Mormon Arts Center's Studio Podcast

On the eve of the publication of her first book, Rachel Rueckert, the current editor-in-chief of Exponent II magazine, describes the events that led to her memoir, East Winds that will appear in mid-November, published by By Common Consent Press. It is a chronicle of her one-year honeymoon traveling around the globe and questioning what the institution of marriage is all about. Rueckert talks about the journey, the book writing process, and finding peace with big picture decisions.Support the show

Author Glen Nelson discusses his discovery of an important body of 1930s fiction by one of the era's most famous cartoonists, John Held, Jr.  Today he's known for his magazine and newspaper illustrations of flappers and other 1920s characters, but in a flurry of activity from 1930 to 1937, John Held, Jr. published four novels and four collections of short stories that are mostly unknown today. This podcast episode describes the fiction, talks about how the author came to discover it, and makes the connections between Held's upbringing in Salt Lake City and how his Mormonisms appear in his art and fiction.Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

Curator Margaret Olsen Hemming, artist Kwani Povi Winder, and scholar Vinna Chintaram gather to talk about different approaches to and perspectives on Heavenly Mother as they react to the exhibition at the Center Gallery, The Sacred Feminine in LDS Art & Theology. Olsen Hemming is the curator of the exhibition. Povi Winder is one of the artists whose work is in the show, and Chintaram is a PhD student at University North Carolina  Chapel Hill studying religion and culture.Music for the episode is “Women of Faith,” lyrics by Matthew B. Biggs and music by Michael Kosorok.Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

To mark the exhibition opening, The Sacred Feminine in LDS Art & Theology, at the Center Gallery in New York, its curator Margaret Olsen Hemming speaks about global artworks that imagine what Heavenly Mother is like. The LDS doctrine that we are from heavenly parents is not new, but recent LDS artists from around the world are building on the artistic foundation laid more than 100 years ago by poet Eliza R. Snow and painter John Hafen to further a discussion about the nature and role of the sacred feminine.Music for the episode is “Women of Faith,” lyrics by Matthew B. Biggs and music by Michael Kosorok.Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

The self portrait, Wrapped Up in a False Sense of Security, by Kirsten Holt Beitler, is the subject of this artist's interview. The work which is part of the exhibition, Siloed: Art for Uncertain Times, at the Center Gallery shows the artist wrapped in toilet paper, painted during the first months of the pandemic when hoarding and bouts of consumer panic spread across the country. Beitler is a single mom of four children, an artist, and a muralist at a grocery store in St. George, Utah. In this episode, she describes how  isolation during the pandemic and personal heartbreak have become crucibles for new, wry, self-exploring works.Music for this episode is the nineteenth-century Mormon folk song, "St. George and the Drag-on," by Charlie Lowell Walker. Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

A new body of art work by Maggie Golightly Haslam is explored in this episode. The artist, whose works are featured in the current exhibition at the Center Gallery in New York City, embodies the 21st century zero-waste ethos and turns it into a process of art making. How can materials be recycled, upcycled, and reenvisioned, she asks. Her inventive and beautiful poured watercolor works are created with materials that have been harvested and salvaged from leftover media of earlier series of works, thereby linking them into a new sort of visual art lineage. Larger ethical questions emerge: What is art for? Why make it? How do the materials direct what the art wants to be?Music for the episode is "Bearing Us Up" by Robert Strobel, a winner of the Center's Art for Uncertain Times project.Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

Photographer Jeffrey Lee Butler chronicled the streets of Brooklyn in the early months of the pandemic. Part of the Center Gallery exhibition curated by Emily Larsen Doxford, Siloed: Art for Uncertain Times, Butler describes life in early 2020 and what he encountered as he ventured out of his Crown Heights apartment into the borough, resulting in a suite of 25 photographs. Surprisingly beautiful, colorful, and even joyous, the people in the pictures show the resilience, ingenuity, peacefulness, and determination of urban dwellers in a very uncertain moment.Music for the episode is a Swedish folk tune played by Claudine Bigelow, part of the exhibition and a dance film by Keely Song, Covenant Keepers.Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

