Jenny Champoux: Hi everyone, and welcome back to Latter-day Saint Art, a limited series podcast from Wayfare Magazine. I'm your host, Jenny Champoux. In Latter-day Saint Art I'll guide you through an examination of the artistic tradition of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Each guest is a contributor to the new book, Latter-Day Saint Art: A Critical Reader, from Oxford University Press and the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. If you're watching the video at home, you'll see that I'm holding up a copy of the book with the beautiful cover art by Jorge Cocco. I'm also posting a video and transcript of each episode along with images of the artworks discussed at WayfareMagazine.org. In today's episode, we'll look at the history of Latter-day Saint temple art and architecture. We'll ask, how does design affect, experience and mood? Hearkening back to our discussion about the sacred and profane with Terryl Givens in our first episode, we'll think about [00:01:00] the ways material and spiritual boundaries are blurred in the built environment of the temple. We'll also learn about recent changes in temple design and interior decoration, and what this tells us about how the Church is responding to a growing and increasingly international membership. Our guest today is Josh Probert. Josh Edward Probert is a historian and historic design consultant who specializes in the material culture of 19th century domestic and religious life. He is a historic interiors consultant to the Church on the renovation of five of the Church's oldest temples. A graduate of the program in Religion and the Arts at Yale Divinity School and Institute of Sacred Music, he earned a PhD from the University of Delaware in cooperation with the Winterthur Museum. His chapter in the new art book is, “Latter-day Saint Temple Design: Aspirations of Grandeur and Tempering Restraints.” Colleen [00:02:00] McDannell is unable to join us today, but her chapter in the book nicely parallels many of the topics that Josh covers. So, we'll also be looking at her chapter titled, “Temple Art Renewal, 2000 to 2022.” Colleen McDannell is a professor of history and the Sterling M. McMurrin Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she's a specialist in American religions. In 2019, her book, Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy, won an award given by the Organization of American Historians. These chapters were both really interesting to me, and I like that we're going to get a chance to talk a little bit about Latter-day Saint architecture today. So, let's jump in. Josh. Thanks for talking with us today. Josh Probert: Thank you for having me. Jenny Champoux: Your chapter and Colleen's chapter complemented each other so well with their analysis of Latter-day Saint temple art and architecture. I really appreciated the [00:03:00] ways you each highlighted the evolution of these sacred spaces. Before we get into more recent developments, I liked that in your chapter you explained some of the early history of Latter-day Saint temple building and use, which is a little different than how we think about it today. Can you tell us more about that early history? Josh Probert: Sure. Joseph Smith and his family, Brigham Young, his family, Hebrew, Kimball, all the, this group of early actors in the Church grew up in this long shadow of Protestant architecture, since the Reformation. And then the, you know, immigration to the New World, you know, British North America, French North America, all these colonies, right? Their minds, the cultural universes which they inhabited, of the idea of a religious meeting house [00:04:00] influences the way that early LDS temple architecture is realized. And so, we know that the early Church met in, you know, people's houses, things like that. They didn't, you know, build what we today call a church or a, or what Protestants would've called a meetinghouse. And then Joseph Smith receives a revelation to build a temple in Missouri, in Independence, Missouri, that is never realized. But they take those plans and, uh, they're modified slightly in some ways executed in Kirtland, Ohio. And so that temple in many ways is a Protestant meetinghouse. It doesn't have endowment rooms because the endowment room hadn't been introduced yet, you know? And so you think of just two preaching halls stuck on top of each other, [00:05:00] and with the architecture drawing largely from contemporary builders’ guides. In this case, a very popular builder named Asher Benjamin, who wrote a design guide that you can go in the Kirtland Temple and just go, oh, there's that window surround, there's that door surround, there's that Greek key design, right? And, and see where they're drawing from. And the same thing happens in Nauvoo is that there are these two meetinghouses stacked on top of each other basically, and that is the design intent for the temples through the late Utah