Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader with editors Mason Kamana Allred and Amanda Beardsley

September 18, 2024

The publication of Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader is a landmark event, the first comprehensive critical examination of Mormon Art. In this interview, co-editors Mason Kamana Allred and Amanda Beardsley introduce the chapters with insights into the reasons why each is indispensable. Then, the authors of this 664-page book from Oxford University Press submitted questions for the podcast about the making of the book and what lies ahead in art and objects by LDS people. Two-art historic interviews.

Glen Nelson: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Center’s Studio Podcast. I'm your host, Glen Nelson, and today marks a milestone in the Center for Latter-day Saint Art's history. It is the production of a beautiful new volume, Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader, published by Oxford University Press. I'm here today with the 664-page book’s co-editors Amanda Beardsley and Mason Kamana Allred. Hello!

Amanda Beardsley: Hi. Good to see you, Glen.

Mason Kamana Allred: Happy to be here. Glen.

Glen Nelson: Let's do some speedy intros. Amanda Beardsley received her PhD in Art History from Binghamton University in 2019 and is a lecturer in Women's Studies at San Diego State University. She has taught courses and written on the intersection between science and religion, feminist media theory and history, community activism, art history and gender and sound studies. I have no idea what sound studies means, Amanda. What is a sound study?

Amanda Beardsley: It's part of Media Studies at large, right? Media studies looks at the different ways that we communicate through various media, television, radio, etc., and sound studies looks at the way that sound influences the world around us, and the way that our bodies can sometimes consume it as well, and the ways that engineers have tried to engineer it towards our bodies. That's  what I look at specifically within Mormonism. 

Glen Nelson: Well, I thought you were just making up that name. That sounds legitimate. [laughter] Mason Kamana Allred received his PhD in German Literature and Culture with designated emphasis in Film and Media Studies in 2015 from University of California, Berkeley. He teaches courses in cultural theory, political communication, internet and society, cinema and the city, and saints and cinema at BYU-Hawaii. There's no class on surfing, it looks like, in your curriculum, Mason.

Mason Kamana Allred: Not mine. It is taught here, but I don't teach it. Unfortunately.

Glen Nelson: Are you qualified to teach it? 

Mason Kamana Allred: Sure, yeah. There's a few of us faculty that get out there and surf together, but we don't all teach it. There's only one teaching.

Glen Nelson: Welcome, wonderful people. I'll tell you, it's such an honor for me to speak with you today and celebrate this extraordinary accomplishment that was made possible through your tireless work. What are your thoughts with the book officially out now?

Amanda Beardsley: Mason, I'll let you go first.

Mason Kamana Allred: I'm so excited. In fact, in a lot of ways I'm relieved, because there were several moments in this huge project where I was like, oh man, how do we do this? How is this going to work out? What's it going to look like? Is everything going to come together? So honestly, right now, I'm so happy and relieved and super proud of what it became. I'm feeling great. I'm really excited to talk about it, just because I think it is really worth talking about, worth promoting, and I'm excited for people to dive into it.

Amanda Beardsley: I'm feeling really similar. Relief is a huge one. This has been–how long?–a five year project. We started before the pandemic, and it went into the pandemic, and it continued on and on and on. At the same time, it's been a really, really enriching project, one that I've learned so much from. I've loved collaborating with all of the authors in the book, as well as the Latter-day Arts Center. I just am really glad that it's finally going to be out there and that people are going to be able to read all the work that went into it. [They] probably won't read all of it because it's a long book, but be able to glean knowledge from it and use it in their classes, and use it in their lives and just see what we've done. Also, I'm really excited because it's, for me as an Art Historian, one of the first art history books in Mormon Studies. And that's monumental. 

Glen Nelson: It's kind of big. I will say that the two of you, your chapters are going to be read for sure. Let's just say that. With a book that's so big, twenty-two chapters, there's so much content that we could talk about. I think we need some kind of organizing structure in our chat today. So here's my strategy. I'd love to give listeners an overview of what the book is, who's involved, and how it came to be. How does that sound? I think that's probably a good idea. We've been working on it so long, it might take all three of us to piece that story together. Then I have something fun. I've asked the two dozen authors involved to send me a question to ask you for this interview. A few weren't able to send a question, but most did, and some asked multiple questions. In addition to addressing some really interesting thoughts, it will give us the excuse to mention each of them, give a title of their chapter, and perhaps something wonderful in each. Listeners might wonder what this book is about and why it's such a landmark publication. As people ask you about it, or you're talking about it, how are you describing this to people?

Mason Kamana Allred: I'm often letting them know up front that it does have a scope to it. We did have to sit down and decide, what can we cover? It's huge, but what do we have to cut out? It is focused on visual art from Latter-day Saints, but it has a pretty long history; it's that whole long history since the restoration of the Church in 1830. It covers quite a bit, but you're not going to find much on poetry or dance in here. It really is visual art, but it is, to my mind, really the first moment where we've gathered together so many experts, scholars from different disciplines, different backgrounds, to look into this with such depth, from tons of different angles, and across that longish history I'm talking about. You just haven't quite seen it like this before. It is monumental, like Amanda said earlier. I think it is a groundbreaking book in that sense: who it brought together, what they were able to accomplish in that. That's how I'm describing it to others.

Amanda Beardsley: Yeah, I'm doing similar. I think for me, I describe it more as an anthology, a more traditionally academic anthology, but it is also something that anyone could read because there's so many different approaches, as Mason said, that tell a very diverse array of stories. These stories are kind of like case studies in Mormon history that are tied to some works of art that I don't think have ever previously been in print before. What's really exciting is that it's going to show 200+ images. We had a lot of them digitized for this book. And it explores some new topics through the lens of art history that I haven't seen very much in Mormon scholarship. I know there's a few chapters on race as it relates to image, as well as feminism and film. We take on a lot of different topics, and that was intentional because we want to put at the forefront that it's impossible to get one comprehensive history, especially when it comes to art history when we're interpreting images. That's generally what I've told people if they've asked about it. It's similar to a book on Catholic art. This is the book on Mormon art. 

Glen Nelson: I was wondering, after Oxford signed a contract with us, why they wanted it. I never called up the editor. Our editor is also the editor of all the religion books. It's a really big job, so he's a high level person. I never said, why do you want this anyway? But when they started writing their ad copy, this is what they said. Again, this is Oxford University Press, the world's largest academic press of religious scholarship. They describe the book this way: “Nearly every major religion has a significant artistic tradition, and religion's relationship with art–sometimes inspirational, sometimes antagonistic, often complex–has generated a substantial body of writing stretching back centuries. In nearly two centuries of existence, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has produced, inspired, and provoked a wide range of artistic responses. Yet that artistic output has not generated a commensurate amount of critical examination.” So it sounded to me that they saw this as filling this gap. They continue here, “Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader, seeks to fill a substantial gap by providing a comprehensive examination of the visual art of the Latter-day Saints from the nineteenth century to the present. It defines Mormon art broadly as art by, for, or about Mormons, including work by artists who share a Latter-day Saint identity and by those with no personal attachment who have responded artistically to Mormonism. The volume includes twenty-two essays by scholars from various disciplines, perspectives, and backgrounds who offer rigorous research and analysis of Latter-day Saint artistic production and culture alongside elegant reproductions of more than 200 works of Mormon art, including panorama paintings, quilts, architecture, sculpture, and cartoons, to film, gallery installations, indigenous works and more.” This final sentence here from Oxford: “Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader explores Mormon visual art in unprecedented breadth and depth.” That's kind of a lot to live up to. Amanda, you were hinting about audience a second ago. So let me ask the two of you a couple of questions about that. Who do you think this book is for?

Amanda Beardsley: That's a really good question, and it's something we considered as we were developing the book itself because we really wanted as broad of an audience as possible. For me, as I was writing, I was thinking of my grandparents actually, who grew up LDS and who practice and were very devout members. I imagined it sitting in their house, even though they aren't rigorous academics. I imagined them really enjoying just looking at the art if they found some of the essays to be too academic. At the same time, we have curators in the book, and we have also independent scholars who work outside of that academese. That was something that, at least for me, I really wanted to strive against is some of the pretentious language that we see. I wanted it to be legible to my grandparents, and I wanted it to be legible also to my colleagues at San Diego State University in the Women's Studies department. I wanted it to have that kind of breadth. I feel like it achieved it through the different voices that we integrated. I think some of our scholars take a less traditional approach, like Mary Campbell in her chapter uses the first person “I” to tell a more personal story of her family history as it relates to polygamy. I think that those different approaches and vulnerable approaches really speak to those larger audiences.

Mason Kamana Allred: I would echo that, but I would almost take it the opposite direction. I agree with Amanda, but I would say that this book, what's so amazing about it and the way it ended up, is that it holds its own in the most rigorous university classroom. It really is legit on that level. It is academic, it's deep, it's smart. There's great analysis linked with context and form and all of this. But most of these chapters are written in a way to welcome anybody in to appreciate this. And it does work. I see it also, as Amanda does for grandparents, it's also the best coffee table book. It's beautiful, and it's got these great images to peruse through, to capture the captions throughout. Even if you don't want to read the full chapters, everybody's got to read that Intro, look at these images, and just touch here and there because it works both ways, in the front room living room, but in the classroom too. It just works. It's a great book that way.

Glen Nelson: We're doing this interview over Zoom, and both of you are book lovers, I can tell, because behind you are bookcases ceiling to floor. So I have to tell you a funny story. About an hour ago, I'm in Salt Lake doing some work here, and I was at the Church History Museum's library. It's mostly a conference table with bookshelves all around it, and it contains probably the largest collection of books about art by Latter-day Saint people that I've ever encountered or heard about. That said, you could put all of those books on a few bookshelves. There just isn't stuff out there. Does that sound right to the two of you?

Amanda Beardsley: It does. I would say there are a handful of books. Those are more monographs, usually, that we find in Mormon art history and in the arts, generally a book about a single artist who is already well known like Minerva Teichert or something like that. But in terms of an art historical approach to a history of art, we really only have a few books that have been written, and a lot of those are devotional books written by curators in the Church. [Lorin] Wheelwright, for instance, is one of them. In terms of bias, it's very front and center that these are devotional books and less scholarship, though there is some rigorous scholarship in there. So they gave us a little bit of an entry point, but I would say there's maybe two or three of those books. One of them that came from a conference in the 70s, and then– 

Mason Kamana Allred: We cover a few of these in the Introduction if you're interested in that kind of background, historiography, what's been done. But you're right. I would say Mormon Studies is actually booming right now. But as far as art history analysis appreciation within Mormon Studies, that's just not happening. This book is like, hey over here, let's turn your attention to this. This is really important. If you want to understand the full picture of the Latter-day Saint or Mormon experience, you've got to include this artwork, and these chapters speak to that. These chapters show just how integral the creativity, the creative process, and that final product has been to the development of Latter-day Saint culture and religion.

Glen Nelson: Okay, you've sold me. Interview over. I'm going to buy a copy. 

Mason Kanama Allred: Buy it. Buy it. [laughter]

Glen Nelson: If the goal of this podcast was to get somebody interested, I think that the two of you have really made a strong case to answer the simple question, why is the book necessary.

Amanda Beardsley: We're passionate about it, for sure.

Glen Nelson: Now, something harder. How did this all start? Okay, this is a messy origin story. I'm going to give my shot at it, and then you all will chime in and we'll try to piece it together, all together. So this is a project of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. It was our idea, our team, our funding, our passion. As I remember it, Richard Bushman, who is the co-founder of the Center and is the Chair of the Board of Directors, was very encouraging about the idea of a scholarly volume on visual art. We turned to Laura Allred Hurtado, who agreed to conceptualize the book and to serve as its editor. We knew that it would be a multi-author book because, frankly, there is no one person qualified to tell this entirety of the story at a high academic level. So far, is that what you all remember? 