Dancer, choreographer, and educator Marin Leggat Roper discusses her lifelong pursuit of dance as merging point of physicality and faith in this podcast interview that also previews a historic, upcoming event in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is Vision, an evening of dance, to be presented September 24, 2021 at the Capitol Theatre. She describes how the pandemic has affected dance and how dance artists are finely attuned to issues of social upheaval, identity, and the immediacy of current events.Music for the episode is an excerpt from Sydney Ann's Apple, by Nathan Bowen, from a 2007 dance commissioned by Marin with sculptural decor by Valerie Atkisson and performed at the Merce Cunningham Studios in New York City. Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

Award-winning author and scholar of WPA-era photography, James R. Swensen discusses his new exhibition, Fields of Labor and Recovery: A Photographic Portrait of Utah from the Great Depression to WWII, 1936-1942. The show at the BYU Museum of Art provides an opportunity to discuss Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, and other photographers who were sent across the United States, including to Utah, to document government programs and ultimately created the most comprehensive portrait of America ever attempted. Swensen discusses his detailed research into the lives of the photographers’ subjects, and he notes the importance of seeing patterns of history by looking back to the past, and as he notes, the value of beautiful pictures of ugly things.Music for this episode is “Mountains,” by Robert Cundick, performed by Grant Johannesen, piano.Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

How does someone decide to become an art historian, a curator, or an art conservator? What kind of training and exposure do they need? In this episode, university senior Elisabeth Hunt discusses her background at Brigham Young University as an art history and curatorial studies major and her time in New York this summer working as the gallery assistant at the Center Gallery. What is it like to work in an art gallery and interact with the public? As an example, she describes a generational difference of viewing art—the consequences of the saturation of images that younger people experience through social media upon their fine art viewing—and the reactions she has witnessed of visitors from the general public to the gallery in New York City.Music for this episode was recorded as ambient sounds of jazz street musicians outside the Center Gallery, traffic sounds, and the video artwork, "Let us rejoice," by Maddison Colvin that opens the exhibition, Great Awakening: Vision and Synthesis in Latter-day Sai

To mark the inaugural exhibition of the Center Gallery, Great Awakening: Vision and Synthesis in Latter-day Saint Contemporary Art, this podcast interview speaks with artist and curator Chase Westfall about what goes into making an exhibition, how to get people to slow down and look more carefully at contemporary art, and what he has learned through the process.Introductory music for the episode is an audio extraction from Maddison Colvin's video work in the exhibition, Let us rejoice.Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

On the occasion of the publication of her latest book, First: The Life and Faith of Emma Smith, historian Jennifer Reeder talks about a complex 19th century figure in LDS history, an Elect Lady, Presidentress, and key participant in the restoration of the gospel. The discussion includes surprising finds by Reeder including Emma’s bi-racial family, her largely unknown skills, her turmoil regarding polygamy, and most importantly, her life of loss and service. Emma’s decision to remain in Nauvoo as other Saints moved to the West set up an environment of tension in the 19th century that is being replaced today with companion and understanding. Music for the episode is Emma’s final aria, sung by Jennifer Welch Babidge, “You Are Like the Sun,” from the opera, The Book of Gold, composed by Murray Boren.Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

On the occasion of his solo exhibition, “Secret Camp—Are we there yet?,” Fidalis David Kanoanikie Buehler discusses how his worldview, which draws from his multi-cultural family, informs his artmaking practice. The conflicts of straddling his Euro-American and Pacific Island heritage include Kiribati traditions, his Catholic upbringing, and his conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1999. Now an artist who exhibits paintings, drawings, printmaking, and sculpture in the U.S. and abroad, Buehler also teaches at BYU, and the podcast interview ends with his thoughts about embracing multicultural students with an eye toward adapting traditional fine art education methods in order to learn from the students and prepare them to contribute to the cultures of their own communities.The musical except for the episode is “Sonata for Two Flutes Unaccompanied,” by Helen Taylor. The Center’s Studio podcast begins its fourth year with this episode.Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysain

Making art is easy; marketing it is terrifying. Many artists find the business side of their careers very difficult and something they know little about. In this interview, composer and creative entrepreneur Andrew Maxfield shares experiences, approaches, and methods of networking, business development, branding, communications, brain trusts, and entrepreneurship that give creative artists of any kind much-needed tools to amp up their careers—with examples of the composer’s music and advice for anyone who is tired of passively waiting for something big to happen.Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

