By Glen Nelson

The hypothesis of The Season seemed inevitable: emerging from a pandemic that infected nearly 700 million of the planet’s 8 billion people and killed 6,955,497 as of August 24, 2023—including members of my immediate family and some of my friends—artists who are LDS and their art were bound to be affected. Tiptoeing back to public performances, exhibitions, and publications after almost two years of lockdowns, dealing with emotional fallout from isolation, and innumerable cancellations and postponements of projects, how would these artist’s works have changed as a result of this global disaster? 

The Center for Latter-day Saint Arts is the leading authority and resource on the full range of creative arts by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so we felt it was incumbent upon us to take a year and document every possible concert, recording, publication, exhibition, podcast, and performance worldwide by LDS creative artists to be able to answer this question: What is happening right now? Our format was in two parts: a monthly online magazine of articles and features about art and an ongoing calendar of events with information and links to everything we could find.

As it turned out, the pandemic was only part of the story. The art world is also roiling from era-defining battles of other kinds. Wars and violence, rising hate crimes, widespread distrust, social upheavals, protests, boycotts, union strikes, contagions of addiction and epidemic levels of anxiety and mental illness, fear and anger everywhere, concerns of potential disruptions from AI, shifting tastes and spending habits of audiences, inflation, incendiary discourse on social media, book bans and school play cancellations, rebalances of racial, gender, and class expectations with corresponding new voices to be heard and others to be canceled: all of these things impact artists and the work they make.

In total, we captured and wrote about some 2,000 works and events. The Season included 185 articles, interviews, original scholarship, commissioned images and music, and notices of new works and events written by 66 contributing authors and artists. We polled our editorial board for lists of music, books, podcasts, and events that they were interested in. We published letters from readers. We made playlists and searchable spreadsheets of new works. We noted artists who had passed away during the year. We featured two product catalogs—one a Christmas gift guide, and the other a Summer guide. 

Given all the potential ways to look at the works, what we did not do was filter them. It was liberating to be free of judgment regarding the categorizing of a work as good, better, best. Our mantra was: Gather everything. There are works that represent the full range of opinion, too. There were works that thrilled us and some that repelled us, which is only fair and to be expected, given the broad spectrum of individuals involved. Our sole concern was to chronicle art made by LDS people, and as is our way at the Center, which resides in the intersection of divine creativity and social relevance, we were as inclusive with that definition as possible. 

I served as The Season’s editor and did the majority of the event listings research. Our publisher was Mykal Urbina, our communications chair was Emily Larsen Doxford, our editorial board was: Charlie Bird, Ted Bushman, Kathie Debenham, Gabriel González, Brian Kershisnik, Jeff Parkin, Arisael Rivera, Madeline Rupard, Joël René Scoville, Benjamin Dean Taylor, Kwani Povi Winder, and Warren Winegar, and our designers were Connor King (graphic design) and Megan Eckersley (website design)—fascinating artists and wonderful colleagues, all.

Now to make a little sense of it. What were the questions The Season sought to ask?

• Would new voices emerge, and who would they be?

• Where would the audiences for these artists come from?

• What artists would have a breakout year?

• What impact would the pandemic have thematically on new works?

• Who is doing exceptional work to support these artists?

• How many LDS artists are there, and why aren’t there even more works to catalog?

• What are the choke points for awareness and interest in art by LDS people?

• What larger trends could be charted? 

• What dividends would an in-depth look at our art landscape yield for the Center itself?

I’ll make an attempt to answer them.

1. Would new voices emerge, and who would they be?

There is no humility like the prostrate confession of ignorance. I will only speak for myself from here on out in this article, so I have to begin this report by saying that I thought I knew a lot about the art of LDS people, but maybe I don’t. I have to own up to a new fact that shakes my confidence: I was shocked (and happily so) by all of the names that were entirely new to me that I encountered this year. Emerging artists are always appearing on the scene—think of all those recent college graduates. Still, there are many, many, many LDS creative artists out there right now, and I have much to learn about them. 