Mason Kamana Allred: Yes.

Amanda Beardsley: Yeah, that's in line with what we remember.

Glen Nelson: Well, later on, you will have blocked out things from scar tissue, but for now, so far so good. Okay, so then I was given the job to be the project manager for the book. As Laura and I sat around her dining room table in Salt Lake City one night, I told her that we trusted her completely and I would do everything I could to execute her vision of the book. So how did she envision it? It wasn't going to be a chronological book, for example. Instead, she came up with the idea of making it topic driven with topics of importance to her, and then she looked for authors who could bring them about. That's a shortened version of the events, but that's basically how it started. We knew that there were a whole lot of topics that we probably wouldn't get to. The globe is a very big place, so it was possible that we were going to miss some stuff. We were ambitious on its scale from the beginning, but also this idea of having it be relevant and topical was really important to everybody, but I think I should say especially to Laura. But the world had other plans. After Covid happened, Oxford had agreed to publish the book and the Center signed a contract with them, but Laura's new job as the executive director of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art forced her to scale back her involvement on the project. That's when the two of you became co-editors of the book. I'm not sure if you think of that as a dark day or a really great day, but I would love to know what your initial contact with her about the book, first as authors and then later as co-editors, was like.

Amanda Beardsley: I'll go first. My initial contact was Laura giving me a call and asking me to do a chapter on Mormon Feminist Art, and I was floored. I've always wanted to. I had worked on sound and technology studies with regards to Mormonism but as it also related to gender, so I was really excited to take on that as a challenge and an opportunity. So that was my first contact. Then Laura got us all together on a Zoom call with all the authors, with the editorial board, with you, Glen, the project manager. I was actually really surprised because I've been published before with journal articles and things like that, but I've never had such a supportive team who wanted to walk us through this process of academic publishing, which is virtually non-existent, I think, in academia. That was kind of how it happened. Then when Laura had to drop, she reached out, I think, to Mason first–and Mason can corroborate with my story–and then me afterwards and asked if we wanted to become editors of the project and take the torch from her, so to speak. We were very honored to do so because we believed a lot in Laura's vision for the book. It was very exciting. We were very excited about the authors. From that day on, it was the last few years of our lives.

Glen Nelson: Okay, Mason, before we get to yours, there are a couple of things that I want to point out in Amanda's story that I think are really quite significant. In many cases, not all, she had identified topics, and she said, who is the best person to write this topic? There are some examples of where she said, okay, I know some people who are doing work in this really cool area and I would love to capture that, but that's sort of a different way of working. I think you're completely right about the camaraderie that we all felt. Mason, what was your version of things?

Mason Kamana Allred: This is my memory and my relationship to this project. First, I have a  pre-story. It was March 2022 when I first got contacted for this project. But four years before that, I'm sitting in Salt Lake City having dinner with Richard Bushman and a few other scholars, and he gets talking about art history. We had been talking about Church history, and he said, the next frontier is art history. And we were like, why? He said, well, we've finally done some good work on getting more accurate about our Church history, kind of big man history, but we haven't done enough to appreciate that cultural tradition we have of expressing ourselves within Mormonism. I thought that's such a great way to think about it, and then I didn't do much with it. I mean, I did some work on Mormon cultural stuff. Then in March of 2020, right before the pandemic shuts everything down, I think I got an email from you with Richard and Laura on there. It had a contract, and it invited me to do a chapter on Mormon cinema. I was very honored, very excited, but I thought to myself, man, I do film studies. I publish on film. I had a book out on film, but I've always almost deliberately avoided Mormon cinema. I didn't know if I really wanted to treat it with my toolbox, and I thought, well, this is the moment to just do it. Just jump in. So I started a new class here on campus that was all around Mormon cinema to help push me and the students to put that chapter together. I started trying to become an expert on it, on the timeframe they gave me. I worked on that, and everything shut down with Covid. But this, to me, is a project of collaboration where I was so happy that–  It's all Zoom. It's all Zoom memories, but we kept meeting. We could never get together in person–that's my only regret–until we had a conference that me and Amanda ran. But we would meet on Zoom, and help each other, and get little breakout rooms, and support each other, and push each other. I ended up doing Zooms to people in Norway, and calling people in Spain, and watching movies over Zoom, and trying to get in touch with archives. I had a great experience with that. So I'm just an author of a chapter and I'm working with Laura, and then I get this call, as Amanda said, and she said that she needed to step back in her life in a way that’s going to work better. So she's going to step back, and asked if I would help, with another editor, co-edit this thing. I think she maybe played me and Amanda towards each other or something, because she said, who do you think could help? She said, I have confidence in you; who do you think could run it with you? I was like, honestly, I really think Amanda would be great for this project. And I think she said something similar, actually. 

Amanda Beardsley: She asked me the same question, and I said Mason. I think I had told her I met you years before in the Mormon Historical Association, Mason. You and I were like, we need to talk more. Then we started sharing our work with each other, and then we're like, we should work on something together. [laughs]

Mason Kamana Allred: Yeah, that's true. That's true. 

Amanda Beardsley: It kind of felt like the stars aligned.

Mason Kamana Allred: We had talked about doing some kind of conference on Mormon culture, Mormon media study, something. So that's true. That was probably in the back of our minds. Anyway, we came together as co-editors, and that was definitely an honor. I was super grateful to take that on, but also a bit intimidated. It's a big project. A lot of great authors here, experts. I don't know everything about Mormon art at all, but I was excited to jump in and just trust that, with Amanda's help and with the support especially from Glen and from Richard and others at the Center, that we could pull this thing off. Then it gets a little blurry, but we start getting chapters together and looking at versions and giving edits and this kind of thing. We finally do have this conference where we all get together, almost all of us, in Salt Lake City. That would have been, what year was that? 2022? 2023? I think it was 2022. That was almost cathartic to just get everyone together and read or talk about your chapter,  present to each other. After that, I remember just feeling like, yeah, this is going to be awesome. I'm really excited about this book. We still have a lot to do, but we're almost there. Then once Oxford's on, it starts just picking up, snowballing, and here we are after a bunch of work.

Glen Nelson: So I have to say that working with the two of you these past years has been one of the great professional experiences of my life. I'm a book guy. I've written about thirty books, and I've never had an editor like the two of you. So supportive, so insightful, so gentle with your criticism, encouraging to go further, to think more broadly or deeper, to tell a story more cleanly. All of those things are really, really rare to find. Publishing is a very streamlined profession now, much more than it was fifty years ago. You're talking about the community that you found with the authors, and I felt that too with this whole team, but that camaraderie trickled down from the two of you, in my opinion. I've been saying this to people privately and to you two privately, but I'll say it publicly now. I wish there were dozens of Masons and Amandas. I can't imagine how cool that would be. Now let's turn our time to the questions of authors. We talked a little bit about what the book is like just generally, but it's so interesting because their interests are really varied. They're from all over the place geographically, and their questions reflect that. I think it will be fun to say a quick thing about them and their chapter. I have that information; I'll just read that. Then I'll pose a question, and we'll see where that takes us. Does that sound good? 

Amanda Beardsley: Yeah.

Mason Kamana Allred: Yep. 

Glen Nelson: Okay. First up, Richard Lyman Bushman. Richard co-wrote the Foreword of the book. He didn't write one of the essays of the book, but the Foreward. What impressed you about Richard's contribution to the book?

Mason Kamana Allred: Richard was so insightful. He would be on all those Zooms– I was just excited to work with him. He's been an idol of mine, a role model in history and Mormon Studies. But he was always so quick to see through things, to just cut through all the fat and get right to what really matters. I just really value his clear thinking, his guidance on this, helping us make decisions, but also never feeling like he was controlling or pushing things the way that he wanted. He felt very diplomatic, egalitarian, but just super clear headed and helpful. Those are my memories of his contribution. 

Amanda Beardsley: I think Richard was, in a lot of ways, the heart of this project. He felt kind of like a faraway mentor in a lot of ways. I felt very comfortable approaching him. I had never worked with Richard before on any project. I had, of course, cited his books in a lot of my own research, a lot of his projects. I was just so excited when I knew I was going to be working with Richard Bushman as well. I have to say this about all of the authors, too. When we were there in Salt Lake City, he couldn't make it to be at the conference with us, the mini conference, but he was on Zoom for all eight hours of that day with us, and he gave feedback to every single author, and he read every chapter as well. It never felt like he was overstepping, but it did feel like he was guiding in a mentorship way, and I appreciated that. As Mason said, I think coming on to this project there was a lot of intimidation. We're editing Terryl Givens's chapter. We're editing Glen Nelson's work. We're doing that, and that's big, and Richard really helped to build us up.

Glen Nelson: Alright, so here's his question. It won't surprise you to know that he's a big picture thinker, and his question is a big picture question. He says–it's kind of a compound question–what comes next? What do you think is the next step in scholarship about LDS art? Your volume has gone a long way. What would you like others to do now?

Amanda Beardsley: I have so many answers to this because, as an art historian and one of the few art historians working in Mormon Art History, I just get really excited. The next thing is to take every single one of our chapters and make them book length projects, because every chapter is– It was so frustrating to the authors. They're like, I only get so many words to talk about Mormon cinema. Randy Astle wrote a huge book on that too. So having to condense this huge topic into a single chapter was very frustrating for a lot of us, and also a really great challenge because scholars should be more succinct and less long-winded. I think every single one of those topics in there would be great. I would love to see, for example, Jenny Reeder’s chapter as a book on hair art and on quilt making. Hair art could be its own book. Quilt making could be its own book. Relief Society buildings could be its own book. I think even within the chapters, there's topics that can be pulled that are really exciting for book length or dissertation length projects. I would love to see a more global  orientation than even what we had, as much as we tried. I think that Laura Howe's chapter on global art as it related to some of the Art Competitions within Mormonism was a case study, a brilliant case study, in that. I think a global–  Also, even just topics. Cultural migration, which we saw happening in different chapters. Rebecca Janzen’s chapter was about a cultural migration, but so was Laura's, so I think that we have a lot there. Mason mentioned this a little bit earlier. This is mainly a visually oriented book. I think in terms of materiality, we could expand. As a sound studies person, that excites me to think of a sound art history of Mormonism. I think we have people who've touched on that. I think Jeremy Grimshaw, for instance, is someone who has, in the past, touched on sound and Mormonism, but I would love to see something more oriented towards the Arts. Then the last for me, just as a selfish thing, would be how do art and technology work together within Mormonism? Because I think there's something really cool and really specific there that I'd love to see untangled by other scholars as well. That's my wish list. 

Glen Nelson: Mason, before I get to you, I want to clarify or ask a couple of follow-ups there. How long are these chapters when we're talking about these various chapters? 

Mason Kamana Allred: They had to keep it under ten thousand words in most cases. I think it was ten thousand words. They had how many images per chapter? 

Amanda Beardsley: Less than ten images, though some went over. 

Mason Kamana Allred: OK. I thought it was twelve images, ten thousand words. But yeah, it's something like that. 

Glen Nelson: Amanda, you had talked about how you'd like to see these chapters be turned into books. I think most of them could easily be turned into a book. There's that much content. Mason, how would you respond to Richard's questions? 

