The Center's Studio Podcast: Recent Episodes
Center for Latter-day Saint Arts
The official podcast of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts with interviews of artists and scholars on topics of art with host Glen Nelson.
The Artists Residency at the Center concludes its 2025 cohort and asks the artists--Alexandra Mackenzie Johns (UK/Utah, literature & drama), David Jones (Oregon, music composition), Thayer Jonutz (Michigan, choreography), Zinta Jaunitis (United Kingdom, visual art), Jackie Leishman (California, visual art) and Daniel Martinez (Uruguay, visual art)--three questions. They are: what books they're currently reading, how Covid affected them and their art, and when they began to think of themselves as artists.
Music: "Please Only Tell Me Good News” by Stephen Anderson; used with permission.
Photo credit: Kah Poon Photography
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Most people are unaware of the symbiotic relationship between artists and the gallerists who represent them. How does a gallery support, encourage, and market an artist's work? And how does an artist rely on the expertise of a gallerist when they are starting out, in mid-career, and when they want to defy expectation with something new? This interview brings visual artist Justin Wheatley and David Ericson, the owner of David Ericson Fine Art in Salt Lake City, Utah, together to uncover surprising ties of trust between creativity and commerce.
Music: "Please Only Tell Me Good News” by Stephen Anderson; used with permission.
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Winners of the Ariel Bybee Endowment Prize, Gonzalo and Susana Silva speak about their new exhibition, Instrumentos de silencio (Instruments of Silence). The 15-piece show at Sargent's Daughters gallery in New York (and later traveling to the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California) plays with ideas of musical instruments and history, but also the ways that invading Europeans subjugated and tandemized Andean populations with outside culture, including music.
Music: "Please Only Tell Me Good News” by Stephen Anderson; used with permission.
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His paintings are in nearly every Latter-day Saint meetinghouse and in many temples in the world. The beloved artist Walter Rane discusses in this podcast his life as a painter, insights he has discovered about himself through the freedom of creating, and why he loves painting now more than ever.
Music: "Please Only Tell Me Good News” by Stephen Anderson; used with permission.
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It’s like a true crime podcast, but it’s about art. An heirloom masterpiece is created, mutilated, inherited, then lost--one of the most important objects in a rich culture’s history. Over a century later, a frantic search ensues, not unlike a manhunt, with a deadline fast approaching and a forthcoming, major exhibition hanging in the balance. Can it be recovered in time?
Scholars Heather Belnap, Ashlee Whitaker Evans, and Brontë Hebdon detail the extraordinary tale of a pre-Civil War album quilt cut in half, lost, and then found. The work itself is one of the most significant objects in all of LDS culture.
Music: "Please Only Tell Me Good News” by Stephen Anderson; used with permission.
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Taiwanese Australian filmmaker Daniel Yen Tu tells about a new book project and screenplay, '93 Castrol which is the fast-paced story of siblings, a stolen race car, and a search for redemption from self-described low-lifery. The discussion of this limited edition artists book contains something even bigger--an emerging artist discovering identity, voice, and a newfound sense of authenticity.
Music: "Please Only Tell Me Good News” by Stephen Anderson; used with permission.
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Lisa Hess moved to New York at the age of 16 and a year later was asked to join the company of the New York City Ballet. That began an adventure with some of the great choreographers and dancers of the century, in a golden age of dance in America. Hess worked with the legendary George Balanchine in his final decade of life, frequently with Jerome Robbins, and others. In this extended oral history episode, Lisa Hess Jones captures a vivid era--a girl from Amarillo, Texas who finds herself with superstars Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Farrell, and a host of luminaries as she charts her course as a female, LDS artist, before embarking on a second career as a teacher, choreographer, and mother of two boys.
Music: "Please Only Tell Me Good News” by Stephen Anderson; used with permission.
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After an emerging-artist blitz of 26 New York exhibitions in just 7 years, the award-winning visual artist Valerie Atkisson de Moura hit a wall. Adrift and depressed in a new home, she received a medical diagnosis of an incurable disease and discovered that her mother had the same disease but had kept it secret from the family. Then, in a horrible year, her mother died, Valerie was hit by a car and suffered head trauma that changed the way she lives and works. Throughout everything, the artist's focus of creating art based on family history sustains her and propels her forward.
Music: "Please Only Tell Me Good News” by Stephen Anderson; used with permission.
