Jenny Champoux: 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. In this second episode, we look at some of the earliest Latter-day Saint art from the 19th century. It's going to be a fun mix of mediums and styles as we discuss paintings, sculptures, cartoons, quilts, and even commemorative designs crafted out of human hair. We'll consider the ways these early artists were navigating a pull between the individual and the community, how they used art to announce their respectability to the world, how women used domestic crafts to visualize belief and shape identity, [00:01:00] and how art was displayed in the earliest temples. Our guests are Ashlee Whitaker Evans, Nathan Rees, and Jennifer Reeder. Ashlee Whitaker Evans is the former head curator and Roy and Carol Christensen Curator of Religious Art at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art. Prior to that, she was associate curator and registrar at the Springville Museum of Art. She is an alumna of BYU, graduating summa cum laude with degrees in art history and curatorial studies. Her research interests span religious art and visual culture, as well as western regional American art. Ashlee has curated numerous exhibitions, including Rends the Heavens: Intersections of the Human and Divine, In the Arena: The Art of Mahonri Young, The Interpretation Thereof: Contemporary LDS Art and Scripture, and Moving Pictures: C. C. A. Christensen's Mormon Panorama. Her chapter in this new book [00:02:00] is titled, “Establishing Zion: Identity and Communitas in Early Latter-day Saint Art.” Our second guest, Nathan Rees, is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of West Georgia. His research focuses on the intersection of race and religion in American visual culture. He has published and presented on topics ranging from the influence of metaphysical religion on 20th century abstractionists’ encounters with Native Americans, to the representation of race in the visual culture of Southeastern shape note hymnody. He is the author of the book, Mormon Visual Culture and the American West. And his chapter in this new Latter-day Saint art book is called “The Public Image: How the World Learned to See Mormonism from Cartoons to the World's Fair.” And then finally, we'll be joined by Jennifer Reeder, who is the 19th Century Women's [00:03:00] History Specialist at the Church History Department in Salt Lake City, Utah. Jenny has co-authored three collections of women's writings and written a narrative history of Emma Smith. She grew up playing under the quilts her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother sewed, and she has an innate interest in folk art. At George Mason University, where she earned her Ph.D. in American History, Jenny studied religious history, memory, and material culture. And her chapter in this book is called “Creating Something Extraordinary: 19th Century Latter-day Saint Women and Their Folk Art.” I've known our three amazing guests for many years, and I know from experience that they are brilliant, dedicated, and generous scholars. You are going to love hearing from them today. Ashlee, Nathan, and Jenny, thank you so much for being here! Jenny Reeder: Hello Ashlee Whitaker Evans: Thank you. Jenny Champoux: What a treat to have such a powerhouse group with us today. [00:04:00] I'm really excited to dive into early Latter-day Saint art of the 19th century with you. I've already given our listeners a little bit of background on you and your scholarship and professional work, but I'd like to give you a chance to tell us a little bit about yourselves. Ashlee, let's start with you. You recently helped curate a really important exhibition at the Church History Museum on Latter-day Saint art. How did your work on that exhibition inform your scholarship in this chapter? Or maybe vice versa? Ashlee Whitaker Evans: Yeah. That's a great question. And just to start off, a wonderful nod to the center for Latter-day Saint Arts, because I feel like we were all part of this book and that preceded the exhibition, but just a little, they had the vision of creating this unprecedented publication of Latter-day Saint Art. And then, shortly thereafter, it felt [00:05:00] like, they approached myself and two other just outstanding art historians about doing an exhibit, also kind of an unprecedented scope, looking at Latter-day Saint art, and one of the things that really felt important was to root it thematically. Not necessarily chronologically, not linear, but thematically. And the reason for that was we felt like it was really important to allow for the values and kind of the, some strong beliefs of the Latter-day Saint people to be the framework in which we look at how these have been manifested over time, over countries, continents, genders, that type of thing. And I think similarly, my thought process as I was approaching my chapter in particular, which, is the more traditional art media of the 19th century. I really kind of kept coming back to this idea that [00:06:00] at least for me to look at this media, there really needed to be a strong foundation and understanding at the core, who the Latter-day Saint people were, and most particularly in context of what I wrote is how deeply the idea of covenant identity of a people that were, you know, Zion, that were seeing themselves as a modern day Israel were. In informing portraiture, landscapes, and genre scenes, etc. And so in that way, I, it just felt like characterizing and putting the artwork in context of values, beliefs, and even discussions of doctrine felt like a really important framework. Jenny Champoux: I had a chance to visit the exhibition out there and just loved it. It was such a fantastic juxtaposition of really iconic pieces, [00:07:00] plus stuff maybe we're not as familiar with that we don't see as often. Old things, new things, things from America, things from all over the world, from members globally. And it just, it was just gorgeous and really gave me a lot to think about. So great work! Ashlee Whitaker Evans: Good, good. That was our hope. That was really our hope. Jenny Champoux: Thanks. Okay. Nathan, when we think about Latter-day Saint art, probably for a lot of people, the default is to think about paintings, right? Your chapter deals more with cartoons from 19th century and monumental sculptures. What drew you to thinking about those different types of media? And do you, as an art historian, do you read those kinds of works differently than you would a painting? Nathan Rees: Yeah, so there's kind of two answers to that question. And the broader answer is that I'm interested in visual culture beyond just what we might think of as art history. And I [00:08:00] think that's something we have in common, actually, with several of us that worked on this project. So the idea with visual culture is that you are interested in how people communicate through images. And you don't really pay as much attention to the hierarchies of like which images are maybe more important. So to me that really just expands the whole range of what we can actually think about as important images to consider and that's not to say that you don't employ all of those methods of art history as well, too. So visual analysis is super important. Thinking about how all of these creators whether they thought about themselves as artists or not, used the formal elements of art to actually communicate what they were trying to get across. That's a really important piece of visual culture analysis. So that's like the method. The question about why these two things because that is a little weird I know to have like stuff that's just ephemeral and then like giant monuments. But to me the [00:09:00] connection is that it's all about audience. So we're thinking about things that were made to be public, although they're very, very different in terms of their modalities, their materials, they both have that in common, that these printed things were disseminated widely. Monumental displays or monuments were things that people would just see out in public. And so not only they had that broader audience, but the people who created them were thinking about this as something that is reaching this much broader audience than what we have, for instance, a painting might have achieved at the same time. Jenny Champoux: That's really interesting. I'm always a big fan of when a scholar can bring together two seemingly or totally different things and find interesting connections. And you certainly did that in your chapter. So well done! Nathan Rees: Well, thank you. It's a lot of fun. I appreciate it. Jenny Champoux: Okay. And Jenny Reeder. I think most of our listeners will be familiar with the amazing work you've been doing [00:10:00] to recover and catalog the history of early Latter-day Saint women. You've published on these women, you've published their collections of writings. Here in this book, though, you're looking more at the material legacy. So, I just wanted to ask, is that a very different project for you, looking at, instead of writings? Jenny Reeder: You know, it's actually the material culture that has brought me to the writings. I've always been interested in quilts. I wrote a master's thesis in a human communication program at Arizona State about quilts as memorials and I also curated an exhibit at BYU in their special collections on how Mormon women have collected and preserved their past. So that's what actually drew me to the history, the written work. I wrote my dissertation on [00:11:00] extraordinary objects and Mormon women in the creation of