Mason Kamana Allred: I totally agree with Amanda. There's just so many ways that this hopefully will spread out. I think that you can almost take it now as this really solid at least skeleton to Mormon art where you can start fitting in some more muscle tissue where you're like, oh, there's something between those two chapters that hasn't been done. I'm just saying, let alone the book length versions of these, between the chapters there's new little things that can happen. I think it will inspire ideas that way. And then, as Amanda was starting to say with the sound studies, I want to see the comparable book on dance and on poetry and on music and so forth. I would love to see that happening where it has inspired those as well, because people will love it. But hey, we're missing this part too. That's my hope. We've talked about this before and in the Intro we mentioned this, that a lot of Mormon Studies has been very heavy straight up history. What we saw here too is more historians taking the artwork seriously. I'd love to see that happen too, where people stop and realize, I want to take account of what's happening here with the artwork in this situation or moment in time I'm looking at. I would love to see that happening too. 

Glen Nelson: I was aware, with both of you as editors, that you are prodding the authors to do more interpreting of the works they were writing about, and I think that's something generally that's lacking that the community could really use. 

Amanda Beardsley: I agree, and I think that's one of the biggest things that art history brings to this is not just interpretive, but taking the images seriously and taking the time to actually describe what we are looking at here. That doesn't happen, historically. Image analysis is such an important skill, but such an understated skill in a lot of work. That was something that as editors we wanted to really put front and center as a methodology. Really tell us what this looks like as art historians or people who are not art historians who have to write an art history chapter. This is really important. 

Mason Kamana Allred: Yeah. And by doing that, we wanted to model as well that if you want a more robust artistic culture to analyze, we're also modeling that appreciation. We didn't want any authors to write their chapter in a way where you could write about these movies or these paintings having never seen them. That would be ridiculous for this book. So you're right that we did push and encourage our authors to do more close analysis and interpretation of these artworks. For me that was a real thrill because I've read some of these authors who haven't done much of that, then here they did it. It just blew my mind. It was so exciting to see both of those happening. 

Glen Nelson: Amanda, when you were talking a minute ago about your grandparents and writing this in some way with them in your head, you two right now are talking about academics and others who are reading this and thinking about writing. But I'm also thinking about it from the artist standpoint. You get somebody in your head and you create stuff with them in mind, if artists were aware that somebody was going to take them really seriously and put them into a different context and maybe even hold them to a standard, I think their work might shift, don't you? 

Mason Kamana Allred: That's what I'm saying. It's by doing what Amanda said, take the artwork seriously, we're signaling to these artists, we love you, and we appreciate your work, and we take it seriously, and we think it's worth time and blood and sweat and tears writing about it. So please keep creating and create better and better and better. Let's do more. I think the book does that. It encourages that.

Glen Nelson: Let me give you the first two authors in the book, the first two chapters, and maybe you can give me some kind of comment about what these artists brought to the book. Terryl Givens’s chapter is the first in the book; It's titled “A Theology of Mormon Art.” Next is Colleen McDannell, and her chapter is “Temple Art Renewal, 2000-2022.” What are these two chapters about, and what did they bring to the book? 

Mason Kamana Allred: Again, we decided not to make this a linear, chronological book. We ended up making it more topical. We clustered these things around constellations, around ideas and themes. But it starts off with this theology of Mormon art from Terryl Givens where he's expanding on the earlier work he's done with this idea of paradox within Mormon culture. This chapter does some really, really interesting things and shows how these ideas of paradox–happening with, say, being separatist on your own but also assimilating to the larger culture–how that's showing up and informing the creative processes of Mormon artists. Then looking at these ideas of where it seems like within the Latter-day Saint tradition, the sacred and the profane are not so separate. They're definitely integrated and spill into each other. So he sees this. In his chapter, you'll see photographs of, say, a chapel into the basketball court cultural hall. Anybody that's walked into a cookie-cutter Latter-day Saint chapel has experienced this, where that threshold is maybe an accordion wall, but they're totally together. You can be at the pulpit looking at a basketball hoop. He starts to analyze some of these things and specific artworks around how that paradox is happening and how it's actually quite fruitful showing up in this Mormon art. 

Glen Nelson: Amanda, what about Colleen's chapter? 

Amanda Beardsley: I love Colleen's chapter, mostly because she–and this is something that Colleen has always done–looked at the materiality of Mormonism and Latter-day Saint arts. Colleen turns to the larger institutional decisions in selecting artwork in temples, basically, and in the interiors of temples. She argues that basically the Temple Art Committee's efforts in the first two decades of the twenty-first century to quietly swap out– Basically she maps the history of how temple art has been placed in temples. At one point they quietly swap out old paintings for newer, more inclusive and global ones. Also supported artists who benefited from the recent development in the wider art world around appreciating what's called contemporary realism–realistic images that are depicting real people in the world basically. She looks at art as this communicative medium, especially in its placement in these ritualistic spaces and thinks about, what is the impact of that? What is this actually doing for those rituals, and how does this shift LDS thought before to this more inclusive ideology? Colleen's chapter is great at thinking through how the institution defined Mormon art within ritualistic spaces. 

Glen Nelson: Randy Astle has a question for you. His chapter is “Moving Pictures: Subjectivity and Mormon Identity in Documentary Film.” Maybe I'll ask you, Mason, about this one since you share expertise with Randy in media. What insights did you find with Randy's chapter?

Mason Kamana Allred: Randy's is great because he does from the inception of cinema–the earliest  actualities where you're just capturing reality, that's the beginnings of cinema–clear up to YouTube clips, Instagram, that kind of thing happening today. So that's a nice through line where he's interested in this objective quality of documentary filmmaking against the idea that it's always a subjective enterprise to create your own images. For him, he ends up reading this as a way of thinking about testifying, that the way to think about Mormon cinema in the documentary genre is that there's no real Latter-day Saints style, necessarily. There's no Latter Saint way of making a documentary, but they've actually made some pretty amazing titles within that tradition. It's kind of like the whole brought together is all these different subjectivities that bring up what it might be about Mormons testifying in your own way towards certain truths that cinema might be able to uniquely unveil, but there's not one way of doing that. For me it was great because I knew a few of these film makers, but honestly he's pulling up directors and titles that I just had never even heard of. So even as someone in film studies, it was a very enlightening chapter. 

Glen Nelson: Here's his question for either of you. While this book is incredibly comprehensive, what areas of study did you notice that are still missing or at least merit further study? 

Mason Kamana Allred: I'm at BYU-Hawaii. My first thought is, how do we not have a chapter in any kind of Polynesian art? Something from the Pacific. There's so much beautiful– The marae with the Maori culture or tattoo or tapa cloth or something. To me that's a whole– 

Amanda Beardsley: Yeah. For me, we mentioned this actually in the introduction, but I would have loved for someone to have taken on the art of Jon McNaughton because it's just the moment that we're in right now. Jon McNaughton does these political images, and this highly propagandistic imagery. I think I would have loved to have someone talk about that in the moment right now with the upcoming election. The other thing I would have loved to have seen, and maybe this wasn’t something we could have included as early on, but I was just starting, in 2020, to see AI come into play and AI in relationship to Mormonism and specifically creating Mormon imagery. There's some artists I know who have been playing around with it. I would have loved to see someone write on that.

Glen Nelson: Those are topics for the future. It's not a knock on what you accomplished. It's like a road map for what could happen next. 

Mason Kamana Allred: I would mention one more before you move on. I'm going to keep these really quick. But just to mention. It makes me think that one of the most popular Mormon artists, of course, was Arnold Friberg because he worked on the Ten Commandments and he did that Valley Forge prayer thing. But because he did the pre-visualization, the paintings for Ten Commandments, it makes me think that today you have these Latter-day Saint VFX artists, these animators working with Marvel or Pixar or DreamWorks. Some of them are amazing, and they're doing the pre-vis work today for these CGI movies. I would love to see a chapter on their work too. So animation as well. 

Amanda Beardsley: Yeah, definitely. 

Glen Nelson: The title of Ashlee Whitaker Evans’s chapter is “Establishing Zion: Identity and Communities in Early Latter-day Saint Art.” What was your reaction to her scholarship? 

Mason Kamana Allred: Ashlee has this great chapter, which is, I think, really important for a book like this. She's not necessarily saying this upfront, but you should know this when you read it. Oftentimes Latter-day Saint art history has been treated like there's not much going on until you get to about the twentieth century. For her to start so early, the earliest centuries of the Church, to look at what artwork is doing, and in her terms how it's helping to create the community that it's representing. She does look specifically at things like portraits, she looks at panorama, but she's looking at them with this angle of, how are they not only capturing it but seeking to construct and also produce that very community of Saints through the artwork, which I think is a great way to look at it. Very enlightening early chapter in the early time period in Mormon history. 

Glen Nelson: Nathan Rees is going to get you in trouble next. His chapter is “The Public Image: How the World Learned to See Mormonism from Cartoons to World’s Fairs.” Interesting chapter. Here's his question, and then I'll talk about his chapter too. Why are so few of the contemporary artists discussed in this book represented in the art section at Deseret Book? 

Amanda Beardsley: He's going to have to write a letter to Deseret Book and ask them because I think that's not a qualm with us. [laughs] Nathan, please reach out to Deseret Book for your inquiry. [laughter]

Glen Nelson: A little bit about his chapter. I think it's pretty fascinating, cartoons to world’s fairs and how the world sees the Church. 

Amanda Beardsley: Nathan's chapter is fantastic. He looks at monuments, he looks at cartoons, he looks at print culture around the turn of the century, the twentieth century, and looks at how those are their own image making mediums. I think what's interesting about Nathan and Ashlee being next to each other is both of them are looking at different ways of image making for the Church. Ashlee is looking at those really early times with mostly paintings and panoramas. But Nathan's looking at the architecture of monuments in the city, which are part of Salt Lake City, and the ways that that distributes in its own social capital. I really appreciate how their chapters turned out and act as even foils to one another in a lot of ways. 

Glen Nelson: Well, the book pivots a little bit at this point because Jennifer Reeder's chapter is next, “Creating Something Extraordinary: Nineteenth-Century Latter-day Saint Women and Their Folk Art.” Any comment on her chapter? 

Amanda Beardsley: I'll take hers because I love Jenny's chapter. It's so amazing. Jenny's chapter is actually really important in thinking about community, especially those community projects that aren't often seen as grand gestures, like a monument like Nathan's chapter does. I really wanted Jenny's to be in conversation with those because she looks at these often neglected [arts] like quilt making. These are things that, in Mormonism, we fold around ourselves to comfort us. At the same time, these quilts had genealogies on them of the Church. Same with the hair art. I can't say enough how cool hair art is. Basically you take the hair of a living or deceased, but usually deceased in Victorian times, and make a sculpture out of it and frame it and you put it on a wall. These were exhibited in temples for a long time, Mormon temples. That hair art, though, is like biological forms of genealogy. It blows my mind and gives me chills right now. I think where Jenny really excels is in the details, a very detailed history of how these things came to be. She works at the Church History Library, so she has access to all those archives, but she really thinks about how those draw together communities and how that creates a different semblance of community in relationship to monuments or bigger structures and portraits. 

Glen Nelson: Heather Belnap is next. She wrote the chapter “Globetrotting Mormon Women Artists and the Art of Travel, 1900-1950.” What can you say about the position of her chapter in the book and what it accomplishes for the book? 