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Potter Ben Behunin has created a body of work that includes message-driven ceramics exhibited in museums and galleries. He is also an author, and the subject of this interview is his field guide, “How to Seduce a Sasquatch,” which includes tips to jumpstart creativity and related theories.
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Dancer, choreographer, and teacher Kate Monson describes her work at Brigham Young University, where approximately 5,000 students each semester take dance classes. She describes the dance-friendly LDS culture, how all of us are dancers, and how, as a dancer's career progresses, it is impacted by ageism. Finally, Monson draws connections between her spirituality and physical movement.
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This interview with visual artist Jackie Leishman and poet Steven L. Peck unwinds the process of creative minds meeting, finding common passions, and then making inter-disciplinary art together. The podcast celebrates the artists' latest published work, a chine-collé print, Sound of a broken wing.
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In this episode, Mia Meredith describes her work as a graphic designer for the very popular, monthly pull-out section of The New York Times created exclusively for kids. The graduate of Brigham Young University's design program talks about her career path in New York that landed her in her dream job, its challenges, rewards, and purpose, which is to help kids understand the world.
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The exhibition The Delicate Ties That Bind explores the precariousness of post-pandemic existence and assesses the complex and often fragile relationships that shape our lives now. Curated by Megan Knobloch Geilman, these threads make up the nature of our reality and serve as metaphors for both a tattered society and the essential connections between us. In this interview, the curator describes the process of putting together this exhibition on the campus of Claremont Graduate University with participating artists: Andrew Ballsteaedt, Richard Gate, Megan Knobloch Geilman, Kyla Hansen, Jackie Leishman, Alice Marie Perreault, and Samantha Zauscher.
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A landmark exhibition spanning the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints marks a milestone in the culture's artistic output and appreciation. The 121-work exhibition, Work and Wonder: 200 Years of Latter-day Saint Art, is curated by Heather Belnap, Ashlee Whitaker Evans, and Brontë Hebdon. They join in this wide-ranging conversation about the show's five years of development and the four themes that emerged from their extensive, global research: Memory and Archive, Individual and Church, Sacred Spaces, and Identity. The curators provide fascinating stories about the works in the show, which is at the Church History Museum from the end of September 2024 through the beginning March 2025, organized by the museum and the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts.
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The publication of Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader is a landmark event, the first comprehensive critical examination of Mormon Art. In this interview, co-editors Mason Kamana Allred and Amanda Beardsley introduce the chapters with insights into the reasons why each is indispensable. Then, the authors of this 664-page book from Oxford University Press submitted questions for the podcast about the making of the book and what lies ahead in art and objects by LDS people. Part 2 of 2 historic interviews.
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The publication of Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader is a landmark event, the first comprehensive critical examination of Mormon Art. In this interview, co-editors Mason Kamana Allred and Amanda Beardsley introduce the chapters with insights into the reasons why each is indispensable. Then, the authors of this 664-page book from Oxford University Press submitted questions for the podcast about the making of the book and what lies ahead in art and objects by LDS people. Part 1 of 2 historic interviews.
Send us a text about the podcast.
The young nonprofit organization, Inspired Arts League, is the focus of this interview with its founder Brittany Scott and executive producer Ellen Wheeler. It’s a fascinating model: invite global artists who are already accomplished to be members and give them as a group, through workshops and collaboration, tools to more effectively tell stories and inspire hope in the world through art. Scott and Wheeler announce their inaugural exhibition October 14-25, 2024 at the venerable Salmagundi Club in New York City.
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In this interview with Rachel Helps, Wikipedian-in-Residence at the BYU Library, researcher and author Helps explains her work refining, creating, correcting, and researching Wikipedia pages that relate to the unrivaled collection of Mormon Studies volumes at the Harold B Lee Library at Brigham Young University. The conversation includes interesting finds and experiences covering eight years of work and hundreds of articles. Helps also mentions her interactive fiction projects.
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Brett Peterson is Director, Exhibition Media and Interactives at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which is at the forefront of engaging audiences and making exhibitions memorable by the creation of accompanying original, responsive digital media. In this episode Peterson describes the shifting expectation of visitors regarding technology. He tries to find new ways to evoke emotions and heighten works on display, including magical digital and physical pairings. He asks, "How can I add meaningfully to what people already love about museums?" and "How can you make the visitor feel like it is for them?" The interview ends with Peterson's predictions how fine art museums and other related public institutions will embrace interactivity for richer and more personalized experiences.
