The Center’s Studio Podcast’s 100th Episode: An Audio Exhibition, Pt. 2

Part 2. Moments of Faith - This second celebratory episode of our 100th podcast includes six conversations with artists and includes intimate stories with a spiritual touch: Historian Richard Bushman in New York, then choreographer Vanessa Cook in Switzerland. James Faulconer tells a miraculous story from Brazil, we hear about a treasured but divided heirloom from Salt Lake City, Utah and the miracle of its reunion. We listen to religious music from Texas, and hear from a political prisoner and painter in Angola. 

Music: "Please Only Tell Me Good News” by Stephen Anderson; used with permission.

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Hello and welcome to the Centered Studio Podcast and its audio exhibition. We're celebrating our 100th episode, now in our ninth year of monthly interviews with Latter-day Saint creative artists. Because there are so many discussions in our history, I've whittled it down to four separate episodes broken into thematic topics. The second episode is Moments of Faith. It samples from six conversations with artists and includes intimate stories with a spiritual touch. Something I hear frequently from LDS artists who are well known in their field is a report that they have a divided identity. They are believing saints, but the public may not know that, and their work might not read on the surface as religious. Furthermore, they have professional colleagues in their lives and church colleagues, and the two often don't overlap. That can be a source of loneliness, but also joy when the two halves do come together. In these discussions, you'll hear how some of our culture's most significant artists try to bridge those separate worlds and what beautiful results come out of it. We'll start with historian Richard Bushman in New York, then choreographer Vanessa Cook in Switzerland. James Falconer tells a miraculous story from Brazil. We hear about a treasured but divided heirloom from Salt Lake City, Utah, and the miracle of its reunion. We listen to religious music from Texas and hear from a political prisoner and painter in Angola. You write in the preface of The American Farmer of the 18th century that you started working on the book 20 years ago and you were motivated by a desire to understand farmers. What's the story behind the writing of this book and why did it take you so long to complete it? Well, it actually is a book that uh attempted to mend my divided soul. On the one hand, I was an early American historian and published on the subject. That's all I taught was early American history. But then I was invited to do a briefer biography of Joseph Smith. And so I got involved in the Mormon history business. And after that, I was sort of working on two tracks. Uh and so after I'd finished this book, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, I uh thought if I'm going to do any more on Joseph Smith, I ought to know something about his social and cultural background. So he was a farmer, his father was a farmer, so it turned me towards farming. And I thought this will be a book that will bridge my sort of standard professional life with my church history life. How are you describing the book to people who don't have the handy dust jacket in front of them to tell them what it's about? Well, I tell them that it's an effort to find out what work does to personal culture. If you are totally absorbed in farming, thinking about it, working at it day and night, employing your children, devising ways to improve your farm, surely that has some shape on your mentality, your values. So I wanted to sort of move between work life and cultural life. And that's why I call it a social and cultural history. Aaron Powell I grew up on a farm. My my relatives are still farmers, they farm for a living. But I was shocked to read some of the insights that begin your book, including this one, that three-quarters of the U.S. population in 1790 made their livings from farms. Did that surprise you too? It's a fairly well-known fact among historians. So it didn't really surprise me. But what surprised me is three-quarters of the population is a minimal figure. Because in addition to people we call farmers as if that were their vocation, there were all sorts of other people who were farming. Everybody wanted to have an acre, everybody wanted to have a cow or a few pigs. Even people who lived in cities tried to keep animals, you know, chickens and uh hogs and so forth. So the farm view or the value of a farm extended through virtually the entire society. Everyone wanted to find some way to raise something to uh support themselves. I was surprised how much family comes out in the book. You say family was the instrument for reproducing society across generations. It gets complicated with families, though, because as as children grow up and they have families of their own, what happens to the farm? Yeah. Well, the question is, uh, how do you launch your children? This is a huge existential question for all of us today, and certainly in those times. And uh to begin with, you teach them farming, so it's in their in their bones, but then you have to give them that property. It's a huge thing. Now we give them an education. That's how we launch our kids. Then you wanted to give them at least a start on a farm. And where do you get the property? How do you pay for it? How you get them going? Uh those are huge everyday issues for farmers. Aaron Ross Powell And not just for the farmers, but it really shaped America too. I had not really considered the byproducts of this expansion from one generation to the next and how it affected Native American displacement, westward expansion, slavery, war, urban development, capitalism, politics, law, regional identity, and so forth. I started to think as I was reading that anybody unfamiliar with farming history couldn't understand U.S. history either, because they're so intertwined. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Well, that's exactly what I hoped you would see. For a long time, I was calling the book Farmers in the Production of the Nation, because I think the major characteristics of our country, the greatest movements, the greatest dynamism, originates in farms. I mean, where has there been a nation on the earth that is so expansive as the United States in the 18th and 19th century? There's no boundary that remains for long. We overflow it. And that's the westward movement and everything associated with it is really at the heart of the American life. And all of that comes from farmers trying to find land for their kids. A few minutes ago, you were talking about these two tracks of your career. In your biography of Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling, you're up front about it. And in the preface, you describe yourself as a believing historian, and you note that you, quote, cannot hope to rise above these battles or pretend nothing personal is at stake, end quote. So on the surface, a history of colonial farming doesn't have all that much to do with Mormon history. And yet as I read it, I kept wondering how Mormonism shades your writing overall. Any comment on that? Well, it it doubtless shades my writing more than I think. Claudia says all your books are autobiographical. Certainly uh Refinement is, but all the others. In this case, there was an explicit effort to sort of borrow from my Mormon view of the world and uh introduce it into my view of this historical period, and that is through the idea of family. Mormons make so much of family, we really have a family theology. We're children of God, we're brothers and sisters. Uh our families are eternal. So theologically we underscore family as central to human life. And of course, if you look at human literature, if you just look at Shakespeare or or uh wherever you go, family stresses, family strains, romance, rivalries between brothers and sisters is everywhere. And so what I wanted to do was sort of draw attention to the centrality of family in American history. That the family dynamics are shaping the major contours of our past. This is Vanessa Cook. You were awarded the uh spot at the artist residency at the center. You had mentioned that a little bit, but I think it might be interesting to kind of ask you like what was that experience like for you? Maybe if you could describe it a little bit. Yeah, with pleasure. So I arrived, one of six artists, and um one feature that's really beautiful about the residency, there are so many, is that you're from different artistic backgrounds. So I'm not in a room with six choreographers. This would be a very different experience. I'm meeting different disciplines, and so there is already a vast wealth of experience and different ways of entering um art approaches. So there's this massive overlap because you make, you're makers, you create. And so creative processes, there are some crossovers, but there are a lot of differences. Um, so there's already masses to talk about and to learn from. And I guess if I'm interested in other people's ideas, this was my idea of heaven, you know, people just telling me what their processes are and what they do. Um, so we arrived and we had um we had a week together to follow our own, our own um projects that we'd proposed. But more importantly, I think the cross-pollination of the experience is so rich. So every evening we came back and uh from whatever the activities were, our own projects and the center's activities. Well, we went to theatre, we went to galleries, we had um presentations, we met artists, um, and then we would come home and we would have amazing dessert um at home and we'd have yes, um, we'd we'd enjoy that whilst um sharing ideas and a question every night that was proposed from the centre from Glenn. Um and these we would really start with these questions and we would discuss and we had notebooks and we would go late into the night, we'd be discussing a crossover. What is it, was it, what is it to be a maker? Um what is it to connect to your audience? What do you think about? What's your challenge? All these questions that are relevant to everybody and yet differently relevant. Um so these discussions were just magical. Uh and I must say that the six of us, I felt really, really lucky to be with this six because they are good people. They're really good. And in every, I think in every career, there's, like you say, there's this desire to present what you are, whether you're an artist or whether you're a lawyer or whether you're a doctor or a business person. And what was beautiful about this this experience was that they these were six people who wanted to um learn about each other, and and also incredibly curious people, open, um, interested. They would feedback what someone had said to them, say, Oh, I'm feeling this, or oh, you said this yesterday. So really engaged human beings, high-level emotionally available, emotionally intelligent individuals. And for me, perhaps um the highlight, another highlight was that I come from Europe where um my spirituality and my creativity, they don't I don't really um talk about I don't connect them out uh externally. Of course, internally I do. So that so in this environment I was able to connect them externally in my conversation, which was very, very rich for me and kind of paradigm shift for me. I remember really pretty clearly toward the end of it, you announced, yeah, we've all decided that we're gonna work together sometime and we're gonna do something. And that's kind of taking things like to the this next step. You know, you've met everybody, you kind of get them together, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna, you know, make something together. And then I heard through the grapevine, also called WhatsApp, um that you were that you after the residency, you continued to meet. Like you'd hang out and talk to each other. And I I don't did you have regularly scheduled meetings or something like that? But anyway, tell me about that and why that was important to you. Yes. So we still meet every month um on Zoom. And it's a Sunday night. We schedule it at the end of the meeting. Have we got a next the next one? And um, we just check in with each other. And what's interesting is um we like each other. For sure we like each other and we are friends, but we've all got our own friends and our own circles where we live. So the primary reason for meeting isn't really to check in about how your life's going, it's more to check in with each other's work, and of course, life comes out of that. But um, particularly Darlene Young, she's very good at sometimes offering a question in the group and saying, Hey, I I was really thinking about this. And we come back to being creators, and so we really celebrate what each other's doing. Um, and the challenge is sometimes there's more happening, sometimes there's less, sometimes there's a little more about life spoken, and sometimes there's more about art spoken, but also with six people, you know, we there's a lot to be discussed, you know, between six people's lives. Um and this means a lot to me because this is a unique setting. I I've I can find myself in many social settings um with different people, with different backgrounds, but this is a unique one for me because this is my artistic connection. And these are my LDS artists friends who I have invested, we've invested a lot of time discussing things already. We've shared. So