Mason Kamana Allred: Here she's clustered together these ones where we're interested in the image making process and what's happening. What is nice is you get this little turn through Jenny Reeder's work where we're looking at women's history more directly. With Heather Belnap, she continues that. You'll learn a little bit later, if you don't know already, about the Paris Art Mission with Linda Gibbs and what's happening there, but Heather Belnap is laser focused on many women who are painters and artists and how their mobility actually begins to open up and shape their artistic production. She calls them globetrotters, which is really beautiful. We get this look into several women–for instance, Minerva Teichert, or Rose Hartwell, or Olive Belnap Jenson, Flora Fisher, Mabel Frazer, and so on–who are able in that first half of the twentieth century especially, to go out and travel the world to some degree. They end up sometimes being inspired by those locations to do either local landscape or features, but sometimes also to turn back to the scriptures and do new kinds of Book of Mormon images and so forth. But it's clearly becoming intertwined with the locations they're visiting and how that travel is shaping their work. Fantastic chapter. 

Glen Nelson: I was sitting with Heather about an hour ago, and she was going on about one of her favorite painters, who was Frazer. What I was thinking about, Mason, while you were talking, is that in part, the travel of these artists also shifted style and color choice and subject matter. And it was because, in part, where they were living they were slightly oppressed or maybe largely oppressed, and they couldn't do yet another Utah landscape in Frazer's case, working next to LeConte Stewart, for example, at the University of Utah. Almost the exoticism of travel shifted what their art could be and also what their brand as an artist could be, I think. OK, I'm overstepping. Sorry. I'll jump back now to the interviewer. 

Amanda Beardsley: I just want to say, Glen, though, the one thing that that brought to mind for me about what you said is that these chapters can cross over a lot of themes. That's the bane of the editor, is having to even categorize these. I feel like we could have put Heather's chapter just as easily next to your chapter on LeConte Stewart and some of those more itinerant artists. I think you make a really valid point there. 

Glen Nelson: Well, she asked a question, and maybe I'll have you try to wrestle with it, Amanda, because it relates to your expertise and chapter. She says, what new avenues of inquiry in the history of LDS art and visual art and material culture do you anticipate? Maybe I'll shift it a little bit. What would feminist scholars want to do now regarding art and visual art and material culture? What do you think the next steps of scholarship might be? 

Amanda Beardsley: This is an exciting question because I've been in conversation recently with Joanna Brooks who [edited] the book called Mormon Feminism, alongside Rachel Hunt Steenblik and Hannah Wheelwright. We've been talking about this a little bit. I think we've seen a few really exciting strides especially since 2010–and I talk about this in my chapter a little bit–of shows that have showcased women artists or Utah artists and things like that. But really I think– This is something Johanna is thinking through right now is, how do we relate our own stories and our own identities as people who grew up in Mormonism, maybe left the Church or who are still in the Church, how do we reconcile that with our past? And especially with, as Nathan talks about as well as Mary talks about in their chapters, some of the exoticization of Mormon women historically. I think there's a lot to be reconciled there and grappled with. But I think the next step is to rethink–and I mention this in my chapter a little bit–beyond the biological essentialism or being relegated to the realm of our biology as women, period. Thinking of other genders that have emerged and how scientifically that isn't something that can easily actually be argued. For me, I'd love to see more in the realm of queer art in Mormonism. I know there are artists who have touched on this historically. I would love to see more that really shirks off that second wave feminism. We are women, and that's what makes us different. It's our experiences that make us different, but it's not our biology, per se, as much if we think of it scientifically. I think, for me, that would be the next step. Not just recuperating and recovering this history of women artists, but to think through what it means to be a woman in our contemporary landscape. 

Glen Nelson: Thank you so much. That was really beautiful. Josh Probert's chapter is “Aspirations of Grandeur and Tempering Restraints in Mormon Temple Design”. How is that chapter different from the earlier chapter of Colleen's on temples? 

Amanda Beardsley: Josh is looking more at an earlier lineage, actually not just earlier but an expansive lineage of Church history from basically the beginning to now in architecture, whereas Colleen is looking specifically at how the interior of temples are decorated with paintings. Josh is looking at architecture, mainly how it might resemble Victorian parlors, and thinking about what that means for that space in particular, especially because parlors were spaces that women brought people into the home with. He and I had talked about the gendered implications of that, but [it is] also about how the ornamentation of temples over time signaled different types of acceptability within society. He looks at Joseph Smith's early ambitions for the Church to be this very opulent space that actually is decorated not within the Protestant tradition of these kind of scaled back, against-images interiors but rather what Joseph called opulent imagery. And then how later leaders tried to reconcile that within these more Protestant leanings and Republican leanings as well later on. I think Josh's chapter is really interesting in that light and also brings that architecture to bear on an art historical understanding of architectural history. He's very into the details of temples, and gives us all of the correct art historical terms for those two. So if you wanted to learn a little bit more about that, I think he's the person to go to. 

Glen Nelson: The next chapter is by Mary Campbell, which the title is “Success in Circuit: Brigham Young's Big Ten”. What's the chapter about, and what does it add to the book? 

Mason Kamana Allred: Mary Campbell brings this really interesting chapter. It's going to blow your mind when you read this. You're going to think about photographs differently, especially from the nineteenth century. She does this great tactic of focusing first on this single image that she signals in the title. It's called “Brigham Young's Big Ten,” about his daughters. Then she unpacks a whole family tree and politics around gender and sexuality from those photos. We grouped her in this constellation of politics of space because, essentially, what she's arguing is in the photographic space only certain things are shown and others are concealed, and it's potentially deliberate. There's something happening. There's a strategy happening or cultural strategy to show some things and hide others, especially around the ways that polygamy is treated photographically as a Mormon tradition. She talks about these ideas that at the time you would leave yourself vulnerable to legal repercussions if you were to photograph and, let's say, prove that you are a polygamist. You could maybe end up in prison or something. So these ideas around the veracity of the technology and the potential mendacity of hiding or lying about your polygamy colors the way she's thinking about that Big Ten photograph. Even in style, as Amanda mentioned earlier, she drops into the first person at the end; she connects it to her own family history. Just a really interesting read, well done. I think that people will really enjoy grappling with her chapter. 

Glen Nelson: What would you add to that, Amanda? 

Amanda Beardsley: I'd say it's a very provocative chapter. It really does butt up against a lot of histories that I was taught growing up in Mormonism. I think that it's going to be provocative for readers in that sense. It also, I think, is vulnerable in that first person way, in a way that is truly enjoyable to read. [It] recuperates, I said this before, but really does recover a lot of the the Big Ten, quote unquote, which were Brigham's daughters and talks about, from this single photograph, a larger sociopolitical landscape that's really fraught. As Mason said, legal repercussions and the sacrifices that women also had to make during that time. 

Glen Nelson: I would say, too, that I hadn't seen any of those photographs before. That's another whole thing about this book that we could talk about in depth: the discovery of new works. But the next chapter, let's jump to, is Rebecca Janzen's, which is “Mormon Art and Architecture in Mexico: Between Mexico and the United States”. Tell us about the book's goals to be global and what Rebecca's chapter brings to that, and then she has a question for you. 

Amanda Beardsley: Rebecca's is a great chapter. I think what's amazing about Rebecca's work in general is that she goes outside of the United States to do it. She talks about the tension that built between indigeneity, attitudes towards indigeneity, and modernity as Mormonism took root in Mexico. For some the conversion to Mormonism would have suggested economic and social opportunities to bolster one's standing, but for others it offered a contested space to work out the integration of different traditions. So she brings early portraits of these families in Mexico that were converted to Mormonism. It's a history I haven't heard told, first of all, and it's beautiful to see the ways that those conversations were happening in the nineteenth and moving into the twentieth century. And then specifically how that impacted how temples are built and how they integrate these kind of superficial styles from the locations they're built in to try and create a more global understanding of the Church. It's a beautiful chapter. It's fantastic. 

Glen Nelson: It's so fun to read it right after Mary's chapter because they're more related than you think they would be at first. She has two questions which I think are really great. I want to know what was the most challenging part of the process and how you successfully sorted things out. And then she asks, I also want to know what you thought the volume would be like and how that compares with how it turned out. 

Mason Kamana Allred: What was the most difficult part of the process? It's a great question. I think maybe, for me, it was probably– Because Glen took the lion's share of dealing with a lot of the images and stuff like that. He really helped out on that front. And Amanda was so organized in getting all the images together on spreadsheets and so forth. I feel like personally, for me to respond, I would say probably somewhere in the editing. It was very enjoyable and very satisfying, but it was also just very time-consuming. We cared so much about helping but not overstepping and trying to encourage artists and never push them too much in certain directions. It was hard to balance that and to give them as much as we could. That's where most of my energy went. So that was the most difficult in that sense. Editing other people's chapters. 

Amanda Beardsley: I would agree. We were working with a lot of entities. We had twenty-two authors, and then we had an editorial board with the Latter-day Arts Center, and then we were working with Oxford as well. Remediating all of those different expectations and needs and ensuring that all those who have a stake in the project leave feeling happy can be really difficult. I found that very challenging because I wanted to also maintain academic integrity as I worked through this book. So what, to me, was the definition of that shifted in those different environments. Figuring out how to work together was hard. I think, as Mason talked about with the authors– And it wasn't that it was hard– It's a challenge that comes with any collaboration, this way of working with people and figuring out their different styles. Working with the authors and ensuring that we were true to what they were saying, and interpreting that, and figuring out ways to either improve content in whatever way that we could in a tone that was kind I think was complicated. I think the second thing that was hard for me was working with making an art history book that wasn't written by all art historians. That wasn't a bad challenge because working with an incredible array of scholars who were not art historians allowed us to center visual analysis and their methods while also learning from their disciplinary approaches to writing about Mormonism. As an art historian, I am moving forward with a very different perspective having learned from them as well. 

Glen Nelson: Had either of you ever been an editor of a book before? 

Mason Kamana Allred: Not editing a collection like this, actually. 

Amanda Beardsley: No. 

Mason Kamana Allred: I mean on the Joseph Smith papers, that's what we did was edit each other's work, but not quite like this where it's an anthology with several different authors, you know?

Glen Nelson: Yeah. The title of James Swensen's chapter is “Defining the Mormon Landscape: Photography and the Representation and Evolution of a Distinctive American Space”. Who wants to comment on his chapter? 

Mason Kamana Allred: I'll take that. James Swensen works into the same constellation thinking about the politics of space. Once again it's a chapter dealing with photography. He's interested here in especially landscape photography and its role in constructing while capturing what would be called a Mormon landscape. [What is] interesting as you read this chapter is to keep in mind his ideas of capturing and almost possessing what's going on with the camera in shaping what would be that Mormon landscape. So he's looking at photography. As we've mentioned before, it has this history of being– It captures truth. Here, when you’re dealing with landscape, it seems pretty objective and straightforward, but he's interested in how it's building conceptions around what a Mormon landscape is or should look like or how it should be captured on camera film. So he brings this from some Latter-day Saint photographers and even later artists such as Dorothea Lange, thinking about how they look at the landscape and how they capture it through their lens to shape what then becomes thought of as a Mormon landscape. 

Glen Nelson: The foundation of his question is something that I get quite a lot working for the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts about just the definition of this thing entirely. So he says, after editing this volume featuring a wide variety of scholars with a wide variety of ideas, did you come to a more concrete view of what “Latter-day Saint” art is and isn't? Is there truly such a thing as Latter-day Saint art? 