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Artist Collin Bradford makes video, sound, photography, sculpture, and other media. In this interview, the incoming art department chair at Brigham Young University discusses his work, how art speaks directly to the brain through the senses, and his work as a reflection of concerns about the future. His video installation, A Burning Hope (2021) is part of the museum exhibition, Materializing Mormonism: Trajectories in Contemporary Latter-day Saint Art, organized by the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, which is at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum, and the artist describes the making of the video and potential interpretations of it. Finally, Bradford discusses the future and how students embody a new sensibility of sincerity and intensity in their art making.
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This episode with composer S. Andrew Lloyd celebrates the world premiere of his song cycle, Amaranthine, which was written for and performed by international opera star Rachel Willis-Sørensen at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall, April 9, 2024. The composer discusses how he came to write the prize-winning work and his emotional response to hearing it for the first time. Amaranthine is the first composition to appear from The Ariel Bybee Endowment at the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, a prize Lloyd won in 2022.
Musical excerpt performed by S. Andrew Lloyd
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The winner of the 2024 Prize of The Ariel Bybee Endowment at the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts is Mia Black. In this interview, Black introduces herself and her winning project, which will be a collection of American Folk Music aimed at elementary school-age classrooms. The breakthrough idea here is Black's plan to organize the collection using waves of immigrants and their songs to tell the story of what people brought with them, including their music, to their new homes in the United States.
Music for this episode is "Old Joe Clark," from the Library of Congress, American Jukebox, recorded at the Reed family home, Glen Lyn, Giles County, Virginia, August 27, 1966.
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Brad Pelo, President and Executive Producer of The Chosen discusses the series' global ambition to provide all episodes in 600 languages. The vast challenges of dubbing and subtitling the series about Jesus while maintaining the writer's unique contemporary dialogue and tone are discussed in this interview alongside the powerful experiences Pelo has witnessed riding the wave of this one-of-a-kind tv series.
Music for this episode: Ave Maria (Bach-Gounod) sung by Jamie Peterson
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Many arts audiences go to performances and exhibitions without thinking much about the institutional leadership that makes these events possible. In this episode, Richard Bushman, chairman of the board of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts and Mykal Urbina, the Center's executive director, announce a chairman-elect, Stanley Hainsworth. The trio talk about their favorite art forms and programs of the Center they love, and they invite people to become friends by participating in its activities.
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In preparation for the 2024 Prize of The Ariel Bybee Endowment at the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts that will sponsor a new music program, singer and music education Jamie Peterson and intellectual property attorney Patrick Perkins discuss with passion the urgency for more music education in public schools. With the deadline for submissions fast approaching for submissions of new music ideas for the classroom (January 15, 2024), the pair talk about their own experiences with music in school and highlight extraordinary programs of music education in the U.S. today.
Music for this episode, "Rejoice Greatly," sung by Jamie Peterson
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This show-and-tell episode features Erin Eastmond and Glen Nelson discussing holiday gift ideas by LDS creatives that are featured in the Center's Christmas Gift Guide. They include children's books, music, art, religious books, scholarly works, food, poetry, family activities, and a few items offered as benefit art works for the Center. Erin and Glen read excepts from the books and talk about how these items might be the perfect packages under your Christmas tree.
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In this episode, the Center celebrates with composer Steven L. Ricks the upcoming premiere of his multimedia chamber opera, Baucis and Philemon (BAH-sis and Phi-LEE-mon), which was commissioned by the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts in 2019. The story comes from Ovid's Metamorphosis. It is a fable about a couple who ask the gods to be turned into trees at the bank of a lake after their death. Ricks discusses how the opera came to be written and the team behind it all.
Musical rehearsal excerpts are by Steven L. Ricks (music) and Stephen Tuttle (libretto).
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Robert Raleigh and Andrew Hall, the two editors of the book, The Path and the Gate: Mormon Short Fiction, gather to talk about the process of creating a new collection of fiction in this panel discussion that also includes Jennifer Quist, one of the book's authors and the fiction editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. The chat includes observations about the evolution of the Mormon literary landscape, the role of editors as gatekeepers, and readings of three excerpts. The collection of 23 stories is to be published by Signature Books October 16, 2023.
Music for the episode is by Robert Cundick, Recessional.