period, Manti, Salt Lake, St. George and Logan. And that's why they're masked like that with a long fenestration of tall, you know, windows because they're originally supposed to be two meetinghouses or two, you know, let's call them assembly rooms. Sorry, not too meetinghouses stacked on each other. What [00:06:00] happens is that, as you know, the endowment is performed in the attic of the Nauvoo Temple. In St. George, it's performed in the basement. And in mid-construction of the building of the Logan Temple, the architect there in consultation with John Taylor, decides to introduce endowment rooms into the temple. And they change the first floor construction of the temple that's mid-construction and put in endowment rooms, but you still have the vestige of the two assembly rooms with the upper assembly room. And so, they changed the floor plans for the Manti Temple, for the Salt Lake Temple accordingly as well. So, you have that Protestant meeting house interior carrying all the way up through the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple. And then it pops up again in, you know, Los Angeles and DC. They put an assembly room upstairs. But by the time you get the Cardston Temple and the Hawaii temple and the Mesa Temple, they don't have that assembly room anymore. Jenny Champoux: [00:07:00] Okay, so that's an interesting evolution of the kind of functional spaces in there that changed some of the design. I also liked how you and Colleen both considered the ways in which that material environment contributes to a certain kind of feeling. Intentionally. And I wondered, does art, you know, framed art, does it play a role in creating that kind of feeling of peace or refuge in the temple? And does art in the temple ever have other functions? Is it ever used to teach or to provoke additional thought, or is it just meant to sort of be restful? Josh Probert: Right, right. Well, you know, the question of framed art, is a nest is, is part of a nested, you know, like a Russian nested doll of the broad, a larger question that your [00:08:00] question, it really taps into this question of the role of the built environment writ large. And what, why built a built environment? What, what is the goal of enlisting material objects for religious purposes? You know, many of Joseph Smith's contemporaries, romantics of letters, of poetry, whatever, would say that God is in nature, right? And they have this, a lot of them have an impulse to look to God in nature. One could ask, “Well, why not do the endowment outside? Why not do baptisms outside baptisms for the dead outside like they did for the living?” Right? And so this is one of the unique things that Joseph Smith contributes or introduces that when he receives the revelation about [00:09:00] baptism for the dead it said, this ordinance belongeth to mine house. And then he says, we need to build a temple so that we can do these ordinances. Now in exigent circumstances, there were times when the endowment was given in other places and baptism. So, and, and that's all, you know, scriptural too, that, you know, but the, it's kind of like President Oaks’ talk, “Good, Better, Best,” like for the best. You know, the ideal that the scriptures layout is a building. And so, okay, well that building then, what is its purpose, right? And, and it's this idea of, of demarcating sacred space, creating holy space something Protestants didn't believe in, in the same way that early Mormons did or do today, or Catholics do. Right? Then the question is what, you know, what does that do? The [00:10:00] bottom line I think for me is Joseph Smith thought of the material environment metaphorically, that it, it was a metaphor for the grandeur of God, for the importance of the ordinances that just, you know, that he can see, like in Lucy Mack Smith's reminiscence, right? She talks about this meeting in Kirtland where some said we're gonna build a temple of the Lord out of logs. And she and Joseph Smith says, no, I'll show you a better way. Right? And so, I don't know, you know, all the historicity of that account, she's writing it years later. But the point is right, that you know that he's saying he wants to do something, grander. So now your question about the painting or a framed artwork, they do both that, that that paintings can be didactic. They teach scriptural lessons. They can represent, like the Church today would like to have represent more, it's worldwide diversity in its art. Local landscapes, [00:11:00] right? It's a way of bringing familiarity and localizing the, you know, religion and those places. And, but there's also, art is always caught up in discourses of taste. And, and therefore, good taste. Bad taste. Who gets to decide who has good taste? Who has bad taste, right? So, it's a moving target. And so that's why somebody that did the temple art in the eighties, it's all been changed. History doesn't, won't end in 50 years. And in a hundred years, peo
