Your Final Project
Children/teens/adults - Lesson 5: Your final project
Now it’s time to bring the tools of Art at Home together—Art Creation, Art History, Art Criticism, and Aesthetics—in order to explore an art work or object. Although this course has presented these four lenses separately in order to isolate their points of view, the real-world application is that we explore an art work or object using multiple lenses at once. One tool informs another.
As a final project—are you ready?—select one or more of the three works below and use all that you have learned in this course to think about and talk about them. One comes from the 19th century, one from the 20th, and one from the 21st century. They are, from left to right, below, an object, a painting, and a sculpture: nature-made, woman-made, and man-made, respectively. We’ll provide some basic information, online links, and questions to get you started. The rest is up to you. Create a response and share it with us. We will post it at the bottom of this page.
How will you use the tools of Art at Home? Here’s a quick review:
Art Creation - Can you create an original work that responds in some way to the art work or object?
Art History - Can you study the art work or object by finding answers to these questions?
What do I see?
Who made it?
What was the person who make it like?
Do you know what the person looked like?
Where did it come from?
When was it made?
Whom was it made for?
What do you think its purpose was? How was it used?
What tools were used to make it?
What is it made out of?
Have you seen other objects like it before?
How do you imagine that people responded to it or used it?
Art Criticism - Can you interpret the art work or object by reacting to these questions?
What do you know about it?
Can you find anything written about the work or, if applicable, the artist?
Has anybody before you tried to interpret it?
Are there any clues to its interpretation?
Does it remind you of any other works?
If you find the work troubling, describe why? Analyze your own reaction.
What do you think the artist is trying to convey?
What does it make you feel?
What does it make you think about?
What choices did the artist make to create the work and what were their goals?
Do you think the artist wants the viewer to be able to interpret the work in depth?
How would others have reacted to this work when it was created?
Aesthetics - Can the philosophical questions of Aesthetics help you to value the art work or object?
What is art?
What is beauty, the sublime?
What is the process of judging something that is either beautiful or ugly?
What is the purpose of art?
Does the functionality of an object negate its artfulness?
What is aesthetic experience?
What merits a distinction of “fine art” relative to something else?
What is the nature of judgment?
What are the differences between the questions “Do I like it?” and “Is it good?”
What makes something valuable?
Who determines the meaning of an artwork or object?
What is taste and where does it come from?
Does art have an objective meaning, or does it take on meaning as time passes?
What is the relationship of truth and artistic judgment?
Do different arts require different metrics of judgment?
How do race, class, and gender affect Aesthetics?
Any combination of these questions can assist you to respond to visual works.
Now select one of the works and explore it, deeply.
Seer Stone associated with Joseph Smith (American, 1805-1844)
stone, approximately 5.5 x 3.5 x 3 inches
Photograph by Welden C. Andersen and Richard E. Turley, Jr., long side view, above
Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah
© By Intellectual Reserve, Inc.
You can learn more about the object through these resources:
Seer stone used by Joseph Smith photographed and published in a volume of the Joseph Smith Papers, 2015
Seer stones and the Translation of the Book of Mormon - 2018 YouTube video posted by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with “Mason Allred and Mark Ashurst-McGee discussing the various historical accounts of the Book of Mormon translation process, including accounts of Joseph Smith using a seer stone to translate the ancient record and accounts of Joseph Smith using Urim and Thummim.”
Joseph Smith—History 1:35 - Scriptural text from the Pearl of Great Price
The Joseph Smith Papers, “Seer stone” - Study aide from the glossary with ten photographs
your response
As you consider ways to delve into the object, history is likely to be a starting point, but don’t forget your other tools. What has given this object mystery, power, and purpose? How would you create an art work or another object in response to the seer stone? Perhaps you remember when photographs of the stone were released to the public. What significance did that event have for you and why? Is the object valuable to you or is it just a stone?
Gather all of your responses and create a document or work that expresses your reactions.