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Three authors from the new collection, The Path and the Gate: Mormon Short Fiction, gather to talk about their stories, lives, and works in this lively panel discussion. The authors are Todd Robert Peterson, Ryan McIlvain, and Heidi Naylor. All three authors are also university teachers, and a question about responses to each other's stories turns into an impromptu literary critics' circle--full of admiration, insight, and reactions to reading each other's works. The collection of 23 stories is to be published by Signature Books October 16, 2023. Finally, the trio talk about the value of many voices representing a community.
Music for the episode is by Robert Cundick, Recessional.
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Emerging painter Madeline Rupard discusses her paintings of the American landscape that include truck stops, gas stations, fast food, and stores that connect the suburban and the sublime. In atmospheric works that recall the stylistic approach of the Ashcan painters Henri, Sloan, Glackens, and Shinn of the turn of the 20th century, Rupard finds kinship with them and additional resonance of paintings inside Latter-day Saint church buildings, particularly the mix of religious paintings amid mundane decor.
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Historian and author Claudia Lauper Bushman discusses in this episode the writing of her autobiography in progress, I, Claudia, and the value of keeping records. In her frequent letters to family, Wellesley College newsletters, and her own daily journaling, she celebrates written communications, the foundation of civilization. She is joined in the discussion about undertaking projects grand and modest by guest co-host Frances LaBianca, a student of Communications and Public Relations at the University of Arizona, who is also Claudia's granddaughter.
Music for the episode is sung by Claudia Lauper Bushman.
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The Dominican Jazz Project is a group of elite Caribbean jazz artists whose band leader is Stephen Anderson, Professor of Composition and Jazz Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. In this interview, Anderson reminisces about his tender relationship with the musicians of the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, their much decorated recordings and performances, and the joy in creating an interplay of traditional rhythms and modern jazz.
Musical excerpts for the interview are from The Dominican Jazz Project's latest CD, Desde Lejos (2021), used with permission.
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It was a dark and stormy night.... Barrett Burgin discusses his first feature film, Cryo, and the makes compelling connections between LDS lore, history, and belief within the context of the genre of horror films and fiction. Mormon Horror is a trending thing--LDS artists are increasingly drawn to explore elements of horror in their work.
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Pianist, BYU associate professor, scholar, and social advocate Jihea Hong-Park speaks about her experience as a Korean American female pianist of faith and how anti-racism efforts extend into the world of classical music.
Music for the episode is by Steven Ricks, including an excerpt from the premiere performance of Overlapping Voices with Jihea Hong Park at the piano.
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In this episode, The Center for Latter-day Saint Arts announces an inaugural program, The Artists Residency at the Center. It will bring 6-8 LDS artists to New York City to reside together and work for a week in October 2023. The Residency is hosted by Stanley Hainsworth, who joins us on this podcast and discusses his own journey from a fledgling actor in New York through global creative designer roles at Lego and Starbucks before founding his own firm, Tether. With each of his corporate positions, he has led "Design Camp," an off-site retreat, which tees up, conceptually, The Artists Residency at the Center.
Music for the episode: guitar and vocals by Stanley Hainsworth.
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Director/screenwriter Aaron Toronto and screenwriter/actress Nha Uyen Ly Nguyen discuss their film, The Brilliant Darkness!, which won the highest award, The Golden Kite (the Vietnamese equivalent of an Oscar) this year, for best film, best screenplay, and best actress. The dramatic film is about a family imploding, precipitated by the death of a wealthy grandfather and his son's gambling debts that imperil his life and his family's future. The main theme of the film and the topic of the podcast interview are the abusive relationships of families over multiple generations that are tacitly condoned in Vietnamese culture and their toll on its populations' physical and mental health. Recent studies show that 2/3 of Vietnamese children suffer physical abuse by family members. This is something that is autobiographical for Nha Uyen. The rapturous reception of the film--its appearance tragically coincided with the deaths of three different family's young children as victims of abuse at the hands of their parents--has started an important, national conversation and prompted the enactment of new protective laws, as well as a more open discussion on mental health (interview in English and Vietnamese).
Music for the episode includes excerpts from the film's soundtrack.
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Young LDS filmmaker Luis Fernando Puente discusses the premiere of his short film, I Have No Tears, and I Must Cry, at the Sundance Film Festival 2023. It is a personal film based on his own experience as an immigrant to the U.S. from Mexico.
