from Utah State is leading a giant sing in of contemporary choral work. The kind of people we imagine will attend are just sort of the kind of people we imagine to be interesting and interested in Mormon arts, but the way that people can participate extends beyond those who are just in attendance. We’re doing, everything will be taped and put on YouTube and other social media platforms. There will be some live, Facebook live programming with some sort of curated content and live responses as we go along. Even someone who isn’t going to be in New York at the end of June will still be able to really get a piece of this and I also think can really feel included and be able to give us feedback during and after the festival.

Micah: I’m fascinated with this idea and we’ve had conversations before about this Glen, about the idea of collaborations between people working in different media. Artists and writers, musicians, composers, all being thrown together in the same place and things that come of that. It’s almost as if it’s a return to what we’d call 19th or early 20th century cafe society where the cafe Greco in Italy or the Four Cats in Barcelona where you’ve got groups of artists and writers who are coming together and sparks are flying. Is that one of the things that your goal is to do? And if so, how do you hope that they’ll interact? How are you creating an environment where they will?

Richard: I had an email just last night from someone who I haven’t met before. He’s a poet and also a historian who works for the Church History Department and he was wondering if he could do some sort of satellite event during the festival, maybe during a lunch hour where people come and just read recent works. I said, go for it and so, there’s a little park in front of Riverside Church and I think that’s where it will happen. That’s the kind of thing that I imagine can happen organically. But to your comment, I’m deeply influenced by that turn of the century excitement, particularly in Paris where you had the event, the painters and musicians and dancers all coming together and forming these new works. The most frequent comment I hear from Mormon artists around the country and abroad as well is how isolated they feel. I’m also getting these from people who live in Utah. They’re working at a high level, but they just don’t really feel like other people around them are aware of their work and likewise, they’re not aware of other people. As I am sometimes able to introduce, let’s say, a composer to a painter or to a writer, I find that they really want to form attachments and start working on projects together. For me, that’s a pretty exciting thing.

Micah: This then, for me, begs a question. If your goal is connectivity with all of these artists in disparate locations, if that’s part of your goal, then why New York? It’s not a question that is skeptical of New York. Maybe New York is the greatest place to do this, but walk us through why you chose to hold the festival in New York?

Richard: Well, I think a lot of good things could happen in lots of places, Salt Lake included. Provo, Phoenix, and so on. Actually our hope eventually is to be able to sponsor events around the country or around the world. Maybe in Buenos Aires or London, but we all know the magnetic pull of New York City. If you tell a violinist, we would like you to perform in Carnegie Hall, it has kind of a magnetic appeal that a performance be where you couldn’t quite have. Of course, there’s a reason for that because you’re on a world stage. What we’re hoping is that Mormon artists even more will blend with world art trends and think of themselves as contributing to a larger world and not just doing for Mormons. I think Mormon artists already do that. We want to enhance that feeling by putting things here. We don’t kid ourselves that critics from the New York Times are going to turn up to this event and write a column on it, but in time, they will. If we do better and better work, we’ll be like the Jewish Museum, whose shows are of the highest quality and rank with the best things that are being done anywhere. This is a first start, I think, in opening a conversation not only among Mormon artists, but with artists of all kinds, from all cultures.

Micah: Is the Jewish Museum in New York a kind of model that you’re looking at as part of what you hope to create in the long term?

Richard: Actually, it is. We have formed an advisory board and we’re meeting with a former chairman of the board at the Jewish Museum for him to tell the story of how the Jewish Museum got started and how it’s, the problems it has met and the things that it has been able to accomplish. We see that and the Harlem museums and the Hispanic museums, all the places where there’s a culture that is producing art are sort of models of the kind of art or the sort of thing we’d like to do for Mormon culture.

Micah: I imagine that if you’re creating a Spanish, a Jewish museum and you’re in the beginning stages, the people who are the principle audience are those who are in your community, so the Jewish Museum’s greatest early donors and participants and audience were all probably Jewish. Then eventually, as it became known as a world class venue, and I’ve been to performances at the Jewish Museum, etcetera in New York. It reached out more audiences than just the Jewish audience that was in New York that were interested in it. In your thinking of the long term of the Mormon Arts Center in New York that you’re thinking of, is that the trajectory you see? Are you looking just at a Mormon audience in the beginning? Are you hoping to gather more than just a Mormon audience?

Richard: Well, I think your trajectory of how you described who goes to a museum like the Jewish Museum is accurate, but I’ve noticed an additional thing that maybe suggests what might happen with the Mormon Arts Center. I was recently discussing with theChief Curator how he put shows together. What I noticed when I was in the space is although it was true that a lot of people outside of Hispanic culture were in the place, it still had a powerful force as an identity maker. As school children went in and saw exhibits, they were able to say this artwork in a New York museum of high quality speaks directly to me and it comes from my culture and therefore, I’m connected to greatness. I understand in Mormon culture how we want to position ourselves in the eyes of others, but I am quite aware myself and how my kids reacted growing up with Mormon artworks in their home and how they become more strongly connected to belief, even, by the way these artworks have shifted their identity and made them more powerful. 