I would say that the most intriguing new voices in LDS art today are coming from outside the U.S. In a couple of cases, they are the most prolific, too. Ricardo Rendón of Mexico City, Mexico is the best example, in my view. Almost every month I found a new exhibition of his sculpture somewhere in the world…and his music…and books about his work. I imagine the cities showing these exhibitions had likely never had another LDS artist’s work on display. Another sterling case study is the husband and wife team of Aaron Toronto and Nha Uyen Ly Nguyen of Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam. Their film, The Brilliant Darkness! won the Vietnamese Oscar equivalent for best film last year including best screenplay by Toronto and Nguyen and best actress (Nguyen). It was Toronto’s feature film directorial debut. It is a testament to everything that matters in fine art: it is meaningful, skillful, beautiful, and impactful. The social discussions that emerged from this very successful film have caused laws to be rewritten in the country; it’s that powerful. Another example, also in film, is Luis Fernando Puente, a young Mexican American writer/director, whose short film, I Have No Tears, and I Must Cry, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and then made pit stops at so many other U.S. film festivals that I could hardly keep up. Puente is a new voice of importance, but for me, an equally exciting piece of the story is his community of filmmakers, recently coming from BYU, who share his immigrant background. They are writers, directors, actors, cinematographers, film score composers, and crew—all of them LDS and all of them wanting to tell their personal stories in daring, uncompromising ways. 

There are far too many more examples to mention, of course, but especially surprising to me, was the large group of fiction and non-fiction writers who are LDS. I wanted to start The Season by looking at all of the books by LDS authors I could find that were already published in the year 2022 (our first issue was September of that year). I found 209, and by the end of our project, that number had grown to 511. It’s a big number, but it should be even larger. Who knows how many titles I missed. Self-published books are difficult to discover; academic and literary journals publish multiple author’s works that I often failed to break out and catalog; poetry is a constant challenge to find because those works often appear in scattered literary journals; and I’m sure that many books slipped through my fingers because I simply didn’t know where to look. 

It appears that Covid gave authors a rare commodity for creation: unscheduled time to write. Several of these authors had multiple books appear this year. Some of the titles were issued by the most important publishing houses in the English-speaking world. These authors penned solo books, co-authored books, contributed to anthologies, and in the much-reported case of Brandon Sanderson, who set a $41 million Kickstarter record for four new novels written during the pandemic, became entrepreneurial to a stunning degree. 

This is probably the place to note that politically, LDS artists are all over the map—the opposite of the lockstep stereotype—and publishing is the clearest demonstration of that range. There are books from these authors that are conspiracy theory-laden, books that attack politicians of both major parties, books that are religiously devout in character as well as others who chronicle the pain of no longer believing in the faith, at all. There are books that are scholarly and others that are pure opinion. There are romances, sci-fi epic series, humorous books, books aimed at every aged reader, and literary novels. Stacks of memoirs were published—in other cultures many would likely have been developed as novels—as well as books about celebrities or by celebrities. It went beyond the scope of The Season, but to my mind, another notable group of books included those written about our culture by others. 

2. Where would the audiences for these artists come from?

The big questions for those on the production side of art—the publishers, performance producers, exhibition venue management, and so forth—was simply this: When would they be allowed to reopen for business and would audiences return for art when they did? Some disciplines benefited from new circumstances. No surprise: reading soared. In the UK in the early months of the pandemic, reading doubled. But at the same time, in-person art forms found the biggest challenge in a generation. Broadway, for example, has a motto “The show must go on.” And indeed, other than a couple of short strikes in 1975 and 2007, cancellations, as My Fair Lady’s Eliza Doolittle would say, “Hardly ever happen.” Even after the 9/11 bombings, New York shows reopened their doors defiantly just two days later. But Covid changed all of that, and the uncertainty of when/whether things would get back to the new abnormal were undecided for eighteen long, profit-destroying, career hibernating months. 

