Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader is an excellent resource and insightful journey. The book aspires to be “the first expert critical treatment of Mormon visual art”, and it offers a breadth and depth that live up to that ideal. The volume includes twenty-two essays by scholars from various disciplines, perspectives, and backgrounds who offer analyses of Latter-day Saint artistic production and culture. The text is accompanied by elegant reproductions of more than 200 works of art relating to Latter-day Saints, including panorama paintings, quilts, architecture, sculpture, cartoons, film, gallery installations, indigenous works and more. At 664 large pages, it’s a hefty book and a large commitment to read, but worth the time and effort (despite the occasional sign that proofreading and editing were not as thorough as they could have been). But at $49.99, it’s a steal for a big, well-researched book with lots of rich illustrations published by Oxford University Press.

Particularly appealing to someone like me is the fact that analysis of art and artists often reveals insights into the history and theology of a religion or culture. For example, “Establishing Zion: Identity and Communitas in Early Latter-day Saint Art”, by Ashlee Whitaker, was really interesting for what it showed about how Latter-day Saints thought about their settlements and landscape as they worked to build communities. I found the emphasis on portraits of Latter-day Saint leaders in meeting spaces that she discussed to be particularly fascinating, especially in light of the recent shift towards a more prominent focus on the Christ. Nathan Rees’s chapter, “The Public Image: How the World Learned to See Mormonism, from Cartoons to World’s Fair” offered a lot of information about how Mormonism was represented in the back-and-forth between pro- and anti-Mormon sources, including the forms of self-representation the Church employed to portray members as respectable Americans. And the chapter on “Race and Latter-day Saint Art,” by W. Paul Reeve is a fascinating look into how Latter-day Saints have thought about race through their artwork over the years. (And it also offers a more in-depth and accurate representation of the past than the Church’s recent aspirational statement that only “some popular Church artwork has portrayed Jesus as white”.) There were some fun and interesting insights into Latter-day Saint history throughout the collection that I enjoyed.

I also appreciated the recurring focus on temple art and architecture throughout. It’s an area that I feel like has often been missing from discussions of temples and their history. The chapter on “The Paris Art Mission”, by Linda Jones Gibbs highlighted the tradition of murals in the endowment rooms and the process by which artists were trained for creating the now-destroyed murals in the Salt Lake City Temple. Colleen McDannell’s chapter on “Temple Art Renewal, 2000-2022,” highlighted an evolution in artwork and its place in the temples—something that I’ve noticed and appreciated, but hadn’t known much about before reading the essay. The chapter “Aspirations of Grandeur and Tempering Restraints in Mormon Temple Design,” by Josh Probert showed how temples have been caught in a tug-and-pull between the Latter-day Saints desire for lofty artistic achievements to inspire practitioners in the temple and the desire to maintain a somewhat minimalist meeting space that does not use lavish amounts of resources. Once again, it put something that I’ve subconsciously noticed and pondered into words and added insights that I was not aware of beforehand. It was a great way to learn more about temples and how they are visually presented. 

At this point, I’m an enthusiastic fan of Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader. It’s beautiful, has a lot of pretty pictures, and an incredible wealth of information about art and religion. (I had also hoped to recommend not only reading the book, but visiting the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City to see the related “Work and Wonder: 200 Years of Latter-day Saint Art” exhibit, but it seems that I missed that window of opportunity. You can still get a taste of the exhibit through the linked article and through the book.)