Micah: Your example is interesting because it’s within a neighborhood that identifies with the community and children are going there and seeing artists that come from their community and it is part of the history of that particular community. If you had a Mormon Art Center set up and part of that influence you’re seeking is like the one on your children, I don’t know how many Mormons there are in New York. I guess, are you also counting those who are traveling from, is this something you would want states you want to send people to? There would be tourism for Mormons? I mean, just like anyone else, Mormons travel to New York in huge numbers on a regular basis. Are you planning on this gathering both the locals and the internationals? Are you going to have a huge scope of people you want to have visit?

Glen: Well, I’m going to say something different than what you just described. This is an interesting example because although it resides in Spanish Harlem, they’re very focused on different Hispanic communities all over the world. The museum itself is just sort of a gathering place for all of them, but it’s not really a local museum in one way. One of the things that Richard has been telling me from the very beginning of this endeavor is the importance of scholarship itself and how each of the things we do has to have a scholarship component. It elevates it, so it’s not just putting on a show, putting on a festival, making an exhibition happen, but gathering people together who can write about it, advocate for it, make a case for it and discriminate it to people more widely. I guess when we say we’re going to do a festival when we were inviting people to participate, one of the things you have to remember is there are 4 publications that kind of come out of this festival, just these 3 days. Those will have a life and we imagine that one of the ways that we communicate with other people is through this kind of scholarship. 

Micah: Fascinating. So, you’re going to, an integral part of this is not just the physical experience of being at the festival or eventually at the center that’s created, but you will, in a way, be a publication house that will be disseminating information and scholarship about what you’re doing, so it goes well beyond the physical borders of the actual events in space.

Richard: Well, that’s very much the case. What we would like is to produce materials that eventually could be used to instruct and inform widely the strength of Mormon artistic traditions. Right now, I don’t know that any of the Mormon studies Chairs programs around the country are offering courses on Mormon art. One of the reasons it’s difficult is that there isn’t quite enough literature to, we haven’t really digested what is our great artistic tradition and where do we stand? I mean, we’re on our way, but we’ve got a long ways to go and we hope we can contribute to the materials that will allow us to teach maybe even our churches something about the strength of our artistic tradition.

Micah: Something that Glen wrote about Richard in his article, By Common Consent, is he quoted you in saying that Mormon art history or Mormon art, I hope you can correct me if I’m wrong, is where Mormon history was 50 years ago. There’s a long way to go. Could you say more about that? first of all, did I get that right?

Richard: Yeah, you got it right the way you were saying it, but it can be misleading. Mormon history 50 years ago, right after World War 2, was really at a very primitive state in that we had only had 6 PhD’s in history up to World War 2 and the work we did, for the most part, the history that was written for Mormons about their own history that had no acceptance in the academic world. It was thought to be biased. It was thought to be immature, unsophisticated. But then after World War 2, people started flowing into graduate schools. I was one of them. Leonard Arrington was another, and many others. Now there are hundreds of Mormon PhD’s and they’re producing work of the highest order that is accepted by scholars as good as anything that’s done on Mormon history. So, in a way, Mormons have reclaimed their own history. We now possess it. We own it. Mormon artists are much more sophisticated now. They’re working at a very high level, but they don’t quite have the recognition that they deserve in the larger art world, so we sort of want to give them an identity and give them a chance to know one another so that Mormons will be known for their art, not just for their football team or their families or what have you, but the full richness would be accessible. 

Micah: It sounds like there are 2 parts to this, at least. I mean, I’m probably being reductive, but it’s not just talking about the artists who are producing today and trumpeting and celebrating their work. You’re also talking about reaching back in time and creating, filling out scholarship on the tradition of LDS art. Is that accurate?

Richard: It’s absolutely accurate. As Glen says, he wants kids to grow up realizing that we just didn’t have pioneers who pulled hand carts across the plains, but we had artists and thinkers and people of real sensibilities who were thinking about and recording this in their art. We have another filler. We want to fill out our tradition. Fill the many dimensions of it.

Micah: I could think off the top of my head, maybe. It’s interesting, maybe a half dozen people around World War 2 who had PhDs in our history and I could probably think of about a dozen art historians who are LDS working at the moment and some of them have written quite important books about the history of LDS art. Linda Gibbs, who is a former curator of the Church Museum of History and Art. Vern Swanson, who has written a number of publications. Do you plan on, maybe not them in particular. Those are just who come to my mind, but do you plan on reaching out to that community and inviting them to be a part of what you’re doing? 

