{"id":539,"date":"2004-03-17T12:37:45","date_gmt":"2004-03-17T17:37:45","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=539"},"modified":"2017-06-21T01:44:14","modified_gmt":"2017-06-21T06:44:14","slug":"a-mormon-image-ghana-temple-murals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2004\/03\/a-mormon-image-ghana-temple-murals\/","title":{"rendered":"A Mormon Image: Ghana Temple Murals"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"GhanaMuralsSmall.jpg\"
\nBeginning with the Saint George Temple, our temples use to include murals<\/a>. Generally the endowment would progress from a creation room, to a garden room, to a world room, to a telestial room, and finally to a celestial room. From the Saint George Temple to the Los Angles Temple, the practice was to put murals on the walls of the creation, garden, and world rooms showing some version of creation, garden, and world. Then for a long period of time, these murals disappeared from our temples. With the Ghana temple, they are back.
\n
\nFrequently, these murals were geographically specific. Thus, in the garden room of the Manti temple, the murals — painted by C.C.A. Christiansen<\/a> — show a lush garden, but if you look at the moutains in the background you realize that it is a garden set in Sanpete County, where the temple is located. The same is true for Minerva Tiechart’s wonderful murals in the world room. If you look carefully, you will notice the New Jerusalem is actually Salt Lake City. <\/p>\n

Once the church moved to a film presentation of the endowment — originally as a way of accomodating multiple languages — we stopped putting murals in temples. We also stopped having multiple rooms. With the Saint Louis temple (I believe) movement was once more introduced into the endowment. There is no longer a creation, garden, world, telestial, and celestial room, but in place of the simple ordinance room\/celestial room format the newer temples have an endowment room, a telestial room, and a celestial room. With the Ghana Temple we reintroduced murals, putting paintings on the walls of the endowment room showing the Ghanan country side. (More images here<\/a>). <\/p>\n

In my opinion, this is a potentially huge shift in Mormon art. The idea is that the Church is once again is in the business of commissioning major works of art for temples that will be individual to those temples. More than that, the temple is once more being conceptualized as a building that is an integral part of the endowment, rather than simply a container in which the endowment occurs. This reconceptualization of the meaning of temple architecture has potentially huge implications, because it provides a liscense — indeed an imperitive — for the building to convey more symbolic and iconographic meaning. The symbolism and iconography, in turn, could play midwife to the renewal of Mormon art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beginning with the Saint George Temple, our temples use to include murals. Generally the endowment would progress from a creation room, to a garden room, to a world room, to a telestial room, and finally to a celestial room. From the Saint George Temple to the Los Angles Temple, the practice was to put murals on the walls of the creation, garden, and world rooms showing some version of creation, garden, and world. Then for a long period of time, these murals disappeared from our temples. With the Ghana temple, they are back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1405],"class_list":["post-539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-images","tag-a-mormon-image"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36780,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539\/revisions\/36780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}