LDS musicians and bands were all in the same boat. Touring? Out of the question. Some were able to get into a recording studio, but without the ability to perform live to drive record sales, their business was stymied. Perhaps as a consequence of the above, 2022-2023 was a boom period for touring musicians, once venues worldwide reopened. As I cataloged the bands with LDS singer-songwriters in them—The Killers, Panic! At the Disco, Neon Trees, Imagine Dragons, The National Parks, Kaskade, The Aquabats, Lindsey Stirling, LOW, Six, The Piano Guys, Mat and Savanna Shaw, Merrill Osmond, Jenny Oaks Baker, Jacob Kahlil, Rosevelt, Goldie and the Guise, Ammon and Liahona Olayan, Silver Cup, Gentri, The Moss, and many others, I imagined how exhausted they must be from nearly endless touring. I imagine that they were trying to refill their coffers, but every other band in the world had the same idea. In numerous cases, the biggest of these bands had concerts almost every night or every other night for months at a time, spaced out with just enough to fly from Rio to Sāo Paulo or from L.A. to Vegas.

Film and TV audiences continued their tidal shift of I-want-it-right-now streaming, and some of the biggest projects in the industry this year included LDS creatives: Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (John D. Payne and Patrick McKay), Cinco Paul’s continuing outpouring of blockbuster content: Minions: The Rise of Gru and Schimigadoon!: Season 2, film composer Chris Bacon’s multiple high-profile projects including his Emmy award-nominated Wednesday, his Strong Enough and 65, and an exciting group of LDS composers for video games. These are but a few examples.

LDS cinema, it seems to me, is in an exciting new era that is quite distinct from the made-in-Utah, made-for-Utah mentality of a generation ago, and it is reflected by its broader audience. On one hand, there are the works made for Christian audiences—Angel Studios continues to push deeper into high return projects like Sound of Freedom and digital-release projects. Then there are the LDS filmmakers who are turning to the genre of horror with compelling results. BYU-TV continues to be a force producing and distributing works that are sometimes pitched to LDS viewers and other times deliberately not aimed at them, exclusively. And then, there are the breakthroughs of auteur filmmakers and studio-system filmmakers who are looking for audiences of much more diverse types, but including LDS people. Many seem to be finding funding. 

Finally, there are important films and TV projects that while they are not made by LDS people have LDS characters in them—everything from the Oscar-winning The Whale to several series that run a broad range of agendas. Casual references to the Church in increasingly nuanced ways are scattered about so commonly as to make a sighting of them about as eventful as a passing butterfly. There is one thing I am not seeing much, and I expect and hope to see more in the future: these same LDS filmmakers could be creating rich, complex, perhaps flawed but real characters who are LDS, in their works. I want to see a Mormon Jack Ryan, Ted Lasso, and Janine Teagues (of Abbott Elementary).

3. What artists would have a breakout year?

Naming just one or a few is a bad idea for a host of reasons. Still, I would say that the most portentous emerging artists—other than the four mentioned earlier (Ricardo Rendón, Aaron Toronto and Nha Uyen Ly Nguyen, and Luis Fernando Puente) are writers Tacey M. Atsitty and Rachel Rueckert. 

Atsitty is a winner of the Wisconsin Brittingham Prize for her first book of poetry, Rain Scald (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). A quick bio: “Tacey M. Atsitty, Diné (Navajo), is Tsénahabiłnii (Sleep Rock People) and born for Ta’neeszahnii (Tangle People). The recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships, Atsitty is an inaugural Indigenous Nations Poets fellow and holds degrees from Brigham Young University, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Cornell University. The author of Rain Scald, she is the director of the Navajo Film Festival, a member of the Advisory Board for BYU’s Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, and a board member for Lightscatter Press. Atsitty is a PhD student in creative writing at Florida State University.” Here is a poet of great imagination who is blending her Diné culture, and as a blurb for Rain Scald notes, “…the poems negotiate between belief and doubt, self and family, and interior and exterior landscapes.” Her new collection is due in November, (At) Wrist (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). 

