“Work and Wonder: 200 Years of Latter-day Saint Art” is at the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City through March 1, 2025. Image by Steve Coray.

Work and Wonder: 200 Years of Latter-day Saint Art—on display now at the Church History Museum and organized by the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts—is touted as the “largest and most comprehensive attempt to show the variety of works by Latter-day Saint artists around the world from the Church’s founding to the present.” The exhibition was curated by Heather Belnap, Ashlee Whitaker Evans, and Brontë Hebdon, who have been immersed in the project for several years. (The same trio also curated a related exhibition, Materializing Mormonism: Trajectories in Contemporary Latter-day Saint Art, which was on display at Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum during the summer of 2024.) Its opening text states:

For nearly 200 years the rich doctrines, history, and culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have inspired artists to create artworks of diverse and profound expression. As the Church nears the bicentennial of its organization in 1830, this exhibition presents a broad survey of the visual art created by individuals connected to the faith.

Visitors might expect a traditional chronological or geographic retrospective given the scope of this gathering of LDS artworks. Instead, the exhibition’s strength lies in its collapse of conventional boundaries of time and space. Organized into four sections—“Memory and Archive,” “Individual and Church,” “Sacred Spaces,” and “Identity”—the show reveals two complementary insights. On one hand, it demonstrates that across long spans of time and geography, LDS artists—and those working with LDS themes—engage with similar questions and ideas. On the other, it shows that LDS art is far more multifaceted than one might assume. Both insiders and newcomers will be surprised by the depth, breadth, and variety of the 120+ works assembled from numerous private and public collections. Overall, the exhibition asks: How do artists of and around the LDS Church narrate its visual story, and what motivates them across different eras and regions? What can art reveal about the past, present, and future of the Church?

The introductory gallery underscores these aims with three works that span nearly 200 years of LDS art. First, CCA Christensen’s “Crossing the Mississippi on the Ice”—one of the panels from his renowned Mormon Panorama—marks one of the earliest visual translations of the Mormon story, capturing the experiences of early Latter-day Saints en route to Utah. Second, Avard Fairbanks’ “Eternal Progress,” a monumental plaster bas-relief originally created for the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago (and restored for this exhibition), reflects a period when the LDS Church was reaching out to a broader global audience. Finally, Mexican artist Ricardo Rendón’s site-specific installation, “Zona de Concentración,” explores LDS concepts of eternity and time through geometric patterns and symbolism. Together, these pieces form a microcosm of the exhibition: works you expect—like the Mormon Panorama—others that are familiar in subject and style, such as Fairbanks’ “Eternal Progress,” and then pieces that challenge conventional expectations, like Rendón’s installation. They reveal distinct differences in motivation and style across eras, while also uncovering underlying thematic throughlines—most notably, a shared exploration of what eternity means and how best to visually represent the quest for eternal progression.

These intriguing juxtapositions continue to delight throughout the exhibition. In nearly every gallery and on every wall, as a Utah and Mormon art history enthusiast, I encountered pieces that both thrilled and surprised me. Clever pairings underscore the dual narrative: while LDS art defies reduction to a single style or genre, it nonetheless exhibits recurring philosophical, conceptual, and visual themes.

For example, one striking pairing contrasts Harry Anderson’s “The Second Coming”—a 10-foot painting of Christ’s return that appears ubiquitously in LDS publications and homes (despite Anderson being a Seventh-day Adventist)—with Madeline Rupard’s 12-inch “Jesus Painting,” which captures the foyer of her then–Brooklyn-based church through a giclée reproduction of Anderson’s work. Hanging Rupard’s painting next to the original helps show how omnipresent the work is in Mormon spaces, and how contemporary LDS artists are grappling with what a Mormon visual culture is and was, and how that influences contemporary understanding of Latter-day Saint art. It’s almost comical how much larger the Anderson painting is than the Rupard, but that also underscores a point—most people when they think of Mormon or LDS art probably picture the Anderson painting or something ideologically and aesthetically similar—and not necessarily the work of contemporary artists, like Rupard, engaging with LDS ideas in new and interesting ways. Work and Wonder incorporates a lot of contemporary art and shows visitors a broader understanding of what LDS art is and could be.

Related works in photography and paint, from left, George Edward Anderson’s “Sister Manwaring and Children at Prayer,” Megan Knobloch Geilman’s “Joseph’s Book of the Dead” and Sutcliffe Maudsley’s “Lucy Mack Smith.” Image by Emily Larsen.

