Nathan K. Rees

Public debates about contested monuments have mostly focused on whether monuments should be removed, but some communities have taken another approach: erecting new monuments that present a different viewpoint or provide context lacking in the original. The largest-scale example that I’ve encountered is in Pretoria. In the first half of the twentieth century, white South Africans descended from Dutch settlers erected a monument commemorating the overland migration their early-nineteenth-century ancestors made to escape British rule in the Cape Colony. The Voortrekker Monument, completed in 1949, is an enormous granite structure perched on a hilltop just south of Pretoria. I co-wrote two articles contextualizing it with monuments in the American West (one of which is available open access) if you’re interested in learning more. Not surprisingly, given the era in which it was designed, the Voortrekker Monument represents colonization as a positive good that brought civilization to a savage world, honoring nineteenth-century settlers in part to justify the racial order of twentieth-century South Africa.

After the end of Apartheid, South African leaders envisioned a new memorial site nearby, where, as Nelson Mandela described, “we shall honor with all the dignity they deserve, those who endured pain so we can experience the joy of freedom.” Opened in 2004, Freedom Park is a complex that pursues this goal through a series of memorials, a museum, and a library housing the Pan African Archives.

While the Voortrekker Monument sets out a vision of South African history connecting the nineteenth century to the twentieth, Freedom Park takes a much broader scope. The museum leads viewers on a carefully-directed narrative pathway through seven “epochs.” The first, “Earth,” combines geological exhibits, scientific perspectives on the region’s pre-history, and Indigenous creation stories. It continues through explorations of precolonial history, European contact, colonial rule, and the struggle against Apartheid—with a similarly wide-ranging combination of artifacts, scholarly exposition, and Indigenous knowledge in each successive section. It doesn’t feel like a typical history museum—the experience is so narrative-driven that it seems almost like walking through a drama that unfolds as you progress. 

The museum is just one part of a much larger complex. A short walk up the hillside takes you to a series of memorial spaces. Some, like the “Wall of Names” listing South Africans killed in conflict, fit clearly within a contemporary Euro-American language of historical commemoration.

Yet the memorial spaces are constructed of vast flowing walls of stacked stone, referencing Great Zimbabwe and other precolonial African sites, a dramatic contrast to the Voortrekker Monument’s classically-inspired design.

Others elements are entirely based on Indigenous perspectives, especially the “Isivivane,” named for the isiZulu word for a stone cairn marking a burial site or a place of spiritual potency.

Freedom Park’s Isivivane is a circle of stone pavers surrounded by nine monoliths brought from each of South Africa’s provinces. The Isivivane serves both as a symbol of union and, as the park describes, “ a place where the spirits of those who have fallen in the struggle for freedom over time can come home to rest.” Viewers are asked to follow traditional practice in their experience of this part of the complex by removing their shoes as a sign of reverence.

One of the most notable distinctions between the Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park is the rhetorical strategy that each employs in its representation of history. While the Voortrekker Monument uses narrative visual art throughout as a means of conveying its vision, representational imagery is notably absent from the memorial spaces at Freedom Park. Instead, the park relies on natural metaphors to create meaning. For example, the largest section of the memorial, the “S’khumbuto” (a “place of remembrance” in iSwati) directs visitors through a series of pathways leading past the Wall of Names and up to an amphitheater and “Sanctuary” at the top of a hill.

From the steps of the amphitheater or from the interior of the Sanctuary (an empty enclosed space designed for contemplation), visitors can look out over a pool with numerous bubbling fountain jets. Under the overhang of the Sanctuary is a circular platform emerging from the pool, housing the “Eternal Flame,” commemorating victims of conflict whose names have been lost to history. The S’khumbuto communicates almost exclusively through form and material. Viewers need a bit of introduction (whether from guides or texts) in order to understand the concept—but all it takes is a basic outline of the memorial’s intent to start to feel the significance of the space through the language of natural elements. The gently moving water, for example, readily evokes the sense of healing, purification, and reconciliation animating the memorial. There are a few symbolic elements, I believe—like the tripartite swooping forms on the inner wall of the Sanctuary, and the “wheel” shapes in the pavement alongside the pool—I didn’t see any explanation of their origin or significance, but not knowing didn’t diminish my experience (if anyone does know, though, please tell me!).

While the Voortrekker Monument tells its story primarily through narrative sculpture, it marshals the elements to reinforce one aspect of its message in a very dramatic fashion. The Voortrekkers attributed their military victory against a Zulu army on December 16, 1838, to divine intervention, and their descendants have celebrated that day as a national holiday. The monument is designed so that on December 16, a ray of light shines directly through the oculus at the top of the structure, through a circular opening in the main floor, and onto a cenotaph in the lowest level, symbolizing the divine support the Voortrekkers believed they experienced. It’s a radically different approach to using nature as a memorial medium. Unlike the open-ended contemplation that Freedom Park aims to foster, the Voortrekker Monument uses nature as a ploy in reinforcing a clearly-defined narrative.