Music for the episode is taken from the short film score, composed by Jorge Murcia.
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Author and Mormon literature influencer William Morris talks about his new book, The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories, and describes his approach to writing fiction with examples from his collection of short stories published by By Common Consent Press. Morris is also the incoming president of The Association for Mormon Letters. In the podcast he outlines some of his plans and priorities regarding the organization, which is the primary institution for LDS authors today.
Music of the episode: "Christmas Soundscapes 7" by Steven Ricks.
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Aaron Johnston and Kelly Loosli, creators of the new animated series, Saving Me, describe the sci-fi show--an old man who manages to return to his 11-year-old self and redeem him. This is the first animated series for BYUtv, and the bestselling author and award-winning animator discuss the process of translating words on a page to animation on a screen.
With the theme song for Saving Me written and performed by The National Parks.
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Joël René Scoville is a current participant in the legendary training ground for musical theater writing, the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in New York. In this episode, Scoville discusses the craft of writing for the theater, her journey from actor to writer, her experience as a Black artist, and she describes why new voices and new stories are so important today.
Music for the episode is:
"Til I Get Back on My Feet” from the musical, Flophouse.
Music by Joanna Burns, book and lyrics by Justin Anthony Long & Joël René Scoville
Sung by Joanna Burns
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 Saint Contemporary Art.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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, whose millennial hymn appeared in 12 LDS hymnal collections from 1835-1927.
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2020 marks three historic milestones surrounding women and voting rights. In her new book, Pioneering the Vote: The Untold Story of Suffragists in Utah and the West, author Neylan McBaine narrates this extraordinary history through the eyes of the women of the West, who were the first to vote in the nation. In this podcast interview, McBaine describes the complex relationships of polygamy, politics, and suffragists, and how local Relief Societies in remote Utah towns united to secure the right to vote against tremendous opposition. Most surprisingly, these are stories are almost entirely unknown until now.
Music in the episode is an anthem of women's suffrage, written in 1910 by Ethel Smyth and Cicely Hamilton, "The March of the Women."
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Although he was born with a physical condition requiring prosthetic legs and braces to walk, John Williamson was a high-functioning professional with a long career in the technology industry until five years ago, when his body began to break down, making employment impossible. In this interview, Williamson describes how he discovered artmaking late in life, how it became therapy for him after his new circumstances in a motorized wheelchair shook him to his core and robbed him of his identity and connection to society. He is a winner of the Center’s Art for Uncertain Times competition, and his image, Walking with Faith and Hope is part of a body of work that is a meditation on mobility, meaning, and visibility.
Music in the episode is another Art for Uncertain Times winner, Wait on the Lord, or The Plaguel Cadence, by Harriet Petherick Bushman.
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Two-time Emmy nominated writer James Best talks in this episode about his new one-act play, The Last Lake, which was a winner of the Art for Uncertain Times grant program of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. In addition to a discussion about the two-character play, presented in Zoom performances last week, and his upcoming projects, the writer describes his varied career in television, stage, and print, as well as advocacy work and civil disobedience for causes including #NoKidsInCages.
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Composer Deon Nielsen Price in San Francisco, California talks about her distinguished career writing music that is socially relevant including works about the Watts Riots and Vietnam. She finds comfort in poetry written by Japanese Americans imprisoned in internment camps during WWII, and she describes how her composer heroes Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Messiaen, and Cowell all used their periods of isolation or imprisonment to formulate the musical philosophies that they would employ the rest of their lives.
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In this special episode recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, four artists discuss their current life and work. Each answers the same four questions: What is it like to make your art right now?; How does this pandemic affect content?; Are there works from the past, written in similar times or about similar challenges that are meaningful to you?; and What advice might you have for an artist in quarantine?
Playwright Javen Tanner in Sandy, Utah discusses his difficulties of focusing on creative work during the pandemic. He muses on Shakespeare and Chekhov, and he has a hearty laugh about a preacher named T. White circa 1577 who blamed the theater for the Bubonic plague, “…the cause of plagues is sin and the cause of sin are plays, it follows that the cause of plagues are plays.”
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Poet Susan Howe in Ephraim, Utah talks about the disruption of her writing practice that typically involves peers gathering together. She notes the lag time and emotional distance required for a personal experience to enter into her work without sentimentality, and she quotes a meaningful refrain by T. S. Eliot that has brought her comfort during the pandemic.