Amanda Beardsely: I'll start. No and yes. [laughs] The back of our book, the blurb that you read, Glen, talks about how we define Latter-day Saint art. It's really anything that's adjacent to Mormonism. It doesn't matter about the identity of the artists themselves too much unless the artist integrates that into the work. I think this question made me and Mason horribly self-conscious because when we first sat down with the authors all of the authors tried to answer this question. It's a little daunting and maybe even not really as interesting of a question to me anymore, but it's a question that needs to be answered. Because if we're making a book about Mormon art, what is it, right? But what seems more important than this question of what Latter-day Saint art is, and what's far more interesting than defining Mormon art is taking seriously what creators put in the world, whether that art is known or not, and asking what their work means. Again, starting with that image and then working outward from there to see if there are some defining characteristics that loosely connect them together. This is really why I like the multiplicity of voices and authors choosing the works for each chapter. This is how all the works were chosen for this book. [To] all of the authors we were like, you have free rein. Choose what you need as long as it's within ten to twelve images. So it highlights the–I don't know if subjectivity is the right word–but the power, I guess is a better word, inherent to defining a canon of something, while also demonstrating that anything within or adjacent to the religion is worthwhile so long as someone chooses and places it on that pedestal. For me that's what the definition is: what we say it is. 

Glen Nelson: I think Laura treats this topic a tiny bit in her Afterward, this larger definition. This is such a fascinating discussion. Just like the big book itself this interview deserves to be extended. I don't want to cut you short so let's split this podcast into two parts. Thank you Amanda and Mason. Excellent so far. I can't wait to continue our conversation. Thank you listeners for sticking with us. I know that you're rewarded by this fascinating discussion. If I were you and you're a writer, I think you should be taking notes about what your next book should be. We're giving you seed material for the rest of your career. We'll start again in a minute.

END PART

OXFORD PART 2:

Glen Nelson: OK, everybody, we're back to talk with Mason Kamana Allred and Amanda Beardsley about this extraordinary new book that just came out from Oxford University Press, Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader. Let's jump right back into our ideas of talking about each chapter with the contributions by the authors themselves. Then if they provided a question to ask you, then I'll pummel you with more of their what I think are really fascinating and insightful questions. Linda Jones Gibbs writes the chapter “The Paris Art Mission.” This is a story that lots of people who love art and know about the Church find fascinating, wouldn't you agree? So give me a little bit about what her chapter is about. 

Amanda Beardsley: Linda gives a great history and overview of the dedicated Latter-day Saint artists in Utah who were sent to Paris as missionaries with the intention of learning the latest artistic techniques out there. Paris in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially twentieth century, is this Mecca for artists and creation and modern art in particular. She talks about that, those global exchanges, especially thinking about how those techniques show up in things like mural paintings for the Salt Lake Temple. By doing this, she places this LDS art and temple construction within these larger art historical contexts of patronage and salons and exhibitions, which played a really significant role in both Paris and Utah in shifting dominant paradigms and meeting political needs. Linda's chapter, it's very detailed, has done a lot of research in how that plays out, and tells those stories. 

Glen Nelson: Her question for you has little to do with what you've just said. She wants to go a whole other way with her question and it's a pretty simple one. How was the cover image for the book chosen? Maybe we should say what the cover is first, but then how was the image chosen? 

Amanda Beardsley: On the cover is by an artist named Jorge Cocco [Santángelo]. It's a picture of Christ, and a landscape next to a ship. It's done in a modern style, kind of cubist, the way that Cocco likes to do. Lots of shades of blue. The cover was chosen by Oxford, actually.

Glen Nelson: I think that's sort of fascinating. What would an outside entity think would be the perfect thing? They were very intent on this. Why do you think they were so intent on this? I mean, they really like this. And I do too. They really, really like this cover. 

Mason Kamana Allred: My two cents is just that we thought about what would make a great cover. There's so many amazing images in this book, and Amanda and I thought, well, there's an image that we analyzed in the introduction to think about the book, and that's J. Kirks Richards' “Cristo Series,” because it's a lot of different images of Christ that are never fully developed, just blurry images of just a face, a beard. So we thought that would be kind of cool because we're talking about it in the Intro. But I think aesthetically they realized, as far as Oxford in their 30,000 feet in the air view of this thing, I think they saw that Cocco pops a little more. The colors are beautiful, and it is a great image and it taps Mormon art into a longer, wider tradition of Christian and especially Catholic art of really representing scenes from the scriptures. To also have Christ reaching out and having His apostles in the boat, that is kind of important. I was thinking about that cover image because there's a moment in Laura Howe's chapter where she actually reads that–I think that's where they saw it–and she gets in there close and thinks about not just that it's Neo-Cubism but about how those lines work almost as grids. She interprets them to capture the relationship between Christ and His apostles, but almost like a cross, and then to the heavens and how He's bringing them diagonally from there, sort of standing up to his to get them closer to God. That's a moment where when I read the way Laura reads that image, I'm like, that actually is a great cover image. So we did not choose it, but I think I can see why Oxford would go that direction. It is very pretty. 

Amanda Beardsely: I just want to say too, I see it also as an interesting camouflage. This is a very recognizable image. It's in church meeting houses. I think I've seen it there. I think pamphlets and things like that as well use Cocco's imagery. So I feel like– This is a joke that I was just making with a friend of mine. I think it was actually with you, Mason, when we first were discussing the cover as this camouflage to help unsuspecting readers familiar with more traditional imagery and ideas find their way to a little bit more radical ideas. That's how I read it as well. 

Glen Nelson: You know, I'm a big fan of the gateway drug in the arts. [laughter] I'm not sure I should have said that and I'm not sure I want to be quoted, but there definitely is this idea of exposure that is a real challenge for a lot of people in the arts who are connected with the Church. I think seeing a work that is not typical illustration is a great gateway to say, why did he make those choices? I would add to, on Oxford's behalf, the book looks great with text over the top of it, a title over the top of it. So that's pretty smart. All right, moving on to something uncomfortable for me. I think I'll avoid speaking about myself in the third person. I'm up next. So I wrote a chapter titled, “LDS Artists at the Art Students League of New York.” Then when one of the other authors became ill, I wrote a second chapter, “George Dibble and Modernism in Utah.” So I won't pander. I'm not actually that needy right now. Maybe next week I would have phrased all of this quite different, but I'm feeling pretty good about myself today. So I won't pander too much to ask whether you actually liked my chapters. But I'm curious to know if the content in these chapters was new to you, and then I have a question for you. 

Mason Kamana Allred: Can I answer it? I'll take these. These chapters, we actually left them together, so you get Glen back-to-back if you read it in order. I did not know these histories, so for me, I was learning as I read these, but they're also very well written. Even if Glen wasn't here, I would say this. They're well written. They're very inviting. It flows, which is great because it's fascinating, new material I wasn't familiar with so I needed that. This fact that you had artists going out East, hanging out in New York and becoming part of the Students League, and learning some of these newer methods, and figuring out between these different schools of aesthetics of how we're going to paint–German school, French school, all the latest things–and then bringing that back with them as they come back West, I did not know that history. I know similar things have happened with universities and intellectual thinking, but as the paint hits the board and so forth, coming back to the West, that was an amazing history for me to tap into, to think about how Latter-day Saint artistic production in Utah itself is not just a Utah thing. All these tentacles have reached out and come back and shape what's happening there. I love that. The next one is so great also because we think deeply with Glen about Modernism as a movement, about how it's treated, how it's thought about in Utah, and how the culture is not quite ready on the whole to accept it as legitimate art. He has this great moment where he begins the chapter with this true fact from history that this beautiful piece of Modernist artwork is in the trash can at an institution. How could this happen, that something like this ends up in a trash can? He starts to unpack that through some family history, institutional history of what's going on with Modernism in artistic production in Utah again, through the figure of George Dibble. I was unfamiliar. Two great chapters. You’ve got to read these. Even back-to-back, they work very well. Did I miss anything, Glen, that you did there? 

Glen Nelson: Oh, yeah, like I'm going to talk about– [sarcastically:] Yes, and in the third paragraph, you'll notice... [laughter]

Amanda Beardsley: I think that I really like– I'm just going to throw it in there to make you turn more red, Glen. I think what I really liked in your chapters was actually the visual analysis. You look at, for instance, an image of a boxer, and you take a lot of time to unpack what that means in terms of even masculinity. For me, I think of the book, they were really beautiful descriptions and also very compelling arguments for what you're making based on the work itself. I really appreciated that part of both of your chapters. Then also from an art historical standpoint too, the fact that you are expanding not just Mormon art history as a canon, but you're expanding how we understand modern art as a canon through the inclusion of Mormon art and thinking about these pieces that certainly are part of it, right? That's another part that I think is really important. 

Glen Nelson: Well, that's very nice of both of you. If the chapters are any good at all, it's because you made them good by making me rewrite them over and over. OK, now to my question, which is a little bit of pain. I'll just say it. My question is about copyright permissions for all of the images in this book, something that I really hate doing, I'll just say. 200+ high-resolution images are a lot for one book. How were those images selected and what was involved to get them into the book? 

Amanda Beardsley: I'll speak a little more on this one, just because the way that Mason and I worked, we divided and conquered. I worked a lot more on images alongside Glen. First of all, I want to say that–and I said this before–the authors had creative reign of their selections. It was really whatever they wanted to include that spoke to their specific discipline and topic. However, I would also have to say that Glen, you really were at the center of helping me obtain permission. We put everything into a big, I would like to say very sophisticated spreadsheet, a Google spreadsheet, which I'm a huge fan of. Then we put thumbnails to keep everything straight, just to make sure that we had the image that matched the name of the image next to it, because we were sharing this with a lot of different people. Then Glen was working with, I think, five of the biggest institutions where we were getting the most images: the Church History Library and Museum, Springville Art Museum, BYU. All of those archives we had to get permissions from, and each one had their own very fun process of filling out specific paperwork to do. Most art historians know this, not a lot of historians know this, because getting images in books is a nightmare. Doing that with 200+ images is a project, and without you, Glen, I think we would have been a few more years up the road in making this book. 

Glen Nelson: It was really hard. I wonder if it's such a barrier that some academics say, okay, maybe I will just write an essay. You know, I was nervous. What would the quality of these images be in a book? It's not a coffee table book. It's not that dimensions. It's a book like you hold in your hand and read, and when I first saw the first galleys that were digital, I thought, OK, they've done this right. These are large; they're not like little thumbnails. Quite a few of them are full page. At the beginning of every chapter is a full page image, for example. All the pages are coated, so that makes all the images pop more than if it's a page that just has text on it, for example, like a novel. It really was quite amazing. I think what you were mentioning earlier about the value of the book just as a catalog of images is really valid here because so many of these images are new to people. I think they are going to find, if this isn't the new canon, it's pretty close to approaching it.

Mason Kamana Allred: People should appreciate those images because I'm telling you, for many of those, us three could do a one act play of some of these email threads we had just to get some of those images correct and the right quality level and from the right institution. It's pretty ridiculous how some of these played out, but we got them there thanks to Glen, thanks to Amanda, thanks to the authors and institutions. I hope people appreciate what went into getting that book full of so many beautiful images.

Glen Nelson: Our next chapter is by Menachem Wecker, who is a scholar in the Washington, DC area. His chapter is “‘Draw All Men Unto Him’: The Mormon Art and Belief Movement.” All right, your thoughts about that? 