Glen: Yeah, actually Linda has already been chatting with us. I mean, there are, it’s sort of a different way of thinking about it, but there are 2 groups that are interested in and we’re engaging. One of them are the scholar people. As you mentioned, there are a number of people who are, let’s say PhDs in musicology or art history, but there’s another side of it, which are almost 100 PhDs in music composition. Right? In visual art, it’s not too common that you have a practicing painter who becomes a PhD. That’s a different kind of metric for them, but really I think what we need to do is engage both of these communities and right now, there’s sort of, if you were to put all of the books on Mormon visual art on a book shelf, you wouldn’t need a very big book shelf. There are really not all that many relative to other fields. We still have a long way to go and I think one of the most exciting parts about this enterprise is If you consider 1830 to the present globally, all of the different disciplines in the arts, right? Painting and poetry and sculpture, choreography and design, architecture, etcetera, we could have hundreds and hundreds of volumes in lots of different ways. That’s one of the things that we are really eager to begin and we are taking a systematic viewpoint, a very ambitious one and so, although the festival is the kickoff point for this, really our focus is going to be how we put some of these ideas, these big picture ideas into practice.

Micah: One of the things that I’ve done with my line of questioning here is I’ve focused almost exclusively on the visual arts, but I should backtrack a little bit and just confirm that you are speaking, like you just said, much more broadly. This festival and the arts center is not just visual arts. It’s also music. You could say more about that. What is your overall, how are you defining the kind of participation and participants that you’re getting?

Richard: The only distinction we’re making really is, we’re drawing a line between creative artists and performing artists. There’s so much work to be done with creative artists, painters and sculptors, composers in all fields, right? From rock music to people who were creating video games to commercial people to fine art composers to folk music, etcetera. All the disciplines. There’s so much work to be done in each of these areas that we feel like it’s more than a lifetime’s worth. We’re going to leave the work of describing what a Mormon actor is or what a Mormon singer is to other people and focus on creative arts, but as far as who was involved with that, one definition that probably should be addressed is, what is Mormon art itself? Who qualifies with this and again, we’re taking a very broad view, but if you self identify as Mormon, then be a part of the conversation. Our feeling is that we really can’t tell our full story unless we know all the details that would make up the story.

Micah: A phrase that both of you have been using throughout the discussion has been, there’s so much work to be done. There’s so much to be done, which goes to… anxiety might be the wrong word. I’m thinking of it more in a scholarly term of the idea of, there’s something that needs to be done. There’s a work that you feel hasn’t been done. You feel an urgency about it. Could you talk more about, what is it that you feel like is not being done and that you’re excited to do that you feel like is central to this idea? How does that work?

Richard: Well, let me give you an example. We’ve been planning a program for 2018 and at the top of the list is the creation of an archive of Mormon music. We’re doing that because Glen has been working on this for a number of years, just kind of on his own, collecting information on some 1,600 Latter Day Saint composers and collecting the basic information. Biographical, where they were born, and so forth. Information on their works, where they’re premiered, when they were performed, so that now it is possible using this archive that he already has in place. If he wants to know what Mormons have written symphonies or those that have written piano concertos or string quartettes, he can bring that information up. We’re getting very close to that. Our aim is to sort of work out a model of where we’re as comprehensive as possible in collecting this information. The advantage of this model nowadays, first of all that it can be done online, so that it’s immediately accessible and in a way, it is self generating. Once it is known that there is an archive of Mormon compositions, everyone who hears about it will want to know, am I part of that archive.

Micah: Right. They’ll want to know, is my name on the list?

Richard: Is my name on the list? If it isn’t on the list, they can get in touch with us and provide us the information. We think it will just sort of fill itself out simply because people want themselves or their grandfather or someone they know who composes part of that collection.

Glen: If I could chime in. In practice, how this works is the in String Quartet is coming to the festival and they wanted to perform a program exclusively by Mormon composers, which is something they’ve never done before. I was able, in about 3 minutes, to just type into this database of mine, string quartettes and up came 144 entries. I sent that off to them and they said, we had no idea that there was so much work. That’s one example of how this kind of scholarship can be put into practice really quickly. The 2nd 1 is, let’s say, going back to identity a little bit, if you’re a Spanish speaking member of the church and 1 5th of the entire church population is, it might become apparent to you after a little while that there are no LDS hymns that are written by Spanish composers and haven’t ever been. What would happen if members who are Spanish speaking became aware of the half dozen or so living Spanish composers of note, I think that would make them feel better, wouldn’t it? I mean it would make them feel more part of the conversation. I think when we say what our aims are regarding broadening the cannon, I think eventually it trickles down to every member is important and if they have some sort of touch stone to the arts, that connection, it can only be stronger for them.