Jessie Larson (American, 1908-2001)
Via Greyhound (also referred to as Applique—Landscape by Way of Greyhound), c. 1963
painting, 22 x 45 inches
Private collection
The artist Jessie Larson is a potentially important figure in the story of Latter-day Saint arts and remains almost completely unknown. She taught art (painting, sculpture, and textiles were her preferred media) at Utah State University for decades in mid-century, at a time when Modernism was a marginalized style in her home state.
To learn more about the artist will be a challenge, but an exciting one. We selected this work as a final project because it is unencumbered and fresh. Having never seen it before nor having heard of the artist before, the experience of unearthing her story and considering the work itself should be an invigorating exercise that can be all your own.
After having encountered Jessie Larson recently and making some contact with her descendants, we’ve gathered what little published biographical information they have and added a few facts that we discovered. Can you find more?
Articles and documents:
The Salt Lake Tribune, February 17, 1946
The Salt Lake Tribune, October 10, 1948
Deseret News, September 18, 1949
An article by Larson, “Understanding Creativity in Art” is in the Utah State University library
A manuscript collection of the Logan Artists Group papers (1943-1961), of which she was a member, is deposited in the Utah State University Library
The Herald Journal, April 7, 1963
Obituary: February 9, 2001, HJ News
Notable artistic accomplishments of Jessie Larson:
Winner of First Prize Award, 44th Annual Utah Art Exhibit, 1946
“Young Dancer” part of the Utah State Fine Art Collection
Winner of First Prize in the Utah ‘49er State Fair, 1949 for “Seattle Streets” (“Up From Canal Street”)
Honorable Mention at the 1956 State Institute of Fine Arts show (Utah), for “Miracle of the Gulls”
According to an article in The Herald Journal (Logan, Utah) (April 7, 1963), “Miss Larson is a native of Cache Valley, was born in Preston and graduated from USU. She received her MFA degree from the University of Washington at Seattle, and since has studied at the Art Students’ League of New York at the University of New York, at the Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and at the Cranbrook Academy of Fine Arts in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, as well as Utah State.”
Five of her works are in the permanent collection of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, Utah.
Information about the painting Via Greyhound:
In a 1963 article of Jessie Larson in conjunction with an exhibition of work at Utah State University, an unidentified local newspaper described the painting with this quotation of the artist, “‘Applique—Landscape by Way of Greyhound’ combines designed realism of the landscape with an over-lay of abstract design formed by the reflections of window casings, passengers, baggage and telephone poles.”
One of the artist’s descendants noted about the painting “Jessie always took the Greyhound bus from Logan to come visit our family in San Diego when I was a kid at Christmas time.” (email to Glen Nelson, February 25, 2020)
Your response
Tantalizing, isn’t it? That’s not too much to go on, but it’s a start. What will you discover?
Although the biographical aspect of this story is the first issue to deal with because much of it has not been uncovered nor documented yet, don’t forget to analyze the painting itself. Its composition is rich with layers of meaning made possible by a striking composition. Imagine how this work might have been received when it was first exhibited. Was it daring for the time and location? Did her gender impact her story and does it affect your level of interest in her work?
We are at a disadvantage because we are seeing the painting only in reproduction, but Larson experimented with the surface of her paintings. Look closely at the image.
How will you react to or engage with the painting? Would you like to see an exhibition of Larson’s works?
Ricardo Rendón (Mexican, born 1970)
Zona de concentración (2018)
steel wire and bronze polished and lacquered plumb, 170 x 150 cm (66 9/10 x 59 1/10 inches)
Collection of the artist
To learn about Ricardo Rendón, an artist whose work has been exhibited in Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, U.S., Spain, Switzerland, France, Canada, Chile, Belgium, Australia, Indonesia, and Germany, spend some time reviewing his exhibitions, awards, and public collections of his work in his CV, and read statements about his work by critics in his bio.
Here is an artist’s statement by Ricardo Rendón:
From the point of view of the arts I try to reflect in the moment where the work is created, the experience of the transformation of the working space and the working materials. In that sense, my work behaves as a memoir or document where all the creative moments are registered and accumulated, the moment when things happen.