Rachel Rueckert’s first book was published this year, East Winds (By Common Consent Press, 2023), a memoir about her journey to discover what marriage means, undertaken while on her honeymoon trip backpacking around the world. Her short bio: “Rachel Rueckert is an award-winning author, editor, and teacher. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University as well as an M.Ed from Boston University. Rachel specializes in creative nonfiction, historical fiction, ghostwriting, and curriculum design.” She is currently the editor-in-chief of the quarterly, Exponent II. In 2024, expect two historical fiction novels from Rueckert, published by Kensington Books. The first is If the Tide Turns, due March 2024. I would suggest that both of these writers, as well as the previous four artists, have the potential to shift what we think LDS art is about, whom it’s for, and why it matters.

4. What impact would the pandemic have thematically on new works?

The Center had a call for submissions in the early days of the pandemic. Titled Art for Uncertain Times, our goal was to give a little money to artists who were hurting, including a subsequent call aimed at children artists. The online collection and later an exhibition curated at the Center Gallery in New York by Emily Larsen Doxford, revealed LDS artists working in different genres and responding to Covid and its impact on their lives. Some of the images were surprising, including a photograph by Emily Wall showing her family sort of happy to be forced to be together. It was as if the little kids were saying, “Woo-hoo, this is the most time I’ve spent with my parents in my whole life!” There were also poignant works about loss and loneliness that still haunt me. 

Still, aside from isolated gestures toward the pandemic, I would generalize and say that LDS artists have been less embracing of it as a topic than other works I’m seeing in the last year. In the theater, for example, nearly every new play I attend in New York has a reference to the awkwardness, weirdness, and disorientation of the pandemic, if not its tragedy. Playwrights are finding rich material about the human condition and isolation, about the ways people sought normalcy in a surreal time. At the very least, it is subtext for every story of contemporary life. I’m reading similarly layered approaches in newly published novels and short stories, but not as much by LDS artists. I’m not sure why that is. It’s certainly true that I haven’t read everything. Maybe I’m missing disproving examples, but I also wonder whether LDS artists living in the West, where my Utah friends often joked that Covid never happened, simply don’t find it compelling. They don’t see the drama in it. 

Going into the depths of Covid, I also expected artists to take the newfound chunk of time to undertake hugely ambitious projects, the kinds of things that they would not have had the bandwidth to tackle otherwise, and consider radically changing their aesthetic, reinventing themselves, and emerging with new artistic identities. A big disruption sometimes yields a big breakthrough. I’m also not seeing that in LDS arts right now, either. When I consider art, literary, and music history emerging after world wars and times of global illness, for example, I see those moments as catalysts for new approaches to art and philosophy: a stark before and after in the timeline of art history. It’s premature to say so, maybe there’s more of a lag time involved, but so far, I don’t see LDS artists attempting such seismic course shifts. It might be fascinating to track how that evolves.

5. Who is doing exceptional work to support these artists?

Maybe it’s surprising, but I’d say that the podcasters are leading the way, here. Our list of podcasts featured 211 current shows, many of them monthly or weekly. They are on-the-ground critics. They are talking to people who are doing and making things, and frequently they are artists themselves or they are speaking to artists who are LDS. There was some internal debate whether to include podcasting in a publication about the arts, but I feel that if you include non-fiction authors, documentary filmmakers, and others like them, podcasters are doing a commendable service in creating content, and they merit attention, too. 

It’s my opinion that the LDS-related associations are vital, as well, regarding the arts. I am thinking of the Association for Mormon Letters, the academic journal publications that feature art and arts reporting, performing arts entities that often include LDS creative artists, and a newer crop of organizations determined to service the artists themselves in terms of business development, training, and networking. 

