Review: Immediate Present

We were pleased to read a critical review of the Mormon Arts Center publication, Immediate Present, by Laura Allred Hurtado in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. The reviewer was Sarah C. Reed. In 2017, for our first Mormon Arts Center festival, Hurtado brought together a group exhibition of two dozen contemporary Mormon artists. For the exhibition catalog, she paired an equal number of authors who wrote a response of one kind or another for each visual art work. Hurtado wrote an extended essay on Mormon art that introduced the volume. 

As Reed writes, "The art underscores the great variety of styles and media that Mormon artists employ and the responses offer us models of how to engage with this art: sometimes direct interpretations, sometimes parallel musings, sometimes with another piece of art. The result is a wonderful synergy of art and audience and a treasury of performance and pedagogy. The Mormon Arts Center seeks to bring together artists to bring them to an audience; this catalog shows exactly how this is accomplished by putting these Mormon artworks together in one exhibition and one volume and then instructing us with the ways we could react to this art through the diversity of thoughtful reflections. I found the poetry particularly fruitful in showing the creative and productive potential of the enterprise."

Dialogue, Summer 2018, pp. 248-252.