Amanda Beardsley: Menachem's chapter is one of the most humorous chapters in the whole book to me. I laughed so much as I was reading it just from the beginning, which starts with this ridiculous story about Gary Smith, who's an artist who's part of the Art and Belief movement. His work was found in a janitor's closet at BYU, and through that story, Menachem traces this really cool history of the Art and Belief movement and the characters, the people who were involved. Menachem is a reporter. He does interviews for a living. He does a lot for the Washington Post and writes for all different news outlets, so he's coming at it from a very different angle from us. He conducted really extensive interviews with these artists and with anyone who he could get his hands on. The commentary from those interviews is really humorous and really appropriate in telling an oral history, I think, of this movement. He talks about the importance of this probably underappreciated movement in a lot of ways, as you could tell from finding a painting, an original painting, in a janitor's closet, and thinks through the tensions that were inherent in what the Art and Belief movement was trying to aspire to be. And what the institution of the LDS Church was trying to accomplish and some of the parameters it put around what their art should be. Menachem really revisits the drama and conflict of this period and really thinks about some of these contrasting views and gives this really great landscape of the conversations happening around Mormon art during the Art and Belief movement. It's interesting because I think we wanted him to be in this section about institutions because of those tensions that were happening between the artists and BYU and everyone else who had thoughts about that movement. 

Glen Nelson: Menachem gave us a few questions to ask you, so let me ask two questions. Here's his first one. With so much going on in the world, why a book on LDS art now? What does it have to say that speaks uniquely to what's going on now? 

Amanda Beardsley: My answer to that is short and sweet. If not now, when? This has been a long time coming, as you talked about–I think it was you, Mason–Richard Bushman was saying it's been a long time coming. That's one way I could answer it. The other way I would answer is to say that this is a book that has a lot of engagement with a lot of the sociopolitical conversations that are going on in the world right now. With Paul Reeve and Carlyle Constantino, we have chapters that really delve into some of the larger conversations going on around colonization and land distribution and representation. In Mason's chapter, in my chapter, as well as in a lot of other chapters we are thinking about feminist topics, we're talking about larger conversations surrounding what it means to represent controversial things. Like embodiment, even, in cinema I think is a new topic, or not specifically new but a really cool topic to think about with regards to cinema. If you're sitting in a theater and are in this disembodied seeming state where your body's not moving. I think we have conversations that are really important to a lot of what is being talked about, both in scholarship as well as what's being talked about in the media right now. It's a really interesting historical document, I think, in that way, because our authors are very concerned with doing that kind of labor too. 

Glen Nelson: In the beginning of this conversation, we were talking about [how] this fills a gap in scholarship. This book could very well have been written a year, five years, ten years, twenty years ago, and should have been written, but it would be a very different book. I think this book ten years from now will be a very different book when there are one, five, ten, fifty more books that take it and run with the ideas of it. Let's see, Mason, let me ask this question to you that Menachem posed. What are some of the things that surprised you most in this project, whether penning your essays or editing others? 

Mason Kamana Allred: I wanted to point to a couple of artworks that surprised me because I was unfamiliar with them that also showcase a lot of the often more recent, but not always, artwork done by Latter-day Saints outside of what we might have expected. Some readers might expect a more Utah-centric idea of Latter-day Saint art history. So I'm going to pull from Laura Howe's chapter because she looks at the International Art Competition. In fact, one strategy to read this book, honestly you've got to read that Intro, but maybe start with Laura Howe's chapter that has all the international, more recent stuff, and then go back and read others to see the history that got us there. Two artworks I'll mention from there that speak to Menachem's question. One is by Aoba Taichi, a Japanese artist who creates these earthenware dishes for traditional Japanese tea ceremonies. He learned this from his father, who's one of the best in Japan. He learns this process, in fact, the same year that he converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and learns about what's called the Word of Wisdom which would prohibit the consumption of tea, which is so deeply important culturally for him in Japan and the artistic practice he's now joined in as an apprentice. What he ends up doing is creating these new types of earthenware dishes that have engravings from the Book of Mormon on it and stuff like that. I mean, you've got to check these out and think about how he's wrestling with that in his mind and then working it out with his hands, literally, as he creates these earthenware dishes. The last one I'll mention is Joseph Banda’s, an artist from Malawi, who has this one image I want to speak of, this painting on wood I believe, of Lehi and Lehi's dream or vision of the Tree of Life. He has Lehi on a baobab tree where he's up in the top of it and getting this, I think it fills up with moisture over the course of the year, and he's getting the fruit. But unlike a lot of the visualizations I've seen of this where it's this problematic thing of once you get to the tree, maybe hang out and offer fruit to people, Banda has it where Lehi's working. He's climbing in the tree and grabbing the fruit and actively giving it out to people, which seems to really resolve some of that issue of, am I done? Is there yet things to do? This enduring to the end is playing out in his artwork, looks totally different than other visualizations of that dream coming from this artist in Malawi that I just think is really fantastic and will surprise some readers who aren't familiar with these artworks coming from around the world. 

Glen Nelson: A minute ago, you were mentioning Carlyle and Paul's chapters. W. Paul Reeve's chapter is “Race and Latter-day Saint Art.” Maybe one of the two of you could describe a little bit about what that chapter is and your reactions to it. 

Mason Kamana Allred: I'll take it if you want to take Carlyle's. 

Amanda Beardsley: Sure. 

Mason Kamana Allred: Paul Reeve, you may know, is a really great historian of Latter-day Saint history at the University of Utah. He's written this great book on religion of a different color, and here he brings some of this idea around whiteness to his analysis of Latter-day Saint art. He really starts to show in concrete detail how whiteness is the default natural order for a lot of, especially earlier, Latter-day Saint artwork, and it shows up in these ways where often the association, if it's not white, is this degradation sometimes, or even maybe a curse. He shows this like, it's not perfect, it's not as pure if it's not the same whiteness, and that plays out in the way the art is constructed. He ends on this more positive note of trying to show more recent representations that seek to remedy some of this issue of the racism that has shown up in artwork previously. But he's got some really fascinating moments in his chapter that I was unfamiliar with: lithographs, paintings, writings. There's even a moment in a Church publication where a photograph of children, mostly white, one black child with them, shows up and you have members of the Church writing in to leave the Church talking about the controversy around this type of photographic representation and then the response from the publishers and the Church leaders. Really worth reading and thinking about as we grapple with this history of race in Church and artistic representation. 

Glen Nelson: Very good. Carlyle Constantino wrote this chapter, “Native Americans, Mormonism, and Art.” What are your reactions to her insights? And then I have a question from her for you. 

Amanda Beardsley: Carlyle does a great job and traces a similar arc as Paul Reeve as she turns to representations of Native Americans by LDS artists. She highlights the shift in authenticity and power once LDS Native Americans move from romanticized or threatening figures in art by others to more fully developed self-representations in their own creations. In particular, she takes up the work of Kwani Povi Winder, who is an incredible artist who brings in some of her indigenous heritage and stylization to the works to show these– Taking ownership back of my [Winder’s] image in a way that pays homage to ancestry as well. Carlyle has a really great chapter that serves as a great compliment to Paul's. 

Glen Nelson: Well, her question for you is a perfect compliment to our discussion. She says, this volume is a tour de force. How do you envision this book being used as a conduit to initiate conversations about spirituality and Mormonism, particularly regarding sensitive or tough topics within Latter-day Saint histories? How does art play a role in that dialogue? 

Mason Kamana Allred: I think we can see throughout the book that– I just think we probably need to get better collectively, those interested in Latter-day Saint culture and history, at recognizing how powerful art can be and has been in providing a space for people somehow orbiting this faith tradition or directly within it to wrestle with ideas and to express their experience in ways that are very individualistic, subjective, but also have these shared moments that feel like they resonate with other people. If you think about what makes it sort of unique or interesting, I do feel like in other traditions, whether it's Jewish art or Catholic art, you may see more things of stories and saints, and I think with Latter-day Saints you have a lot more direct grappling or wrestling with modern revelation or prophetic utterance or cultural norms in ways that I think show up in– The art is providing the space, it's connective tissue, but also space to push and pull. That's really, really important and needs more support and appreciation in its role in doing that. 

Glen Nelson: Haven't the two of you found, generally speaking, that art is a really great way to start a conversation about difficult things? And if that is the case, maybe an example or some thought about that. 

Amanda Beardsley: Yeah. When I teach, for instance, we always start with an image to open up the conversation. I think part of that is allowing students to make observations on their own about maybe a theme, if I designate the theme as such, or just say what themes could be drawn from this based on what you see. Again, that close looking and observation can start with what we know about the world in ourselves, what we see, and then take it to this really, for me, a magical space, which is talking about it or transforming the image or the piece or the work, the sculpture, what have you, in front of our eyes because we may have thought of it in one way for all of our own history. I think that's what is beautiful about art as this space for conversation is that it's a communicative medium, but we have to interpret that communication together as art historians. In that interpretation, I think it gives us a degree of separation to some extent. With Mormon art in particular, I think where Terryl Givens really comes in, in his paradox of personal revelation and institutional telling you what to do institutionally, and that seeming to be at odds with each other, but within Mormonism it acts as a paradox. I think that's where you're talking about, Mason, in a really interesting way is artists' subjectivity in Mormonism might have that valence or that inflection of personal revelation that allows them to state, “This is my experience within this Church,” and opens up some of those conversations of individual expression. Though I don't want to always say that it's only about individual expression because it's an artifact still of a collective experience in a lot of ways when we interpret it. That's what is exciting, I think, about it. That's what allows us, a lot of the time, to really talk about these difficult topics such as this fraught history of race within Mormonism that a lot of people have had a really hard time talking about for a very long time, as well as polygamy and queerness within the religion too. Specifically in my chapter, I bring in the artist Marlena Wilding's images about her experience of being black within a Mormon culture. Being able to talk about her experiences through that medium in our conversations was really both liberating for her as well as communicative in a way that I think she hoped would reach Mormon audiences to understand how those more banal forms of racism enter into those community experiences. 

Glen Nelson: I think a lot of the artists that I know are interested in eliciting a response. That's part of the communication that you were referring to. I wouldn’t say the same is true for the illustrators I know. I think they're trying to tell a story. It's just a different kind of thing that they're working toward. So I love the idea that you have an artwork and people are gathering around it and just talking about it. Then one thing leads to another and you're getting insight into why that means something to them. Maybe their interpretation or their response to it is completely different from yours because of their individual experience, and then that connects you to them and gives you insights and all of that stuff. I guess what I'm saying is art is cool. Art knows what it's doing. We should let art do its thing. I have to say, I'm excited to see what life this book will have overtime. It feels like it's tailor made to be a textbook, doesn't it? 

Amanda Beardsley: I think in a Mormon Studies course or religious studies course of some sort it could be selections for those courses. Or if it is truly like a Mormon Art History course which should be taught at Claremont especially, or all the places that are developing Mormon Studies programs, I think it could definitely work within those classrooms. 

Glen Nelson: All right, Mason, now we get to make you blush. Your chapter is next. The title of it is "The Piety of Perspective: Bodies, Media, and Cinematic Experience in Latter-day Saint Film, 1970-2020.” Amanda, I suppose you have to say nice things about Mason's chapter. [laughter] What do you think readers will discover in it? 

Amanda Beardsley: Dancing [laughter], and what dancing means. I think this is one of the things I was really excited about with Mason's chapter. First of all, it's super interesting because it's stuff that I have never seen before. It's talking about cinema from Filipino filmmakers, from all over the world, and it really thinks through how depictions of things that are really a little bit crunchy for Mormons to talk about sometimes, like sex and violence, sentimentality, Mason calls those–and this is where he becomes a person who posits theory and Mormonism–”a positive theology of embodiment.” I think that theology of embodiment uses film as a conduit to think through some of these more crunchy topics and demonstrate this global reach and the exclusions that we've seen in LDS film history. I also think what I really like about Mason's chapter is how much he talks about the creative techniques that play into affect. How does this not just effect us, but affect us? What does that mean as we're sitting in the theater and might take on these different characters and these different stories? How does that influence us with these gratuitous displays? I think anything having to do with embodiment, bodies in Mormonism, is really interesting. Just that first clip that you talk about in your chapter, Mason, you'll have to remind me of the film maker, but the “Dance of the Devil”–is that what it's called?–is probably one of my favorite descriptions in the whole book because I'm just like, wait, what? How does this relate to Mormonism? So it really creates a bridge, a really compelling bridge too, that fills in a lot of gaps for me historically in Mormonism. 