Apparently, there is some group tasked with adding LDS citations to online publications—Wikipedia is the prime example of this effort now. I know it because my own Wiki page is continually updated and includes lots of LDS-related things. As I research artists, celebrities, and people of note who are LDS, there is almost always a mention of their Church membership. That might creep some people out, but I find it normalizing, and given how very common it is to list people’s religious affiliations and backgrounds on these sites, regardless of their current religious practice, it feels smart to me: a Dumbledore’s army of LDS champions.

There are some published criticism and reviews of books by authors who are LDS—there could be much more—but the other art forms could use far more attention in the form of art criticism and art historical discussion. I was impressed this year by Heather Belnap who had multiple books, papers, and presentations on LDS art-related topics, one of the few scholars this year to bridge academic writing at an elevated level with LDS art history. If there is scant visual art criticism featuring LDS contemporary artists, 15 Bytes is a noteworthy exception, covering the visual art gallery and museum scene of Utah. I’m unaware of any sustained and recurring criticism or scholarship on contemporary film, music, dance, architecture, or design by LDS artists anywhere in print. The artists would benefit from it, and their potential audience would, too. 

At the risk of…I don’t know what…I want to add that local attention for art is valuable and wonderful. I’m thinking especially of Utah here. What is absent from it, often, is attention to religious identity, even when elements of the work are themselves derived from LDS culture or theology. I can hardly imagine a serious publication writing about an artist, let’s say from Bali, that doesn’t reference the nationality, heritage, or culture in the body of the article describing the Balinese art and artist. I think writers should be less fearful of engaging religious identity in their writing of LDS artists. It is prejudice by omission. Meanwhile, accomplished LDS artists around the world are writing to me and talking about how isolated they feel. I can’t help but think that this regionalism at the expense of religious identity has an unintended consequence of marginalization. 

6. How many LDS artists are there, and why aren’t there even more works to catalog?

To conduct research during the last year, I relied on the databases that the Center has—a couple of thousand visual artists and a similar number of composers, for example. And we asked artists to share with the Center notifications of upcoming events. My inbox always had some fun discoveries, for which I’m grateful. I kept my eye on postings of events quite closely for a year, as well. I would review every name on our databases, look at their websites and social media channels, all with the hope of finding upcoming events—concerts, exhibitions, publications, and so forth. I predict that The Season will be the seed for even more databases of creative artists within the Center.

Again generalizing, I’d note that the majority of LDS artists are not featured often in public events. They may be painters frequently in their studios working, but gallery and museum exhibitions of their works are rare. I should add that a few venues in Utah specialize in large group shows that have given a sizable number of local LDS artists access to collectors and the press. JKR Gallery and Writ and Vision in Provo are exemplary community builders in that respect, and the Springville Art Museum is invaluable. It’s hard for most artists to gain such access. I don’t see it as a division between professional and amateur, and I don’t think that statement minimizes artists who are not paying the rent with their art. It does, however, place an increased burden on scholars and others to dig deeper to find art that might be a bit hidden. The history of art is full of monumental discoveries of those who labored under the radar, in some cases, for their entire lives.

During the year, the Center had a couple of calls for arts submissions. One was for visual artists to create a piece for a New York art gallery show on the theme of music; another was an application for The Artists Residency at the Center, a week-long residency in New York City. In both instances, we received many submissions from all over the world, which was tremendously gratifying and proof that our mission to broaden the discussion is working. As the submissions arrived, I recognized more than half of the artists. Again and again, however, I would look at names new to me and marvel how accomplished and exciting their projects were. I’ll add another caveat: and how serious they were about their work. 

Many artists have not exhibited work this past year. That’s an important distinction because their work is certainly worthy of finding its way into the public eye, and I believe it will, but if one looks only at the work from the past year, there will be many artists’ names who have all the hallmarks of excellence who simply don’t have a 2022-23 exhibition, performance, or publication credit. 