I I I've consider myself very rich to have this group. I value it a lot. I think we all do. I'm talking by phone with James E. Faulkner, professor in the Department of Philosophy at BYU, where he has taught since 1975. In January of this year, he was named a senior research fellow at the Maxwell Institute. He is formerly the Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding and Resident Senior Research Fellow at BYU's Wheatley Institution. A list of his books and articles is as long as your arm. His most recent book is from the BYU Maxwell Institute series titled The Book of Mormon: Brief Theological Introductions. I have to say, Tim, I'm such a fan of your writing. It just feels so smart and human and uplifting, and it makes me want to be better. So that's off to you. Your book of essays published in 2010, Faith, Philosophy, Scripture, is so full of gems. I'm not entirely sure how we should even approach discussing this book. Some of the stories are so personal that I'm hesitant to ask you about them. I found myself in tears reading your essay titled Remembrance. I'll mention that this book is another free download at the Maxwell Institute's website. We've been talking today a lot about I'm not making any money at all. No. You're subsidized in some other way, I hope. We've been talking today a lot about things that have personal connections, but these stories are more intimate still because they're autobiographical. You describe a few miraculous events from your life, and the vocabulary you use to reference them is anchors. Could I ask you to take a memory, one of those anchors in your life or another one entirely, and tell it and say why it stands out for you? Sure. It's always difficult to do this because these things are so close to the heart that it's difficult to to talk about them without um losing control. But um the most recent one, the and these are events I was was baptized in 1962 at the age of 16, so it's been a while. I don't have these kinds of experiences often. But they happen often enough to kind of I like the word anchor. They sort of are anchors for me that hold me in place. The most recent one was probably this uh the experience I had twenty plus years ago. I went to Brazil to meet my son who was coming home from his mission in Porto Alegre. And he had this grand plan for us to travel through Brazil and then leave from Sao Paulo and fly home. It turned out that he didn't know that much about getting around in outside of his mission area and didn't have as good a plan as he thought. And so we wandered a bit and we waited around in bus stations a bit. But in Porto Alegre, as we were getting ready to leave town, the place we were going to, there was only one bus that would get us there reasonably, and it was an overnight bus. And we could sit and wait in the bus station and take this overnight bus. And he had a really good idea. He said, Why don't we instead take a bus right now to someplace that's about midway, and then when the overnight bus gets there, we can get on it and go the rest of the way. And I thought that was a grand idea, so he asked her where she recommended, and she said, Well, you should go to Hosario. Hosadio is a beach town, you'll love it. It's you know, just a small community on the way. And she talked it up and he bought us two tickets, and we got on the bus and we stepped off in Hosadio, and it was in the mountains. It was a small farming town. There didn't seem to be anything around except a few houses and lots of fields. But as we stepped off the bus, these two young boys came running up to us saying, Elders, elders, elders. And it was just to me, it was genuinely shocking to be out in the middle of nowhere and have this happen. And so my son talked to them. I stood around listening because I don't speak any Portuguese at all. And it turned out that they were an LDS family that lived in a small little town, and they wanted us to go and see their mother. And so we went to this little house that they had. It had a small store in the bottom of the front of the house, and they lived in a couple of rooms up above the store. And we went with them and we met with her, and she said, I have to work until later this evening. Why don't you come back and we'll do family home evening? And so we went and sat in the city, the town square and read books for several hours until we could go meet with her. We went, we had a family home evening. And it was, you know, it was really very wonderful. We enjoyed it very much. And as we were talking, she said, We've been praying that the elders would come. And it was sort of difficult. I mean, my son did the explaining, but it was difficult to explain that we had come, but it was just for we were just on our way through, because she was hoping that this meant there were going to be missionaries in her town. Um, so she was disappointed, but she said, Well, before you leave, there's a young man in town who's inactive and you need to see him. And when my son told me this, I thought, this is the strangest thing. There is not a church, there is a church building in town, but not an LDS church building within many miles of here. I don't know what it means to be inactive when there is no church to go to. But she was quite, you know, definite about this. So we went to see him, and he owned a truck stop at the bus station up the road. We went up there to the truck stop, and as we went in, he had the same response. He said, Elders, elders, come in, have dinner, and we sat and we he served as a huge steak, of course, and uh gave us mate to drink, and we talked. But as we talked, he said that he assumed it was time for him to go back to church because we had come to tell him to. The night before, he had had a dream in which two missionaries came and told him that they were to go to he was good to start going to church again, because he was able to go to church by hitching a ride on Sunday mornings to a town down the road where he could attend church and come back. But since he had recently married within the last year or so, and his wife was not as a member of the church, he had quit going and he just, you know, wasn't doing the things he should do. And now he had this sign from God that he should. So I I mean I was just um I was really overcome by this idea that somehow or other, I have to say I am not a person who believes that everything in our lives is arranged by God. But somehow or other God had managed to arrange that the accidents that my son and I were doing answered the prayers of uh this woman and the incipient prayers of this man and blessed both of them. I mean I just it it was really uh incredibly moving to me. As we got on the bus that night, I said to my son uh something about how moved