Glen Nelson: All right, excellent job, Mason. Okay, Mason sent you, Amanda, a question to answer. Was there a previously unfamiliar art piece that stood out to you from the book and why? 

Amanda Beardsley: Yeah. Oh my gosh, there's so many. I thought I knew Mormon art history pretty well, but then this book came about and I was like, all I know is what I don't know now. I think a lot of the pieces that you discussed in your chapter, Mason, were very new to me and ones that I was like, I have to go and watch those movies now. I think in terms of hair art, I have always had this really big fascination with hair art, Victorian hair art, and hearing about it in Mormonism through Jenny Reeder's chapter was really exciting for me. It helped me see that art in a very new way, in a way that I had never thought about with the biological, genealogical implications of it. Then the art in Laura Howe's chapter was all art that I had never been exposed to, some of it. There was one work in particular that resonated with me the most from there; let me see if I can find it. I wrote it down. Danielle Hatch’s And I Am Here, which is a dress made out of pages. I love when any artist brings in the things that we wear or the more overlooked things in our lives that we're like, this is just a part of us. But if we're talking about embodiment, what better way to represent ourselves than how we fashion ourselves with clothing and the words that are written on that clothing. So that dress sticks in my mind. I would love that to be the cover, actually, because it's such a beautiful piece. But yeah, those are some of the works that really stood out to me. Then of course, I will never forget Gary Ernest Smith's Eternal Plan just because it was found in that janitor's closet. Menachem bringing that to light was really exciting, too, for me. 

Glen Nelson: All right, we're going to flip the switch now and talk about Amanda's chapter, Mason. Amanda's chapter is “Latter-day Saint Feminism and Art.” What did you learn from the chapter? 

Mason Kamana Allred: Oh, I learned a lot. I really wasn't familiar with many of these artists and the work that they produce that she analyzes in her chapter. Amanda's really great because she brings a very diverse toolbox to the way she looks at art, with her art history background, with her deep knowledge in media studies and in history. She's the perfect person to bring this most up-to-date chapter on feminism and artistic creation, and she does it through a theoretical lens of thinking deeply about archive and recording and pushing oneself into that historical record in ways that aren't always commensurate with a patriarchal order of archiving. That was really great. She opens with this really beautiful piece with all these hanging– I don't know. Who's the artist on that one you open up with the analysis, Amanda?

Glen Nelson: Valerie Atkinsson. 

Amanda Beardsley: Yeah, Valerie Atkinsson. 

Mason Kamana Allred: Yes. So thinking about new ways and materialities around archiving and recording these processes in history is just really great in her chapter. Genealogical archive through the lens of feminism, feminist movement, of what's maybe not been so clearly told as the primary story throughout the history of the Church. Amanda is able to look at this in contemporary art and she looks at the way that gender has shaped a lot of the recording process in Latter-day Saint culture, but how these installations and art pieces allow for new spaces to do it in new ways. [She] really pays attention to– because the artists are doing this as well–the actual material processes of doing this, and the materiality of the art pieces, and how the bodies of the women interact with that, and how their work shows up, how the work they do is recorded in the process of making these artworks, in ways I actually wasn't even familiar with from that process standpoint. She really reveals the mundane and material tasks, we say, that women undertake to express themselves or to even write themselves into history. You know, sort of create yourself into history. Really, really great chapter, really smart way to think about artwork that needs to be more talked about generally, but Amanda offers us a lens to look at it in ways that's just really enlightening. I feel like the artist reading her chapter about them would smile because it's like someone really got them on a deep level and maybe elevated even some of what they're doing. It's just a really, really great chapter. If you've read Heather Belnap’s and you've read Jenny Reeder’s and then you come to Amanda's, it's just a great through line in the book, a nice contour. 

Glen Nelson: I'll be fascinated to know what the artists think about the book and how they're described. I think in many cases, they will not have previously had anybody writing about their work like this. I can't wait for that. Amanda wrote a question directly for you, Mason, and she says, as a media studies scholar, how did a volume oriented towards art history depart from or align with the work you do? How do you see it informing your future work? 

Mason Kamana Allred: This is a great question because Amanda knows my work and she knows that I often am very influenced, in media studies especially, from a tradition of McLuhan. Medium is the message. I'm very interested in the technology itself or the medium itself, how it shapes what can and can't be done. A book like this does some of that, but is much more in the camp of taking particular stock of the content, like what's going on in the image itself or the movie itself. That is really important to me, and that was a great part of this to push me outside of some of that more, I think insightful but limited thinking to go with more the art history route and do some of that work there. Really helpful for me as a scholar. I want to keep some of that. I mean, I love the way the art historical formal analysis shows up in this book, and many of us felt challenged but encouraged to try to do more of that. Amanda really was the great voice on that, the beacon that we could turn to to help us do that better. I feel really good about the way the book turned out in that respect. 

Glen Nelson: Laura Paulsen Howe wins the award for the longest title in the book: “‘Who Did I Leave Out and Should Have Included?’: The History and Influence of the International Art Competitions at the Church History Museum.” OK, we talked a tiny bit about her chapter which is, if I could just summarize it quickly, she's the global curator of art at the Church History Museum here in Salt Lake City across the street from Temple Square, and every two or three years they have an international competition that brings artists, hundreds of them, from all over the world. I would say they've been doing it for maybe fifteen cycles. So that's quite a long time. Many of the artists who are LDS from outside of the US were first discovered in this process. It's quite an important topic and she does a wonderful job with it. Here's her question for you. What concerns or fears did you have in taking on this project? I think we've talked about that a tiny bit. Any further thoughts on fears or concerns? 

Amanda Beardsley: I had a few when I took it on. We talked a little bit about the intimidation or maybe even some imposter syndrome that seeps into any academics project, especially as more of a junior scholar. But I think another thing for me that I was self-conscious about was my religious orientation because I'm not Mormon and I've not been LDS longer than I have been LDS. I grew up within the religion but I'm not– That gave me pause about how I might be perceived by various scholars who we work with. A lot of our scholars who we work with are within the religion, some aren't though, quite a few aren't. But I think that was just one of the things that I was a little bit like, okay, a little nervous about. I think that's something that's come with my career within Mormon Studies, riding that line of inside and outside is always a question. It's a vulnerable question because anytime we go to conferences or anything like that, there's not usually a question that involves your identity, right? But if I deliver a paper at a conference, usually it's like, oh, are you Mormon? You know, and it's like, oh, okay, like we're going to talk about this. So I think that writing a book about Mormonism is going to invite that vulnerability to some extent to talk about it, and I'm inviting this on myself as I talk to you right now. I think that was a little bit of something I just think about every now and then as I do my scholarship. 

Glen Nelson: How did you make peace with that? 

Amanda Beardsley: Oh, that's a really good question. I think that as I've grown in confidence in my work, I enjoy what I do and I enjoy speaking about it. I think that no matter what, the religion is a part of me and that's in my movements every day. Just knowing that it's a part of me has helped me, I think, know– It's who I am, right? I'm moving through the world, so what can I do about it? 

Glen Nelson: Yeah. I think insight often comes from looking from the outside in. Has it been your experience? 

Amanda Beardsley: Yeah. 

Glen Nelson: So I think some of these authors who are looking at the Church from a completely different vantage point really have fascinating things to say about it. If you were saying, OK, we're going to have a chapter on the Art and Belief movement, and we were going to reference President Kimball's admonitions to BYU fifty-five years ago, we would imagine what that chapter was going to be like. Our brains would ChatGPT it. But having somebody outside of the culture look at it would say, actually that's quite interesting because it's connected to this other thing that was going on completely outside of your religious tradition and it was a different context altogether. I find that super, super helpful. I really think it's fascinating. Analisa Coats Sato's chapter is “Being Relevant: On the BYU Department of Art in the Twenty-First Century.” This chapter might be a surprise for people. Why is it important? 

Mason Kamana Allred: Sato's chapter is really, really great in the sense that it brings a new analytical angle in hers, and that is this site specific way of thinking about artwork. Instead of going wide looking all over the world, she comes in really deeply concentrated on Brigham Young University in Provo, specifically the Art Department. What kind of art is coming out of there? What's the sort of tradition? And she really roots it in almost a micro-history. She's looking at the artwork of specifically two graduate students, Gi Huo and Dalila Sanabria. I probably slaughtered those names, but these are the two names of the artists. She's looking at how their art represents–as installation work they do towards the end of their career there, I'm assuming their senior project–the shift at BYU more generally away from more narrative representationalism towards this type of more conceptual work, which is on its own already aesthetically fascinating. But she's also teasing out how, for these two artists, it's also a way for them to express and work through what it's like to be a woman of color attending university in Provo at BYU. So the artwork's doing two things: showing that change in the art department and capturing how these women experienced the art department there. These images are necessary for the book. I remember first reading the chapter and being like, wow, what is this thing? To have the photo is really helpful because I just love the work that these women are creating and what they're trying to say through this type of work. 

Glen Nelson: The question that she asks is something that we've touched on earlier. She's asking about concerns and fears that you had in taking on this project. So let me, you know with respect to Analisa, kind of shift that a little bit. This book is going to be reviewed. Press, people, publications have already requested review copies. What do you think critics are going to make of this book? And I'd love both of you to weigh in on that.

Mason Kamana Allred: I'm being really honest, I think they're going to love it, but I think there's a couple ways where you can begin your review or end your review with some low-hanging fruit to poke holes in a few things. Like I said, Mormonism in the Pacific, huge very early on. Joseph isn't even dead yet and they're out in the Pacific doing missionary work, but there's really not much going on there in the book. So there's a few ways that I think they'll need to quickly poke holes in what could be done in the future, which is totally fine. Every book is going to have that. But on the whole, I am hoping and assuming that they'll recognize just how, as we said earlier, how groundbreaking this is, and what a gift this is not just to Latter-day Saints but really to the study of religion and art and the way they work together to create culture and to perpetuate ideas and beliefs and develop them. I think that they're going to recognize the expertise here and the potential for future work. Yeah, I think they'll love it. 

Amanda Beardsley: I feel similarly. I think as an art historian, I feel a little self-conscious on how art historians might look at it through that lens, especially the more traditional art historians who ask questions like how are you even thinking about this topic that's outside of our field. But I think that's the really rich part of this book, this interdisciplinarity that allows us to pave a more exciting road in that field and opens it up a little bit more to show alternative avenues to how it's always been done. So I would be interested to see how an art historian would review a book like this and then how a Mormon Studies historian would review it. I think there's going to be different things that they're looking for based on their own insular fields. I think that for me is something that might come up in critiques. 

Glen Nelson: I think it'll be interesting to compare publications that are LDS related to those that are broader. The book winds down by looking toward the future, which makes perfect sense to me. Chase Westfall wrote the final chapter in the book, “Toward a Latter-day Saint Contemporary Art.” Why is that an important question to pose to readers? 