7. What are the choke points for awareness and interest in art by LDS people?

How to answer this without getting into a lot of trouble? Let’s see how diplomatic I can be. I joke with friends about this all the time. I say that I have a permanent dent in my forehead from banging my head against the wall to try to interest LDS members in the art of their own people. I don’t entirely understand the deficit, and I’m getting old and wondering whether I ever will understand it. But despite the fact that there are artists who would easily connect with every stripe of LDS person there is, artists who are of great quality, or who are super-accessible, or who have all the trappings of acceptance and excellence anyone could hope for, there simply are too few people who care. (Dear reader, I hope you are an exception.) 

Furthermore, there lacks an institutional venue to pull it all together. There’s no publication that seeks to talk about the totality of LDS art, either. There’s no museum that attempts to tell an encyclopedic story of the visual art of our people. There’s no record label that tries to tell a full story of our composers. Regarding literature, publishers are trying, and I would say that BCC Press is an important recent addition to our literary production, but it is difficult for audiences to discover what is out there by LDS artists, and the problem is particularly acute once we talk about art other than by English-speaking people. There’s no archive of LDS artworks that seeks to be comprehensive, in any artistic discipline. There are some BYU databases that are helpful, but some are abandoned and out of date. We are a record-keeping, entrepreneurial people; there must be solutions for this. 

Of course, the artists themselves don’t want to be put in a box of claustrophobic Mormonness, but I’m saying something different. There are people who would support these artists, love them, and champion them…if they could find them and locate people to help understand them. There’s certainly the infrastructure to build awareness for the grand history of our art at Church schools and affiliated schools, for example—a single university president’s memo could change this regrettable problem almost instantly—but there seems to be no institutional will to teach about nor expose LDS students to such things. The consequences are, in my opinion, tragic.

Meanwhile, technology is doing something quite interesting regarding awareness. Every artist’s Instagram feed is building its own collector base. Followers may not ever purchase anything—let’s say, in the visual arts—but they have on their phones a sort of private, curated art collection. I was at a ward event recently, and somebody asked about LDS artists; everybody whipped out their phones and showed me image after image of LDS painters and their most recent works. They follow these artists very carefully and discover new LDS artists by seeking their peers’ faves. Many LDS visual artists are quite well-followed, even if they lack gallery representation and other markers of traditional careers. The flip side to that is the unprofitable (and perhaps unsustainable) expectation that all their art be digital and shareable, that art is free, that the consumption of art is viewed by perpetually scanning and the work itself as nearly disposable. Frequently, images online are skeletally described, cited, and photographed, which drives scholars and collectors crazy.

One more bottleneck to awareness is the lack of public access to LDS museum collections online. I know they’re working on it, but there are amazing things in the basements of the Church History Museum, BYU Museum of Art, and other institutions with sizable collections of works by LDS artists that you simply can’t access because the websites aren’t able to share them yet. Compare their websites to the richly-funded institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Museum of Modern Art, and you’ll see the potential for average viewers—both members of the Church and others—to find exposure to life-changing works of many kinds. It needs to happen. I was at the Modern a couple of times last week, and I loved a giant work of AI-generated art by a Turkish American artist named Refik Anadol. He had full access to the museum’s online collection, and the media program he created and projected on a huge lobby wall took those digital works and turned them into gorgeous, morphing images right before my eyes. What might happen if the Church History Museum let someone play around with AI and their beautiful collection?

8. What larger trends could be charted?

Covid accelerated a number of art consumption behaviors that were previously underway. Reading and streaming video content blew up during lockdown, for obvious reasons. Social media engagement likewise jumped. The average person of working age spends 2.5 hours a day on social media platforms now. That might be good news for artists. But here’s a stat that artists aren’t going to like. What is the average amount of time someone looks at a social media post? Trigger warning: It’s not good. The attention span, even for a video, is only 1.7 seconds if they’re on mobile and a relatively luxurious 2.5 second on a desktop computer. Nor is liking content quite the indicator of engagement that it appears. The average range of Instagram likes per account is 36-60 per day. Scrolling and liking, liking and scrolling. What does a “like” really mean, anyway? It’s not very sticky.