I was, and I just I I just cannot believe what we've just experienced. And he said, Oh dad, it happens like this in Brazil all the time. And I didn't but I wanted to say yes, but it doesn't happen like this in Provo all the time. For me, it was a revelation of God's love for his children, that he loved these people and he could use someone like me to answer their prayers apart from my own particular desires. Motives. I love stories like that so much. Thank you for sharing it. You know, when I'm between moments of having anchors of my own, I rely on stories like that to ground me. So thank you very much. Hello, everyone. Welcome to a special interview with three art sleuths extraordinaire. Dr. Heather Belknapp, Professor of Art History and Curatorial Studies, Ashley Whittaker Evans, former curator of religious art at the BYU Museum of Art, and Bronte Hebden, a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. It is so great to have you all here today. Thank you for having us. The story that we're discussing today is one of the most bizarre, most intriguing, and most important in the history of art by Latter-day Saint people. Just like a true crime podcast, let's reveal the story in episodes. First, a description of the precious object and why it is valuable. Second, the history of the object itself, including your own work searching for it to bring it back to life. And third, your insights into the artists who made this work and what it all means to you. Okay, is everybody ready? Do it. Okay, here we go. The object itself is the Salt Lake City 14th Ward Album Quilt, 1857. Who wants to describe for us what an album quilt is? I feel like we all want to defer to Heather, because she's the mastermind behind this. Um I can say that I do album quilts were very common in the 19th century. Um, and the idea behind it, as I understand it, is that an album quilt will be where different pieces are made by individual women, um, and then pieced together. Well, all three of you are really interested in the components of this story of art by women, of objects and textiles, for example, and 19th century work. So you are like the dream team for me to talk about this um today. Let's figure out what a why 1857 is significant and who were the people who made this quilt. Um, one thing I'll say is kind of bridging the last question to this one is I became aware of the quilt because of um Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's work on the quilt. She found out about the piece thanks to Carol's book, among other things, as a source. And then she gave um in her book A Houseful of Females, she references it, and she gave a speech um using that as kind of an object to unpack micro histories. That's when I became aware of it. And I mean, one thing she points out about 1857 is it's a really dynamic year um for the Latter-day Saints in the Deseret, you know, soon to be Utah territory, but um, but it's a year where the Relief Society, just a year prior, the Relief Society organization had kind of been re what do we say, revived? Um under Brigham Young, it had been latent for years um while the Saints were traveling west and settling, but it had been um kind of reinstituted as a church unit. So we have that happening. 1857 is where there's a lot of early really fervor over the Mormon Latter-day Saint practice of polygamy. So Johnston's army is sent to the West to kind of quell the rebellious Mormons. So there's that tension that's happening. Well, also definitely the lead up to the Civil War and so sort of questions about um slavery and abolition and the like. Yeah. You know, Bronte, you because of your expertise with some of these things, I was gonna ask you, is it uncommon to have an entire book about a single object like this? Yes. Right? And especially one that is so an object that is female-made and that is kind of more connected to popular history than any sort of institutional political or social world. Um, that these women, this these 14th Ward Relief Society members were coming together to create quilts and and to collect clothing, I believe, really represents this moment of kind of feminine domestic authority and using the skills and materials available in a really harsh and difficult environment. So, yeah, no, very rare to have uh a study focused on an object like this. Um, textile, even more rare. So it's just it's absolutely fabulous that it exists. Have we said why this quilt was made? Maybe we should ask that question. So the the 14th Ward, Salt Lake City 14th Ward album quilt, was made as um, I think a signal of their unity and sort of love and sisterhood, uh, but also to be a product that could be auctioned off for one of their charitable uh endeavors. The Relief Society was always keen on raising money to um bless the lives of others. And so um what we have are these individual portraits, you know, that then become a group portrait with the idea that it will be auctioned off and that uh in in order to, I think I think it was to um give money for the perpetual immigration fund, even to bring more saints to them the area and to make the desert blossom like a rose. And in the book that Carol wrote, her introduction says that she heard about the quilt for the first time around 1971 when her mother-in-law said to her that her husband Dan would inherit the quilt. And every par apparently everybody knew what this was, but Dan had no idea. He had no real interest in it. He thought it was like a denim quilt that people would spread out over the ground for picnics, um, because he had seen his grandmother make some things like that. Uh, but apparently he had never seen this quilt until the day he received it, Thanksgiving Day 1996, when the quilt was delivered to his home. So Carol writes, we carefully spread out the treasure before us. It was not a picnic quilt. It was an exquisite quilt. It was half a quilt. All right, it's time. Um she she talks about the half a quilt. So let's let's bring everybody up to speed on the raffle, who gets it, and then what happens next. Uh my understanding is Heather said correctly, they're creating this quilt um so that they can use it as a fundraising um item, which is incredible in my mind that they put that time and effort into this item. And as I understand it, it's won by a teenage boy, right? Richard Horn, who's around 12, I think. And he gets this quilt. So I don't know how he was so lucky and what he thought of it as a 12-year-old boy, but lucky him. And then he keeps it, and as the years pass, um he has two daughters. He wants to be very diplomatic, and so he decides rather than creating tensions between his, I'm assuming, beloved daughters, that he's going to give them each part of the quilt. Just as you say that, I can just I'm