A Personal Review of Materializing Mormonism—It's Worth It, and Not Just for the Air Conditioning

by Adam C Anderson

Just walking into the Museum’s artificially cool temperature from the 113 degrees (45 C) outside was refreshing. I couldn’t wait to see what the art exhibit did for me. I followed Sara downstairs asking why she was moving past the exhibit, Materializing Mormonism: Trajectories in Latter-day Saint Art. 

“The exhibit starts here.” 

“Oh yeah,” I retorted, “What about the painting I walked past with Brigham Young riding a dinosaur?” (Secrets of the Great Salt Lake, by Kent Christensen)

“OK, that one’s part of the exhibit, but over here is the main room.” 

I generally like Mormon Art. Can I still call it that? Sara and I try to visit the International Art Competition sponsored by the Church History Museum when we’re in Salt Lake. Materializing Mormonism was different. It wasn’t earth-shatteringly different, and it wasn’t good different or bad different. But it was different: smaller and more intimate.

Also, to get to the International Art Competition, I have to travel to Salt Lake. It’s another event on a zero-sum itinerary taking time from or the place of another event. The last time Sara and I went to the Church History Museum to see the art show, we skipped lunch with my parents and siblings. 

This exhibit was much closer to home. We left a little early for our shift at Paz de Cristo where we sometimes help give free meals to people that need them and stopped in at the Mesa Arts Center to see the exhibit. After about thirty minutes, I’d seen the whole exhibit, and we left to help give out meals. But the exhibit stayed with me. 

About an hour later, as I was sitting at a desk typing in the first three letters of people’s first and last names to check them in for dinner, I remembered the first piece I really noticed in Materializing Mormonism, Ryan Moffet’s ceramic sculpture Not Even a Sparrow 2. Moffet’s piece is mostly abstract. Instead of detail, I remembered the sculpture’s evocation of offering, pleading, and the unimaginable ability God has to be aware of and care for fallen birds, for the people coming to eat that evening, for my kids, and for me. It’s the juxtaposition that is really piercing, though. The kneeling human holds the fallen sparrow out to God seeming to say, “if you care for this, why not for me? Where are you?” 

Looking around the cafeteria at all the people waiting to be served their free meal, sweaty and tired, I felt like Moffet’s sculpture: “Where are you, God?” Then I remembered Collin Bradford’s A Burning Hope. Four wind-fanned flaming 8-foot letters—HOPE—in the middle of a lake. It is both a burning hope for tomorrow and a hope perilously close to being extinguished by the surrounding water. Which is where Maddison Tenney’s haunting Wholly Divine, across the room left me with its ceramic plate desperately crying “I believe. I believe. I believe. I believed.” Is that the end of hope? Maybe it’s the refinement of hope. 

One topic I’ve not seen treated anywhere other than LDS Art is Heavenly Mother. Treatments of Her feel like individualist attempts to remember something we all know about but have forgotten. Materializing Mormonism has two Heavenly Mother depictions: Emily Hawkins’s Mother in Heaven Diptych captures the elusive feeling that Mother in Heaven is there but not quite knowable. As I looked at it, I couldn’t help but wonder if that isn’t really how I see Heavenly Father, too. Just because He’s more frequently depicted, do I know Him any better than Hawkins’s vague image of Mother? 

And on the facing wall hangs the visceral Breadth of Life (From the Dust) by J. Kirk Richards. A faceless, powerful, feminine-formed heavenly being supervises the miraculously messy creation of a male figure from the triangle’s apex. This large painting, probably the largest in the exhibit, demanded, and continues to demand, my attention. It depicts so much we know so little about. Even the name keeps me thinking. A cross between Bread of Life and Breath of Life, the image could be a pre-mortal nativity. Is this the creation of Jesus?  

The problem with art exhibitions is that, to enjoy the pieces again, you have to go back. Fortunately, though I recommend going if you at all can, after you’ve gone, or if you can’t go, you can take a virtual tour. However you go, I hope you enjoy it—not just for the free air conditioning.

— July 12, 2024

Gallery images credit: Angela Mason Photography

Adam C Anderson, a graduate of Columbia Law School and BYU, is a commercial litigator in Mesa, Arizona.