Award-winning artists whose works are exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, Georgina Bringas and Ricardo Rendón discuss their work and philosophies of artmaking in this podcast episode. Living and working in Mexico City, they have entirely separate bodies of work that focus on sculpture and installation art of the highest caliber. Rendón concentrates on constructed work that documents the creative process, and Bringas makes probing, colorful works that explore time, matter, and the measurement of the infinite.The music for this episode is Pulso by Francisco Estévez, composed for five “clappers.”Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

Have you ever wondered how the fine art market functions, how air fairs and auctions, collectors and dealers, navigate through a $64 billion industry of art work sales? In this episode, private dealer Warren Winegar, former head of client services at Sotheby’s, discusses this fascinating world. He describes the impact of the pandemic and what it is like to travel the world in search of art for clients. Then, the discussion shifts to psychology and the consequences of collecting. What motivates people to collect? How do the visual images with which we surround ourselves affect our sense of self, and in the case of Latter-day Saints, what do the objects we have in our homes have to say about us? With music by Francisco Estevez, Luisiadas II, for toy piano. Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

Fifty LDS artists won Center grants in 2020 that responded to “the needs of the people at this specific moment.” In this podcast interview with the manager of the project, Emily Larsen Doxford, Art for Uncertain Times is described as a historical document of LDS artists’ reactions to Covid-19 and the social injustice protests in this turbulent, exhausting year, with examples from the winners’ literature, visual art, music, film, and dance, and the stories behind some of these powerful creations.This episode includes musical excerpts from four winners of Art for Uncertain Times grants: Julián Mansilla, Jed Blodgett/Andrew Maxfield, Daniel E. Gawthrop, and Harriet Petherick Bushman.Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

Theologian, scholar, and Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute (BYU), James Faulconer discusses his recent book, Mosiah, one of Institute’s The Book of Mormon: Brief Theological Introductions series. His insightful approach to close reading of scriptures emphasizes the creative act of study.The podcast interview also discusses his earlier books written with LDS audiences in mind, Scripture Study: Tools and Suggestions, the scriptures Made Harder series, and Faith, Philosophy, Scripture. Finally, on the eve of the presidential election, Faulconer reflects on what Mosiah has to say about governments and what the tragedy of the Book of Mormon means to us all. With introductory music by Robert Cundick.Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

After 20 years in the food publishing industry (Ladies’ Home Journal, Martha Stewart Living, Kids, and Weddings magazines) and televisions appearances on the Martha Stewart network, the Today Show, the Food Network among others, Tara Bench--her nom de plume is Tara Teaspoon--has written her first cookbook, Live Life Deliciously: Recipes for Busy Weekdays and Leisurely Weekends. In this episode, Tara discusses her approach to cooking, eating, entertaining and how kitchen time becomes a lifestyle.In addition to talking about the genesis of ideas for the book, the author discusses her library of cookbooks, what mentors and mothers have taught her, and how she developed her own cooking and writing style.With introductory music by Leonard Bernstein, Adolph Green and Betty Comden, “I Can Cook Too.”Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)

Collaborators James Goldberg, Ardis Parshall, and Carla Jimison discuss their new book, Song of Names: A Mormon Mosaic, in this episode. The volume is divided into 22 sections, each telling an extraordinary story of quiet heroism by members of the Church lost to history, as Ardis writes, “…Trying to capture the sacred in Latter-day Saints’ everyday histories.” But there is nothing ordinary about their incredible stories that cover nearly two centuries of our history, and geographically include: Lebanon,  Sweden, Sri Lanka, Mexico, India, the United Kingdom, Sierra Leone, Brazil, France, Egypt, Singapore, Cambodia, Japan,  Spain, French Polynesia, the Shoshone Nation, and Argentina as well as states across the U.S. The trio describes moving stories unearthed by Ardis from decades of research and turned into art by James Goldberg, accompanied by visual images by Carla Jimison.Music for the episode is “The Towers of Zion,” an unpublished 1999 composition by Murray Boren setting text written by W. W. Phelps, whos