just imagining the severing that happens here and how so painful. But also understand as a you know, as a parent of wanting to to be fair. The orientation of the quilt blocks are di are are diamonds. So then when when um when Richard cuts through it, he cuts directly through it, making some of the diamonds, you know, half. So he doesn't kind of cut to preserve any of the quilt blocks. He just cuts straight through. And he ends up being, he is the great-great-great-grandfather of Dan. That's how, that's how that thing goes. As you've told this story before, um, and you're you get to the part of taking a priceless object and cutting it in half. What has the response been to the people you're talking to? It's universal horror. I mean, just no. Carol makes a point though, saying that only a man could have cut this in half. I don't know if that's true. That that cracked me up a little bit. Okay, so here we are now with the two pieces cut in half. At that point, it's passed down from generation to generation. But I think it's fascinating that it's it's mom to daughter. Dan only received it because he's the oldest of four boys and there weren't any daughters there. So Dan and Carol on the top half of the quilt. They had no idea where the bottom half was. And so as I understand it, Carol's doing all this research, and her book is essentially like this anthology of biographical stories of each of these quilt blocks. And the quilt block might be a flower, or it might be a bird, or it might be something personal and meaningful to them. But she researched what happened to those women, you know, after that quilt was done, which is that that's the historical documentation part that I love. So in her book, she tells the story of Dan discovering that Shirley Mumford owned the bottom half of the quilt. And so these would be like distant cousins, right? Both of them were uh, you know, their great-great-great-grandparents on this quilt originally. And they tracked her down, Shirley, and they called her on the phone. And she said she had anticipated their conversation for a very long time, confident that the rest of the heirloom was preserved and would eventually be found. She had displayed her half at church and civic events throughout the years, giving it an opportunity to be seen and hopefully recognized. But Shirley had never heard the origin of the quilt. She didn't know the story of the raffle, but her half had been passed down again, mother to daughter as well. So after more than 130 years, the two halves of the quilt were brought together, and it was a big photo-op and kind of family reunion. Then Carol felt this urgency to learn and tell the stories of, quote, the pioneer women, the artists of the 14th Ward Relief Society. And Dan discovered something he hadn't known before. When he saw the bottom half of the quilt, he recognized some names. So his ancestors were in the bottom half of the quilt, and they weren't in the top half. So he didn't know how connected his family was to this. Doesn't that all sound kind of a fast like a fascinating discovery? All right, so let's let's pick up where we left off with this crazy story. And now the three of you are going to get involved in the history of this object because you weren't wanting to use it for something yourself. Why don't some why doesn't somebody give us an update on what that was all about? So, Glenn, I think that you, uh as we were organizing uh this show for the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, that you told us to think big and uh to think about the impossible dream. What objects would we would we have as part of that? And this for me was number one. And not knowing anything about its location, if the Nilsons were still in possession of it, if uh the Mumfords, the other, the other family, um, that if they were around. And yet knowing that this would be just a dream object to have um in the collection. So we we took you seriously and uh put that on our list of objects that we'd like. And this exhibition ended up being called Work and Wonder 200 Years of Latter-day Saint Art. And this was at the Church History Museum uh last year, and the three of you were the curators for it. So knowing that we we wanted this um object and knowing that Laurel had was the most recent historian, I guess, to publish on this, I approached her at a Mormon History Association conference and asked if she had the contact information for the Nielsen's, which she did. And so I reached out to them and uh got a really generous uh message back from Dan saying, Yes, we still have this. Thank you so much for your interest. We've actually, you know, been sort of wondering um what to do with this quilt. But by all means, we are so happy to have this work exhibited. And so shared this email with the other curators, and we were all so thrilled. And then a few weeks later, um he wrote and said, we um feel really strongly that this quilt should go to the Church History Museum, where they had been docent years before and had really felt a, you know, uh uh an appreciation and love for that institution and for its mission. And so that um donation sort of happened while we were preparing for the exhibition. So fill us in on what happened next with that. Yeah. So anyway, established this lovely relationship with Dan, and we started uh chatting on the phone and and talking about the quilt and its history, and and he provided me with the information for uh the Shirley Mumford and her um most the most recent contact information that they had. And there it was, there were addresses, there were a few phone numbers, even of the daughters, and so I start reaching out, making phone calls, getting onto social media, trying to send messages and nothing, nothing. And uh reached back out to Dan and said, Do you have any you know more ideas? And he he didn't. And so for several months, many months, maybe over a year, if I if I can recall, we just thought the the it's it's lost. We're not going to be able to to um connect with this family. We don't know what's happened to this object. So meanwhile, the we were we you were you were all preparing for the exhibition, and they had figured out how to display half of the quilt. And that was the plan, right? Okay, then what happened? And then I believe that Shirley reached out to Dan and Carol. Is this your understanding as well? Okay, I happen to have an email. I happen to have the email. And you know, Okay, good. Read it. There was celebration in Mudville that day. So this was April 22nd, 2024, around the time that all of the submissions deadlines were fast approaching. Like, you know, it was like when you do an exhibition, you have to have this checklist, and a million people have to see it and sign off on it. And