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Painter Samuel Evensen in New York, New York is recovering from COVID-19 symptoms that have forced him into quarantine and attacked his body. A painter whose subject is the body, Evensen discusses the Spanish Flu epidemic, HIV/AIDS, and other global health crises and how artists such as Hyman Bloom and Egon Schiele chose to engage in the figure. His poignant advice for artists ends the episode. The music for all four segments is by Deon Nielsen Price.
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American composer of jazz, musical theater, concert, and choral music, Lisa DeSpain has not one, not two, but three operas in late-stage development—all winners of important commissions and grants. In this interview peppered with excerpts from the operas and with DeSpain breaking into song as she describes the compositions, the topic at hand is how an artist juggles different projects, collaborators, producers, and publishers at the same time. The three operas discussed in the podcast are: That Hell-bound Train, Staggerwing, and No Ladies in the Lady’s Book.
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In this episode, scientist and novelist Steven L. Peck discusses his newest novel, The Tragedy of King Leere, Goatherd of the La Sals. The book updates the Shakespearean tragedy to the near future, specifically, after a global climate change disaster. At turns funny, tragic, and frightening, the novel--and the interview--wrestle with the truths to be found in art as well as science.
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Painter Kent Christensen's Secrets of the Great Salt Lake is a virtuosic piece of visual satire representing early Utah history. Brigham Young rides a dinosaur in the lake while two trains bringing Jell-O, Snelgrove's ice cream, donuts, and toxic waste meet at Promontory Point for the driving of the Golden Spike. The state's animals frolic among recognizable tourist landmarks even while their existence is imperiled by climate change. Derived, in part, by Bosch's masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Christensen's most complex painting yet is the topic of this episode along with a discussion of the purpose of satire, the relationships of illustration and fine art, and how a project that has taken 500 hours to create started.
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"Beleaguered but buoyant parents of five children between the ages of 6 and 16," as The New York Times described Erik and Emily Orton, "hadn’t even plotted an itinerary when they bought a 38-foot catamaran (sight unseen), flew to a Caribbean harbor and set sail on a Swiss-Family-Robinson-style adventure." The resulting adventure was only the beginning. In this episode, the authors of Seven at Sea: Why a New York City Family Cast Off Convention for a Life-Changing Year on a Sailboat, describe the writing of the book and the lessons their experience continues to teach them as parents and dreamers.
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New Juilliard vocal faculty member, Darrell Babidge, discusses his career of training a generation of the world's opera singers. He discusses what it is like to be a vocal teacher of these elite musicians, what his voice lessons are like, and how he works with singers to perfect their craft. The interview is peppered with magnificent performances of his renown students, including Rachel Willis-Sørensen, Shea Owens, and Rebecca Pederson. The discussion includes an acknowledgement of the prominence today of LDS opera singers at the most important opera houses in the world and imagines what that critical mass of talent might mean for the culture itself. To conclude, Darrell is also heard performing the lead role of The Book of Gold, an opera by Murray Boren about Joseph Smith and the publication of the Book of Mormon.
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Music from Bali is the subject of this podcast interview, with Jeremy Grimshaw, who brought the traditional percussion ensemble of gamelan to Brigham Young University. The nature of gamelan is communal music-making, and Grimshaw discusses the history and culture of Bali, his experiences there, and how a new community of gamelan has grown in Utah.
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The Center for Latter-day Saint Arts provides a weekly Art Companion for the gospel study curriculum, Come, Follow Me. This was the idea of Jennifer Wilcox who explores, in this podcast episode, how the project came to be, how she uses art in her church teaching, how she commissions new art for her students, and ultimately how the home is the perfect classroom and art space.
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Artist Brian Kershisnik discusses a new monograph of his art work, Looking for Something: Selected Paintings, published Unicorn Publishing Group (London) and discusses how growing up in Angola, Thailand, and Pakistan has informed his worldview and affected his body of questioning, joyful, vibrant art.
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Assemblage artist Page Turner talks about how the sisterhood of church women in her hollow near Roanoke, Virginia, inspire her work, which has recently been included in 50 Women Contemporary Women Artists, alongside some of the most important artists working today.
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Emmy-award winning producer Angie Denison takes listeners behind the scenes of two recent KSL documentaries: Amish Latter-day Saints and the story of a kidnapped boy from India who finds his family again in adulthood.