All things considered, looking at visual art in person isn’t that profound for most people, either. The average duration somebody in a museum looks at an artwork is only between 15 and 30 seconds. Some museums are trying to slow visitors down by inviting them to take pictures of themselves in front of the art and post them online. (Worldwide “MuseumSelfie” day was January 22, in case you didn’t know.) At least while taking a selfie with art, the reasoning goes, people will stop to pose and get the shot just right. I’m unconvinced. Unless you have a photographic memory, what kind of art can be appreciated this way? I’m all for love at first sight, but total sighting durations have to be longer than a few seconds. 

The diminishing digital attention span trend plays into LDS arts, too. Name recognition trumps curiosity when you’re robo-scrolling; the usual suspects retain a disproportionate hold on viewers, readers, and listeners. It is already a problem that artists in Utah have an outsized influence on the broader cultural output because the official media and headquarters are based there, and Church tastemakers often look close to home for examples of art to share, perform, and use. Pity the person trying to buck that trend. The ability of critics, scholars, and arts advocates to explain new LDS works is increasingly challenging—and speaking of challenging, works that are difficult to grasp are unlikely to gain much of a following after such a drive-by art experience. To my mind, that’s just one more reason why arts education is imperative and LDS arts exposure for members of the Church is so crucial.

9. What dividends would an in-depth look at our art landscape yield for the Center itself?

This whole thing was Mykal Urbina’s fault—I mean, idea. She is the Center’s executive director. Unfortunately, when multiple people at the Center get together, ideas likewise multiply, and quickly, a little over a year ago, we were talking about a huge undertaking of The Season. I was into it because I love magazines, and I imagined my weekly delivery of The New Yorker and bimonthly Art in America at my doorstep except, what if they were about LDS art? It was too tantalizing to pass up.

It was an experiment and a valuable one for many reasons. I’ll start with the personal. I met so many wonderful people this year. I loved meeting with the editorial board every month. I wish everyone could sit with LDS people like this and brainstorm and network. They were like improv comedians. To every idea, they would respond, “Yes, and….” Marvelous, meaningful fun. 

Related to that was the joy of meeting more artists of the Church. I would often encounter their work randomly and write them a fan letter out of the blue, “You don’t know me, but.…” They probably thought I was wacky, but as proof of their generosity, they would often spend time with me on the phone or have long exchanges of emails chatting about their work and their lives. Maybe I’m a pushover for experiences like that, and maybe another consequence of Covid was my eagerness to come out of my shell a bit and meet new people. The thing I’ve discovered about all of this is that every human has a beautiful story to tell, and once you get past the bland, surface responses that all of us are so programmed to give, artists are some of the most generous and self-revealing people on the planet, and LDS artists, perhaps, doubly so. Should I confess that I love them? I do.

Regarding the Center and its future, though, The Season accomplished much more than we could have anticipated, even if the lessons learned were not entirely about Covid. It solidified ideas that I had been considering for a long time, namely that the all-or-nothing, black and white version of the culture doesn’t really work today. To truly understand the art and artist, you have to take them where they are right now, without judgment nor agenda. You can’t project onto them what you wish they would deliver. There’s trust involved; if you want their best work—and that’s the kind of work that can change your life—you have to give them your best and most accepting and appreciating self in exchange. 

The main takeaway of The Season is the most obvious: the sheer number of artists who are LDS is both overwhelming and glorious. Our organization will never run out of content to share. Never.

It makes me a little sad to end this project and nervous, too. I have other, even bigger Center things on the horizon (no spoilers, here). Still, without the excuse to constantly prowl for new works, I know I will be missing out. I’ll need you to write and tell me what just happened. glen@centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org