it was getting to the point of no return. So here's what happened. So Dan wrote to Heather and me, and he said, Hope all is well, and the upcoming exhibition at the Church History Museum is on track without too many headaches. It sounds marvelous. Heather, we talked about the possibility of displaying the other half of the quilt, but couldn't successfully contact the current owner, Shirley Mumford. Interestingly, she has just contacted me. She had moved and changed her phone. She texted me to reconnect and say hello, and we have had a couple of conversations and renewed our ties. He continues, I told Shirley about your upcoming exhibition and that you might be interested in displaying both halves of the quilt. And she said she thought it would be good and she would be willing to lend her half of the quilt for such a purpose. And then he he goes on and on and says really nice things, giving a little bit of information about Shirley, who was then uh 80 years old, and trying to make some changes in her life about where she would live and so on. And then he ends his email. Thanks again to you, Glenn, and all who are working to present and share this wonderful exhibition. Know that you are appreciated. Love from us, Dan and Carol. So Heather and I got this email, and we were, you know, I think jumping up and down. There was like earthquake level jumping up and down. Okay, so take it from there, Heather. Then what happened? So uh she wanted to, she really wanted to give one more presentation to her friends and family, an opportunity for her to share this. And so um, I was able to go um with the uh Laura Howe, who is the curator at Church History Museum, and see this presentation. And it it it just was a a poignant reminder that this is uh a family heirloom, and you know, as well as this important material aesthetic object for the Latter-day Saint church. And anyway, so um got to see her present that and share that and see how connected uh and important this object had been to her. And then it was transferred over to the Church History Museum for conservation, um, which had to happen very quickly. Um so they had been working on conservation in the top half for uh over a year, 18 months, something, something like that, and uh, which is painstaking sort of work. And they with their their their great um what in enthusiasm and generosity said, sure, we can absolutely make this happen. And uh and so the object was displayed. You know, I hesitate sometimes in my work with LDS artists to talk about spiritual experiences that I have regarding it, but I've definitely felt prompted sometimes to do things or say things that later I discovered were answers to prayers or would have a significant spiritual impact on others. I I I'm not sure whether this is the place to bear testimony on the podcast, as it were, but it feels to me like it would be shameful and maybe a little ungrateful for us not to acknowledge that there was some larger hand going on with this. I mean, do you agree? Absolutely. I mean, absolutely. I I I felt I felt the spirit as we were pursuing this and that that we were allowing a you know a great work and reunion to to transpire. Yeah, I mean God moves in a mysterious way. And I definitely I mean, I feel that with the recovery of many of these types of objects that are worthy of and receiving more attention, I think that's such a gift to us, to our history, to our understanding of our past, present, and future as a people, as women in this church. Dante, what were your thoughts about it wrapping it all up? So I was kind of not on the outside necessarily, but the unique um situation of this curatorial project was that I was in New Jersey while Heather and Ashley were in Utah. And so my first experience with the quilt was seeing it in the gallery installed. And I'm actually really grateful that that was how I first encountered it. Um lit just perfectly for me. The gallery was empty and I had time to really just soak it all in. I don't think it's a coincidence that this exhibition happened. I don't think it's a coincidence that the two halves came together when they did. The strength of its its testimony continues to grow in our kind of cultural zeitgeist. The other thing I think of too is what other pieces have we not discovered yet? Um are there more quilts? Are there I don't even know. But what objects are waiting to be discovered? Uh, and that's something that makes me really excited. Today I'm here in Cache Valley, beautiful Logan, Utah, with Ethan Wickman to discuss a new oratorio to a village called Emmaus, I think is the name of it. Is that correct? That's right. In fact, it's the title that you gave to it, Claire. Oh, yes. Remember? Yes. On the self-serving scale of one to ten, I'm a little nervous about this podcast because I'm the librettist for the piece and Ethan is the composer. And you had been reading and thought about wouldn't it be interesting to do something that had kind of a a narrative that we don't talk about very much, you know, that that's familiar that we love. And it was your idea. I mean, you pitched to me in the weeks afterwards the story of the the road to Emmaus. And I love the idea. Uh I love the idea because it places the resurrected Christ in a very intimate relationship. The details are kind of spare. There aren't a lot of details. We know there was a conversation that happened with these two grieving disciples and the Christ who is not known to them. I mean, he's he's kind of in a in a cloak and they just assume that that that Jesus Christ has died and he's gone. Because of that, it left room to include some of the scriptural story. But also to imagine what might have those conversations sounded like. And that was I think really the beauty of your of your text was was the moments where you took uh scripture verbatim and then took things that were from elsewhere of the scriptures, but those created the foundation of conversation between these various parties on the road. I maybe I'm maybe I'm just getting old and uh less risk-averse, but it just didn't appeal to me to do a large piece that was just edited scripture. Right. I mean, there's a long history. There's a long history of that, and the works are awesome. And and we're not just talking the traditional repertoire, choral the choral literature. There's a lot of contemporary music that's the passion or the last seven words of Christ. There are several settings of that, actually, not just the most famous one. And it just it just felt to me that I if I couldn't make it feel personal and intimate, why bother? Why bother doing it? And I thought, well, I bet I could, I bet I could write some original poetry in addition to scriptures. It has some advantages because even though the