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On the day of the premiere of his Easter oratorio, To a Village Called Emmaus, composer Ethan Wickman previews the work with excerpts and behind-the-scenes insights into its creation. The oratorio was commissioned by the American Festival Chorus and Orchestra and conducted by Craig Jessop.
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The former global acquisitions curator for the Church History Museum reflects on her tenure and influence on art in the Church with the aid of tributes written by artists and colleagues: Neylan McBaine, Walter Rane, Rose Datoc Dall, Alan Johnson, Valerie Atkisson de Moura, Annie Poon, Diane P. Stewart, Caitlin Connolly, and Jason Metcalf. Hurtado is the newly-named executive director of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art.
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Starring on Broadway at the age of 11, Tade Biesinger played the title role in Billy Elliot the Musical and reprised the part in London and St. Louis. The experience left a strong impression on him but not in a way you'd expect; he learned at this tender age why he needed God in his life. This podcast episode was recorded three months before his departure as a full-time missionary.
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In an unlikely space in an unlikely place, Brad Kramer has achieved in four years something that many thought impossible: open a fine art gallery tailored to the contemporary art of Latter-day Saints. In the process, he has invited a highly diverse group of people into an exciting new community of thinkers and makers. With musical excerpts from Todd Coleman's Sonatina for piano.
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In a discussion about his newest book of poetry, award-winning poet Lance Larsen speaks about prose poetry, describes how his work evolves from draft to print, reads from his work, listens to an art song setting of his poems, and considers other art forms that appeal to him.
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Art historian and Latter-day Saint Brontë Hebdon, a PhD student at the prestigious Institute of Fine Arts in New York City, discusses the Church's visual culture and how new approaches to art history and the exploration of objects affect identity, testimony, and gospel messaging.
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A series of letters from Broadway deity Stephen Sondheim opened the doors for composer David Fletcher. The resulting songs--like Weepin' Mary, Eternal Day, A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief, and Wondrous Love--have been sung in numberless Latter-day Saint church meetings are a singular blend of Broadway, classical, sacred, and popular styles. In this podcast, the composer discusses the musical path of his life and illustrates some of his best-loved works with recordings, including never-before shared demos.
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Independent scholar Brigham Barnes explores allusions to Mormonism, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and the Book of Mormon in James Joyce's novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, leading to a larger discussion of how Mormon Studies might expand to embrace artworks by members of the Church and also works about our culture, texts, and people by others. Music includes exclusive content of a bootleg recording of an excerpt from Murray Boren's opera, The Dead, adapted from Joyce's short story.
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Ruby Gilmore and Addy Hawley are teenagers who have performed with the Metropolitan Opera and American Ballet Theatre companies. In this podcast, Ruby and Addy talk about the dedication required and the joys encountered in the performing arts. They also discuss what it's like to perform alongside principal ballerinas and international opera stars who are LDS, like they are, and how talent and testimony intersect.
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The newest book by Richard Lyman Bushman is The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Cultural History. In this podcast, Bushman discusses the legacy of farming and labor as a shaper of America society, the tragedy of Native American displacement and slavery as a consequence of farm expansion, and the influences of the family on larger issues of American culture.**Support the show (https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/donate)
Excerpts and discussion with pianist Scott Holden about his Carnegie Hall concert and new CD of a century of Mormon music.
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Author Randy Astle describes the largely unknown story of early Mormon film and its remarkable connection with LDS history. A product of twenty years of research, his new book, Mormon Cinema: Origins to 1952, published by the Mormon Arts Center, is a landmark volume full of extraordinary and entertaining stories.
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In this episode, Angolan painter Hildebrando de Melo discusses his life and work, including the chaos and brutality of his country's decades-long civil war, and his responses to it through the lens of a search for God.
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The composer, scholar, Hopi, Mormon composer Trevor Reed discusses new genres of Hopi/contemporary concert music and his work to repatriate art and advocate for the rights of indigenous peoples.
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The visual artwork of Annie Poon is the subject of this interview with the artist, who describes her interest in outsider art, children's art, and how those styles feed her own work.
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The legacy of composer James W. McConkie is explored by his grandson, Jamie Erekson, including a vintage recording of the composer who studied with Arthur Honneger and Nadia Boulanger and who was the brother of LDS apostle, Bruce R. McConkie.
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