Micah: You know what? As you’re talking, one of the things that occurs to me is for the longest time, the church has had the policy in its sponsorship of artists and of patronizing artworks that artists remain somewhat anonymous from their works. There are good reasons for that that I completely understand. We wouldn’t necessarily want to have someone get a work by the church and use that to promote themselves. I know artists are very sensitive to that. But the consequence for that and I think we all know artists who have had that experience, where they have licensed and worked with the church. They are no longer able to necessarily promote that. The consequences that, there’s an anonymizing of artists that’s gone on for several decades within the church. What I hear that you are doing and what’s exciting about it is that you are giving names to these artists. You’re making people aware of them and it doesn’t compromise the church’s overall goal, which is I imagine to use the arts strictly for devotional purpose, right? Here, you’re able to create a place that allows people to find out more about who is similar to them, who has created around them, what they’re creating, where to see it, and I don’t know if that’s necessarily the church’s job. Other people need to fill that in. That’s just me thinking out loud I guess. It sounds like that’s what you’re doing. That’s exciting to me.

Richard: Well, we’re not really reformers. I mean, that’s not really our purpose to sort of imagine how the church could do things differently than it is.

Micah: I’m not suggesting that they should, necessarily. No. 

Richard: Right. But we do feel like this kind of information could be quite a powerful resource to others, including the church in its operations. That’s sort of been our focus.

Micah: Well, we’re close to the end of our time together. We’ve been asking all of our guests a final question and I guess, I’ll ask it to both of you and either one of you can respond or both of you can. 50 years ago, as you mentioned, Spencer W Kimball said that we have the potential for a Mormon Michelangelo, which he explained as being someone who, through the arts, can express our highest values as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. 2 Questions about that. first, do you think we’ve reached that potential? Do we have people expressing our highest values in art at a high level right now?

Richard: I think the people who are doing the art have to, in effect, bare testimony, but in a very authentic way. They don’t use standard language. They may not think of it as a testimony, but artists really have to consult their inner voices in order to produce good art. It’s not a mechanical process. There’s this painter that we’ve discovered in Africa who paints his incredibly compelling huge abstractions and he says, this is God. I think that we have to recognize that these people are, in a way, speaking for us.

Micah: Let me ask you Glen, this question. It seems like part of what is fascinating to me and we’ve asked other people this question of, have we achieved Spencer W Kimball’s vision and reached that potential? Often, people’s immediate answer is no. It seems like the question you’re answering with the Mormon Arts Festival is different. The question you’re answering isn’t, how do we get better art? It’s not that question. It’s, how do we let people know about the great things that are happening? Is that accurate?

Glen: Yeah. I mean, when I was a grad student at NYU and the whole anxiety of modernism was just everywhere in every conversation. Was it new enough? Was it a breakthrough work? If not, oh no. So, we judged ourselves quite a bit on the past. What I found over time was, and you know this was also in the era of Derrida and deconstruction. What I found was all of that anxiety was forcing people to not create anything. I think that there’s some negative consequences of comments looking for the next masterpiece all the time. What I’m finding as I talk with these artists is, they want to communicate. That’s what they want to do. They want to do their best work. That’s really what they want to do. Of the 23 visual artists who work here, I had never even heard of about a 3rd of them before a couple of months ago. You know, the more that I really look and look at their works, what I’m finding is that each one has such an individual voice. I think that that’s something that is easy to lose when you have an institution like a church commissioning works. In a way, it’s almost like you don’t want an individual voice. You want a branded generalized voice. This is an exciting moment in time, I think for all of us in the church to realize what Mormon means is quite broad. You have people who are fully participating, like we are, and then other people who haven’t been inside a church house for years and years, who still consider themselves fully Mormon. Then you have other people whose work draws from their Mormon history, but who don’t consider that part of their belief system at all anymore. There’s a very large range of what, even the word Mormon means, as an adjective for Mormon art. I don’t think it’s our place to really close ranks on a firm definition. I think now is the time to spread our arms a little wide and see what’s going on and then later kind of process that and see where we’ve been.

Micah: Right. Well, gentlemen, I can’t thank you enough for joining us today and I’m also very excited about the festival and I will be there myself. I plan on being there for that weekend. Thank you so much for coming.

Richard: Enjoyed it very much Micah. Thanks for having us.

Glen: Thank you.

Micah: I’d like to thank Richard Bushman and Glen Nelson for joining us for this episode of Mormon visual culture, represented by the Zion Art Society. You can see the work we discussed by Daniel Everett on our website, zionartsociety.org under the podcast tab, along with information about the Mormon Art Center Festival and links to register and buy tickets. For more interviews with artists, collectors and scholars, subscribe to Mormon Visual Culture on iTunes. I’m Micah Christensen and thank you for listening.