events have already passed, you have some ability to kind of in retrospect uh refresh the memory because Jesus is talking to these two disciples and saying, you know, here's what's happened. And they're also recounting, here's what's happened, because he toys with them and says, Why are you sad? Like, and they say, Well, you'd have to be a stranger around here to not know what's going on. I like the aspect of this story in the scriptures. Yeah, let's listen to another aria. How about if we listen to Jesus' aria? And this is sung by Eric Hood, who's a baritone. He also is a uh professor at the university. And I actually had some ideas sketched out, some you know, some pretty intellectual things about the space, and I just I found that it wasn't going over, so I chucked it, and then um so the very Completely tossed it. Completely tossed it. Um, except you know what was in that mix was a was a first stab at the Cleopas's uh the the the song of grief that was that was in there, and some of that remained. But I remember I was at my parents' house in St. George in early July, and I wrote the first chord and the first violin solo. In fact, I was late leaving to come up to Salt Lake because you know it's always I oh the car was packed, but I was like, oh I got in the car and I was like, I've got to write this down while I'm feeling it. And I went to You were in the groove. I was in the groove. And then the next thing I wrote, you see, I skipped away ahead, and the next thing I wrote was that Arya we just heard of Jesus. You know, I wrote that on my mother-in-law's piano in South Georgia one morning, and that that came together almost in its entirety. Should I tell you how I how I wrote it? I'd love to hear it. Yeah, so I was completely chronological from page one to the and never going back. And I don't think of myself as being very intelligent, and there's there are so many people who can corroborate. And so I'm just really insecure about my scriptural studies. It's like I read a scripture and really respond to it, and then it just flies out of my head. Like I just can't remember anything. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I'll tell you it's not. But uh so what that meant for me is I really needed to immerse myself to feel comfortable. Yeah. And so I had a lot of different source material and I was going through it, and I would spend time every day. Um, I would just spend, you know, two or three hours a day studying, and as ideas came, maybe like a fragment or an image of a thing, I would I would write that down. Or if there was something that I had seen and, you know, or something from some other art form or what or even earlier uh music or whatever, I would make note of that. And then each day my goal was to write maybe like a half an hour. And that would sometimes be, you know, a stanza of an aria or a section of uh something. But when we got when I got to this Jesus' aria, it doesn't have a title, I'm a bread baker. Yeah. And I I once took a class at the Solden Street Bakery, which is a a really well-known bakery in my town that that supplies most of the great restaurants, their bread. And I ended up taking a class one day from him, from this teacher, and he's an amazing guy. And he said the thing about bread that is so fascinating to him is that every culture has some version of it. And then I just came across this image of bread rising and the heat of it the that I thought was sort of a metaphor of the challenges that we all face. And so as soon as that idea came out, I felt a lot of confidence that I had maybe something to add of value to it. Beautiful. And I love that image of the of the metaphor of the rise of the bread at the end, because in a way, I mean, this is like this is Christ's speaking kind of one in this in our production, in this one last time in the parable. You know? Um, and the and you know, it's such a simple thing. Everybody understands bread. You know, and of course bread has great significance in Christ's ministry. But when you can talk about the bread and the the very last line and the miracle of the rise, we know that he's not talking about bread anymore. And and the characters know at that point that it this is no longer a, you know, how to bake bread lesson. Yeah. I was wondering if, you know, in a contemporary way, if you could write a parable or if that kind of metaphorical speech was even possible anymore, if we're too jaded to do that. And so that was sort of my my attempt at it. What I find is like in a personal way, uh and sc let's say in a scripture reading kind of way, when you're reading the scriptures, not just for your personal edification, but to see what you can make out of it. Like artists using the scriptures in some way, they have to internalize it differently. And so I found, I said, oh, well, maybe, maybe there is a new way for me to to interact with these things. It's a phrase that's a little hackneyed by now about you know getting closer to the savior, but I feel that I kind of got some insight to that. Like I want the I want the work to feel that it matters to somebody. Like it's kind of like a painter whose and whose primary work is illustration, yeah. And they're just making work because somebody tells them to. Right. You know, and if it's a scriptural piece of the Garden of Eden and the editor says, no, the bush needs to be six inches higher, you know, on Adam. Like I that doesn't appeal to me. It's just that's just not where I am in my life, you know. But I do love collaborating with other artists, and you've just been fantastic to work with. It's been great. I mean, the really the this text did leap mean it's a cliche, you know, but it leapt off the the the text is a cliche. No. Thank you for that from it. Thank you for that criticism. It was it it was a joy to set, and it was rich with imagery, and it gave me an opportunity as a composer to write some really beautiful music. Uh, I felt I have high hopes that you're gonna have a great night. Tonight is the premiere of it. Yeah. We're recording this on Saturday. So congratulations on this accomplishment. Thanks, Glenn. And this is Hildebrando de Melo. You said at a certain point that from a young age, and here I'm just quoting you from your book again, I have questioned existence. Where do life and nature come from? I have always had a desire to see God. I wondered what he would look like, how he would be. One of my artistic pursuits is to wrestle with these questions. It is something I want to manifest in my art, but I don't know what it is exactly. I feel close to an answer sometimes, but it is just out of reach. Many of the titles of your works from 2006 on have to do with God specifically. I mean, the word God or other things related to the God