Therefore, I decide to think on the exhibition space as a scenery for work, for example the transformation of the gallery in a working environment, from the walls to the working materials, my practice is determined by the social and physical conditions of the space and its own possible materials.
My work is designed as a system of inquiry into creative practice. It is a search for meaning that not only uncovers motivation, answering the question of why to create, but also permits a critical appraisal of the role of the subject who performs personal work. Reassessing the creative process allows me to make sense of making art through experiencing its continual realization.
It consists of determining my subjective reality and setting in motion my creative faculties, which enable the emergence of new understandings. In this way, experience, consisting of the development and accumulation of moments of creation, informs my strategic orientation towards my surroundings. Accordingly, I recognize that as the subject of creative doing, I am shaped by possibilities, events, dialogues and interpretations in a place of continual transformation, a setting of action and experience in which creative activity is restricted only by the physical limits of workspace and materials.
Galerie Wenger in Zurich, Switzerland, where Zona de concentración was exhibited, wrote this: “Ricardo Rendón's practice is not defined by a single medium or technique, but rather by the artist’s interest in seeing what happens when he experiments with different processes. This curiosity has led him to incorporate into his work elements of masonry, carpentry, leather working, and plumbing. ‘I always leave traces of the manufacturing process in my work,’ he has said. His felt installations, begun in 2007, are perhaps his best-known works; to make these, Rendón attaches a piece of felt to the wall and then cuts it, leaving the discarded felt on the ground below the work.” Artsy.net
Perhaps the most exciting thing about the discovery of an artists who is new to you is to see a lot of their work. Fortunately, in Rendón’s case, his website provides a tremendous number of images—many of them installations of his works in art galleries. Explore them here.
In response to the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts’ question about Zona de concentración, Rendón wrote:
Zona de Concentración is part of a series of works created through the use of the plumb, an ancient tool used on the Egyptian pyramids that is still used today to level and build straight walls.
The way the plumb works fascinates me because of its weight as its main characteristic, but also because of the fact that it draws a straight line to the center of our world, establishing a direct link between the world and ourselves. In this sense, the works created with the plumb are created by the participation of our world and its gravity pull. Thus, the work is alive and "happening" through the combination of the materials and the natural forces.
Without the plumb, the work will colapse, the wire will fall down because all the drawing with steel cable is sustained by the plumb, its mass, its weight, and the attraction force of our world (gravity).
Today's COVID-19 crisis, along with Global warming and the plastic pollution are examples of how our policies affect our wold.
We have been ignoring the cries of nature and our world, but now nature is hitting back.
As the plumb line, I believe that we are connected to our world and to everything that surround us. There is a link between us and our world that must not be forgotten. [1]
Zona de concentración is related to other works by the artist that use plumbs, pulleys, and steel wire. On the artist’s website, see the exhibitions: Formando Constelaciones at the Galería Nueveochenta in Bogotá, Colombia; Sonos Constelaciones at ArtParis, Grand Palais; and note other exhibitions that explore related concepts.
What have other critics written about the artist? Google it. Here’s one review, “Intricate Simplicity,” by Paula Braga.
This artist lives in Mexico City, and he is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One thing you might consider is how/whether his belief system appears in his work.
Your response
What do you make of the sculpture? What is the work trying to communicate? Rendón is Latin American. Does that element of his identity surface in his approach to art creation? How does his work fit into schools of thought of other artists? What effect does it have on you?
Share with Us
Although there is a growing body of scholarship on art made by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as well as the objects of its culture, there deserves to be much, much more. The variety, quality, and history of the works justifies it. How about adding to the literature yourself?
We challenge you to respond to this final project in some way. Share with us: an original art work that relates to any of the three examples, above; write a paper about your art historical or critical evaluation; or create an essay that describes your thoughts about the works.
Send them to glen@centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org, along with your name and the city where you live, and we’ll post them here.
[1] Correspondence between Ricardo Rendón and Glen Nelson, April 14, 2020.