Other engaging groupings include displaying George Edward Anderson’s iconic 1903 photograph “Sister Manwaring and Children at Prayer” alongside Megan Knobloch Geilman’s 2017 “Joseph’s Book of the Dead” and Sutcliffe Maudsley’s circa-1842 “Lucy Mack Smith.” Presented together, these works highlight how a contemporary artist like Geilman reimagines Mormon visual culture in her cerebral digital compositions by echoing stylistic elements from both Anderson’s compositions and medium and Maudsley’s depictions of Joseph Smith and his family. Similarly, Maddison Colvin’s 2012 “Typologies (Utah),” paired with Ann Eckford’s 1846–1849 “Nauvoo Temple Sampler,” demonstrates that throughout the 200-year history of the church, artists have been keen to interpret and decode the symbolism and significance of the Mormon temple.

A true treasure of the exhibition is “Fourteenth Ward Album Quilt.” Remarkably, its two halves—one of which was once lost—were reunited during the research and curation process. Dating from 1857, the quilt comprises individual blocks crafted by members of Salt Lake City’s Fourteenth Ward Relief Society and pieced together. Quilting emerges as an unexpected throughline: it is not only a literal medium of cultural expression for Mormon women (across the nearly 200 year history of the LDS Church) but also a visual language that contemporary artists such as Jacqui Larsen, Paige Crosland Anderson and Sara Lynne Lindsay have reinterpreted in their work.

“Fourteenth Ward Album Quilt” is a communal piece that dates to 1857. Image by Emily Larsen.

Japanese artist Kazuko Covington also employs quilting to explore the theme of family history and generational lineage—a recurring motif throughout the show.  A central doctrine in LDS theology is the idea of eternity and the need to participate in rituals, including baptism, the temple endowment and a temple sealing, to ensure your family can be together forever throughout the eternities. This doctrine leads many Mormons to be heavily invested in family history and genealogy. This focus on genealogy is echoed in works like Valerie Atkisson’s “Hanging Family History” and Michelle Franzoni Thorley’s “The Finding Process,” among others.

The show is full of other delightful surprises. I cried the first time I saw the exhibition to see Brigham Young and His Friends by Sarah Ann Burbage Long for the first time in person. She is one of the earliest and most important LDS women artists, who has largely been forgotten by Mormon history and culture.

Throughout the exhibition, the curators include the work of women artists in thoughtful and significant ways. Minerva Teichert’s “House of the World” hangs next to the very well known “Samuel the Lamanite on the Wall” by Arnold Friberg. The pairing makes the subtle argument that Teichert’s Book of Mormon  paintings and influence are just as important as Friberg’s, whose works benefited both from robust financial support from the LDS Church in the form of important commissions, and cultural capital through their widespread reproduction in the paperback Book of Mormons distributed across the world, and inclusion in every Sunday School class that I attended in the 1990s and 2000s. Mabel Frazer’s “The Furrow,” hung next to three of the most important modern-day powerhouse Utah painters David Dibble, Justin Wheatley, and Colby Sanford, shows visitors that it was Frazer, who in the 1930s as a professor at the University of Utah, was one of the first to bring modern painting styles into the LDS visual culture.

Another unexpected inclusion in the exhibition is photographs by depression-era FSA photographers Dorothea Lange and Russell Lee, who both captured Mormon towns and scenes in their signature documentary photography styles. Their works in the exhibition show how outsiders saw and documented Mormon culture.

In this review, I’ve focused mainly on Utah and U.S. artists—reflecting both my expertise and the emphasis of Artists of Utah—even though the curators intentionally made this a global exhibition. Works by artists from Asia, South and Central America, Europe, and Africa further attest to the depth and breadth of LDS visual culture, in addition to several works by Navajo/Diné artists.

Overall, I think visitors will find the exhibition both surprising and deeply impressive due to its incredible variety. Some pieces may feel familiar, while others take you in unexpected directions. The show clearly demonstrates that even though there are common themes, ideas, and symbols in LDS art, the overall expression is much broader and more layered than we often acknowledge. By blending works that meet expectations with those that challenge them, the exhibition invites us to see LDS art as a vibrant, evolving conversation that grows with each new contribution. The exhibition itself truly is a work and a wonder.

Works by, from left, Nick Stephens, Franz Johansen and Paige Crosland Anderson. Image by Emily Larsen.

Work and Wonder: 200 Years of Latter-day Saint Art, Church History Museum, Salt Lake City, through Mar. 1, 2025

Emily Larsen

Emily Larsen is a Utah-based curator, arts administrator, historian, and artist. She currently works as the Director of the Springville Museum of Art, where she has worked in a variety of positions since 2014. Her research and writing focuses on the Utah art scene c1880-1950. She is passionate about Utah’s art and cultural history and loves working with local Utah artists.