are very present there. Tell me about how this quest of searching for God appears in your artwork. This is a huge high. I know. I'm sorry when we remember about the this is this confrontation of existence, you know. I think every artist, every good artist, he always reached or she in this point to question his stance. What are we doing here? What is the purpose? What is what is this driving force that leads us to why do I breath? Why do I have why do I have this energy? Why the where does this all come from? You know, this is a kind of a quotation that it is among us since the beginning of times when when when we started to think as a human being by philosophers like uh Platon or Aristotle or all of them, they were thinking, you know, about until the days on. We didn't find any solution for for this this gap of I I have to smile um listening to you because I know a lot of Mormon artists, and they all say the same thing. Much of their artwork is this kind of searching, but their artwork could not possibly be more different than yours. Their their journeys take them to representation, take them to pictures of drawing a picture from the scriptures. Yes, I'm understanding. They're illustrating the scriptures, or they're talking about people who are God-fearing and believing people, and they're drawing and painting them, and they're showing what their life is like. Your works, though, are not representational in that way. Most people looking at them would call them abstract, although that word bothers me a little bit because you are finding things that are meaningful to you and sometimes are connected to the world. You've done series on spiders, insects, trees, yeah. But each of those are symbols that become something much larger than just a tree. It becomes something like an allegory that has elements of of the political and the real and this kind of uh supernatural too. Would you say that you are interested in in life beyond this planet? Yes. Uh that's what uh the I knew that you were going to end up there. Because I'm super smart. Yeah, okay. When I when I joined the church, when they were giving me lectures on on religion, uh stood it in my my mind all this idea uh that I've shown you a few moments ago, that is the blood, the flesh, uh how that thing connects. Even when we born, we pass in through a situation that we forgot about things and we had uh uh uh we we have a body and uh and uh when you die you even ha go to heaven and all this kind of influenced my work. What do you think your grandmother would think of all of this art and your journey and your Mormon membership? Um one one thing that that she told me when she was feeling that she would pass away, it is that uh Ildo she said to me, You go wherever you want to go because you had born to be great. You will not be a small person. You were born from us and you had born to be great, not to be uh any kind of people, you know. And uh someone that tells this to his uh son, it's someone that wants the best for you in in many different ways. And uh when I became Mormon, she was alive and she saw she knew my biblies, she knew about uh what I have chosen to my life to embrace Christ, to be a better person every day. Of course she is she's very happy where she is, you know. I think of all these people and the one hundred plus other artists in this podcast series as friends now, but often they weren't when we started talking. I'm surprised how frequently in our conversations they opened up in a way they wouldn't in a typical press interview. We've all had that experience of telling a close friend a secret. It's such a bonding moment, right? In a spiritual setting, telling others about a sacred experience is trickier because keeping it private is also a powerful and moving impulse. Personally, I do a bit of both. Sometimes I share miraculous things with friends and family, and sometimes I don't. Still, with this sampling of revealing comments, I find myself warmer and cosier than before, and more grateful to these artists and friends for speaking so candidly. I've worked with LDS artists for a very long time, and there's definitely attention regarding their ways of using spiritual language and professional experiences to make their work. It's complicated. Years ago, I hosted a big group of LDS composers in an email forum, and one of the topics was whether composers use prayer in their professional practice. It divided pretty cleanly, if surprisingly. Those living in Utah uniformly reported that they never do such a thing. They wouldn't consider offering a prayer or fasting before sitting down to write that string quartet or choral work. They found it almost laughable, and they told stories of students who turn in really bad art and say, but I felt the spirit. So they were really skeptical about it. But the composers outside of Utah, almost universally, said the opposite. They ask for spiritual guidance in prayer all the time, as they're writing jazz, classical film, and other kinds of music. One composer, Lansing McCloskey, a Grammy Award-winning classical composer whose resume is unmatched in the church, told me the story of a recent composing crisis. He had a commission for a piano work that was already scheduled to premiere at Carnegie Hall, but he couldn't get a single good idea for it. Everything he tried felt wrong, and so finally he hit the delete button and threw it all away. With the drop dead deadline approaching, and having already missed the deadline for the pianist going into the recording studio to add it to his accompanying CD, he offered up an urgent prayer, I'm paraphrasing. Okay, Heavenly Father, I've done all I can do. If this is meant to be, I need thy help, and I need it right now. So we went to bed, and in his sleep, the perfect concept, structure, and content for the piano piece appeared, virtually complete in his mind. He woke up and wrote it out almost without editing. As he told me the story, he gave to God all the credit for that piece. I don't know exactly what to make of the variety of responses to issues of blending creative life and spiritual life, and maybe it's different these days geographically too. But I like having a forum where people can, if they're feeling it, express a spiritual aspect alongside their work. And the Center's Studio Podcast has sometimes been that safe space. I hope you're enjoying this audio exhibition. In our next episode, we'll offer some surprises and gain unexpected insights from a wide group of artists. I feel guilty that there are so many wonderful interviews that we don't have time to highlight. I know that as you all explore them in full on your own, you'll be able to curate your own lists of favorites. This is Glenn Nelson, your host, in New York. Goodbye.