Amanda Beardsley: I think this relates to one of the earlier questions about why now? What does this book give that relates to our current moment? I think Chase's chapter does a really great job at thinking about how both exhibition making as well as art making answers maybe a larger call that he gives. There have been several calls on what art should be in Mormonism. We've got Kimball's call in the 80s, and then we have Uchtdorf's characterization of it later on. With Chase, he looks at the artist more as an activist in this chapter in some ways and thinks about the ways that we can engage some of these larger issues that are happening in the real world to some extent. He surveys past efforts, and he suggests possible futures that might be more vulnerable and caring and radically open to individuality and the diverse experiences of a shared faith tradition. I think that's his call to some extent, and I think it's a beautiful call too, to think about the politicization of art and how art is also its own political message in and of itself. He does a really great job of invoking that call. 

Glen Nelson: Mason, did you have additional things to add to that? 

Mason Kamana Allred: No. It's just important to think of– He's so involved in thinking about, as an artist producing as a community, how artwork may look towards the future too. I think he already has his eye towards what this can become, which is a helpful bookend to where Terryl Givens starts us off with a theology, especially early Latter-day Saint art and what it might show, and then Chase Westfall ends us up with what's been going on, the activism, political aspects. If we're more inclusive and more open to what that art may do and look like, where we might be headed as far as Latter-day Saints creating. 

Glen Nelson: Well, the question reminds me of those sort of utopian thoughts that came out of BYU and their arts festivals in the 70s. They were asking these questions directly, and they were getting all the artists who were, granted, very geographically homogenized all on the same page on this. You won't be surprised when I say that his question to you is on these same lines that have a predictive nature to them. Having assembled, he says, and accounted for this history, what does it suggest to you about what might, could, should come next? How do you see the next 200 years of LDS art and material culture? 

Mason Kamana Allred: I have no idea how to answer the 200 year question. We've talked quite a bit about the scholarly hope of inspiring new iterations of this type of a project or ways of expanding it, but since we're talking about the artwork as a community too, I would love to see more of a sense of that appreciation, support, criticism, just care and love for Latter-day Saint Art. Where you're at, Glen, with the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, this is what you're all about. If you had that same sense of your Center all over the world, at least ingrained in people's minds to take very seriously and to get more familiar with stuff that's already out there in the Latter-day Saint tradition and to help push and create for more, that artists coming up would feel like ‘I connect to a very deep, rich history of creators, and I want to do this now, something new and push it new directions.’ I feel like there's been too much of a disconnection with creating a public that loves and supports and critiques this to help artists want to create more and be a little more radical and push it in new directions. My hope would be that in 200 years it would almost be some of these familiar contours we've seen, but maybe almost unrecognizable in some senses as far as the new directions it's gone and new creations we would see. But I have no idea. I’m not a prophet. 

Amanda Beardsley: I think this also gets at Nathan's question about why aren't there any contemporary artists featured in Deseret Book? Maybe in 200 years, Deseret Book will be more open to exhibiting these artists and to having those kinds of conversations that really do allow for a little bit more critique of the Church itself, because I think that a lot of the contemporary artists do give some really interesting critiques based on their individual experiences. I think in 200 years, my prediction is that Deseret Book will have more art books of contemporary artists. 

Mason Kamana Allred: Won't that be like you're no longer punk rock. You sold out if you're at Deseret book. You know what I mean? I don't know how that's going to–

Amanda Beardsley: [laughs] Because 200 years from now it won't be contemporary anymore. 

Glen Nelson: I will admit I'm a little bit more interested in what's going to be in ten years. 

Amanda Beardsley: Yeah. 

Glen Nelson: Are the two of you prepared? You're going to be seen now as the experts on all this stuff.

Amanda Beardsley: I'm sorry, but I'm kind of curious because you are so entrenched in the art scene, too. I'm kind of curious what your answer would be to this question, and in the ten years. If you don’t mind me asking you that.

Glen Nelson: All right. Oh, I'm a happy-go-lucky person. I'll answer a question. OK, what does it suggest to you what might, should, could come next? I've mentioned this a couple of times in the past, but I'll restate it here. I hear from an artist who's a member of the Church somewhere in the world almost every day, and I think that is the future. I like the usual suspects. These are friends. I'm on their Christmas card list. Thank you for being nice to me. I really like you. I like the work you make. So nothing against them. But these new artists that I'm meeting, this guy from Zimbabwe who is now a friend of mine, he's in his 20s and he's in art school; and this guy from Mexico who's coming to Salt Lake City tomorrow to install an art installation at the Church History Museum, Ricardo Rendón, I consider him to be the most important LDS artist alive right now. I think it's all about curiosity and exposure. I would hope that what might, should, could come next is the audience, including the institution and the corporate audience, will be curious. Money is going to go where money wants to go. So if artists who are outside of the predictable group arrive and they're embraced– And I think Jorge Coco is the perfect example of this. Oh, they're picked up quite quickly, thank you very much, by institutions and publications and stores, and good for him. Good for him. He got commissioned by the Queen to do stamps for London two years ago for Christmas. Like, good on him. He paid his dues. He was an abstract artist in Argentina all those years, and then hit upon something that was meaningful to him and meaningful to other people. So hooray for that. About the 200 years, I really don't know. I suspect I won't care too much. 

Amanda Beardsley: I wonder if we would have as many books as there are on Catholic art. 

Glen Nelson: But I do think, though, that when we say books aren't around, I think conversation isn't around. I would love for there to be a lot of conversation. I do this thing each week, the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts produces this art companion for its weekly curriculum of study. People with teenagers sometimes will talk to me, and they'll say, we can't get our kids to read the scriptures with us. It's too hard. They don't want to do it. But if we start with a painting and then we talk about it, pretty soon everybody's chatting and then we slide in the scriptures. I think that instead of thinking about art as an illustration to prove our point, art can be a way that we enter into the discussion of why the point matters in the first place. That sounded a little soapbox-y at the end, didn't it? 

Mason Kamana Allred: Well said. I like it. 

Glen Nelson: Finally, Laura Allred Hurtado wrote an Afterword in the book, “A Culture (and Its Artifacts) in Search of Self.” What is her Afterword about? 

Mason Kamana Allred: So Laura Allred Hurtado is integral to this book, as we spoke about earlier, especially its inception and conceptualization. She provides this afterword to sort of get a little bit personal in her own experience across a few different paradigms and relationships with Mormonism, to think about the community at large, how this is obviously not just her, and this inherent tension she talks about where there's this desire, she says, within the Latter-day Saint tradition to be a peculiar people, to be a singular group. But there's also always an attendant longing to be accepted, to be worthy, to be looked at and thought about, to belong within the larger context. This is really important when you think about art, and that's what she's doing through this afterward. For Latter-day Saints, they want to have an artistic tradition, maybe some of them, but at the same time, how do they fit in or what is that desire to fit into the larger art circles and art world and so forth? She takes this as an opportunity to think back on the book itself, some of the moments throughout it, her own life, to think about those inherent tensions that are actually sometimes a bit raw but also quite productive for the creation and appreciation of art.

Glen Nelson: Amanda? 

Amanda Beardsley: I think it's a beautiful afterward on both where she's at with thinking through her personal identity, and this reminds me of the question about the fears. I related to her chapter a lot because it's like, how do you put a definition around something? Why is there this discomfort of creating those parameters around that definition and what is inside and what is outside of that? For me, I think it does also really speak well to the Foreword where it asks this larger question of, what is it? And we end with, what is it? We still don't quite know. There's all these things, and there's these themes, and there's these things I personally experienced, but what is it and why? It's a little existential in that way, I think in a really lovely way. I definitely related to it as I was reading, and I hope readers would as well, because at stake in a lot of these conversations is our cultural memory and history and who we are as a people and what it means to be human, too, as we attach ourselves to certain cosmologies. That's how I took Laura's chapter, to be the person who worked with you and Richard in the beginning, to say the last word I think is very appropriate. 

Glen Nelson: I agree with that. She has a question for the two of you. I think we've covered the first part of the question, which is about what you might have learned and new stories and new ideas through the process. But this second part of it that deals a little bit more with identity might be novel enough to tackle to end our discussion today. How do you see this publication influencing culture, conversation and identity in coming years? 

Mason Kamana Allred: The question that would keep coming up and has come up in this conversation is sort of, what is Mormon art? This is going to be important for cultural production because we tried to set this up in the Intro as almost an agreement. We promise we'll keep asking that question, but we're more interested in provoking new questions. We think it's actually going to be more helpful to ask new questions. I'm hoping that will be the cultural ripple effect, that it's not so much to be obsessive about what is or isn't Mormon art and what are exactly those delineations. It's more like, what's the new questions we can ask about these? I think these chapters help showcase that in new ways. So I'm hoping the more, like you said, the curiosity, new questions about the scholarly endeavor of appreciating this artwork, but then on the other side, new questions about creation and artwork and new things that can be done that still connect with Mormonism somehow but push it in new directions is what I'm hoping to see. 

Amanda Beardsley: My hope is that, I mean, of course– It's funny because you hope that your book is going to change the world, right? This is a book about Mormon art history, and I find it to be one of the most important projects I've ever worked on in my life, and I'm very, very proud of it. But for those who read it and are open to it, I do hope that it continues, like Mason said, to provoke and incite curiosity. Whether the ideas rub you the wrong way, I would hope that that creates a conversation in and of itself. My hope culturally is that it creates more discourse, that it continues to make us sit down and have conversations about what these things mean and what are the stakes of how we represent ourselves and how we represent people outside of ourselves. If we can learn from those instances historically, like we learn from Paul and Carlyle's chapters, then how can we make ourselves better as a people? What are the case studies that allow us to not repeat history? Culturally, I would hope that–as a historian and as someone who loves art as much as I do–I would hope that people can use that as a case study. 

Glen Nelson: Okay, we did it, Mason! We did it, Amanda! I want to thank you, and I want to thank the authors of Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader for their brilliant work, of course, and also for helping me by sending questions for Mason and Amanda. There's one more thing that I haven't mentioned that I just can't end this without thanking. If you think about two dozen scholars working that many years, this is a very expensive book. It takes a lot of energy to write quality work. You can't ask for people to do their best work for free most of the time. So we have to thank the donors to the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, some of whom wrote very generous checks, because they saw there was something going on with this book in particular that could move the needle. One additional thing, the book is available almost anywhere you buy books. There's an e-book edition that's around thirty something bucks, and there's a hardcover book. Now, when you have hardcover books that are 650 pages and have 200 full color images printed at a very high level and they're hardcover books, those are extremely expensive if you ever have to go to a bookstore and buy books of this type. We had donors who gave money specifically to subsidize the cost of the book, the retail price of it, so anybody could buy this book. I mean, I am so grateful to them. I'm sure Oxford was like, are you kidding? I've never heard of such a thing. But that was something that we really, really cared about, and it just wouldn't have happened without the real generosity. We don't receive money from the Church. We are a nonprofit 501c3. We exist solely because of the gracious goodness of people who think that we're doing some interesting things. So thank you to the authors. Thank you to you, too. Thank you, really, to these donors and the team at the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. Mykal Urbina is our Executive Director who has really shepherded this through these last couple of years in particular. OK, listeners, I hope this discussion today has been curiosity-inducing enough for you to look out for Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader, which is in your favorite bookseller shop today. My thanks to Mason and Amanda for being my guests today and for your brilliant work that made every chapter in this book better because of your insight, persistence, keen eyes, and gentle nudging toward excellence. Do you have any final thoughts? 

Amanda Beardsley: Just thank you. Thank you. Thank you. What a dream this has made come true. Thank you to the donors and thank you, Latter-day Arts Center. Thank you, Glen, for keeping us afloat.

Mason Kamana Allred: Thank you everyone, and we hope you enjoy this fantastic book. 

Glen Nelson: You can learn more about the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts by going to our website, www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org, and you can learn more about the book there as well. Bye-bye.