Freedom Park is a memorial that is also, in part, a critique of memorialization. In subverting expectations about what a monument should constitute and what experiences it should facilitate, Freedom Park’s memorial spaces ask whether a different approach to meaning-making could better align with the cultural context and the values of its community. It is not the first memorial to explore new forms of visual and phenomenological rhetoric—indeed it openly references previous examples, as in its reliance on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a model for the Wall of Names. Unlike Western examples, though, Freedom Park’s critique of monumentality operates in a Postcolonial framework, seeking a new mode of commemoration that subverts colonial ideologies while engaging Indigenous perspectives on remembrance. In addition, Freedom Park stands out because it carries out its critique not as an independent vision, but in direct dialogue with (and against) the Voortrekker Monument—an archetypal emblem of traditional Western monumentality in the service of colonialism.

I’ve been intrigued by an aspirational phrase I keep coming across in my research. For half a century, folks with an interest in Latter-day Saint art have been awaiting what they describe as a “Mormon Michelangelo.” The concept references a 1967 speech by Spencer W. Kimball, then a member of the LDS Church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles who would go on to become the church’s twelfth president in 1973. He delivered the address, “Education for Eternity,” to the faculty of Brigham Young University, and a decade later, he repurposed the last section of the speech for an article in the church’s Ensign magazine in 1977 titled “The Gospel Vision of the Arts.” As one of the most extensive discussions of art by a leading authority of the church, it had an outsized impact on Mormon artists. It has been quoted by numerous creators, theorists, and critics within the Latter-day Saint tradition; as recently as 2017, the Mormon Arts Center (now the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts) took Kimball’s remarks as the starting point for a book of essays by fifteen LDS artists and scholars.

Kimball never used the exact phrasing “Mormon Michelangelo,” but the concept captures the essence of his argument: if people outside the “restored gospel” have succeeded in creating works of great beauty and meaning, Latter-day Saints should be able to go even further, bringing the light of restored truth and moral living to their creative pursuits. Kimball wasn’t just focused on the visual arts—he listed, in addition to Michelangelo, more than twenty examples including composers and performers, writers, playwrights, and others whose work was exceptional, but could nonetheless be surpassed, he believed, by committed Latter-day Saints. “Take a da Vinci or a Michelangelo or a Shakespeare,” he argued, “give him a total knowledge of the plan of salvation of God and personal revelation and cleanse him, and then take a look at the statues he will carve and the murals he will paint and the masterpieces he will produce.”

Why Michelangelo?

I want to explore an aspect of this discourse that has largely gone unaddressed. Why Michelangelo? I admit that what initially intrigued me about the idea of a “Mormon Michelangelo” was that it seemed like an absurd oxymoron. I know something about Michelangelo, and I know something about the artistic patronage of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the second half of the twentieth century, and I can attest that there is zero chance that either would have had any interest in working with the other. Michelangelo created complex, divisive work that pushed contemporary audiences beyond the comfortable realm of what was then accepted as traditional. His unwillingness to compromise his personal vision legendarily frustrated more than one religious leader. Yet “innovative,” “challenging,” and “individualistic” are not terms that I would associate with the visual culture of mid-twentieth-century Mormonism, when church-sponsored art tended toward illustrational representations in traditional modes, carefully directed by the institution through intensive editorial oversight.  

The concept of a “Mormon Michelangelo” has nonetheless retained salience among Kimball’s audience. One path toward understanding why and what’s at stake is to step outside the discourse that has explored the topic so far by “queering” the conversation. I’m using the term in both the broad sense of “reorienting” the scholarly focus from an oblique perspective (see Sara Ahmed’s conception of queer phenomenology), but also in the specific sense of focusing on the dynamics of sexuality. Following the playfully contrarian approach of queer studies, I read Kimball against the grain. Plenty of other observers have investigated the nuances of his language as it offers advice for Mormon artists, but I’m curious about the unspoken context that didn’t make it into the speech—but that might nonetheless offer surprising insight about what art meant to Latter-day Saints in the mid-twentieth century.

Fame as a Virtue

To restate my central question: why celebrate Michelangelo when the artist’s work was antithetical to the kind of art that the church was patronizing at the time? Michelangelo wasn’t the only artist that Kimball mentioned—he also included Leonardo, Raphael, Rembrandt, and the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen in his list of luminaries—but he devoted more attention to Michelangelo than any of the others, listing several of his works by name and referring to him twice as an iconic example later in his text.

I suspect Kimball thought of Michelangelo as the single most famous artist in history, in part owing to his experience a few years prior at the New York World’s Fair, where the LDS Church had invested in a pavilion. One of the key attractions at the fair was Michelangelo’s Pietà, lent by the Vatican in an exceptionally rare opportunity to see one of the artist’s signature works in the United States. But Michelangelo’s fame was not incidental to Kimball’s argument—fame, in fact, was the primary virtue that Kimball identified as defining greatness in a work of art. Considering the impact that his remarks had on Mormon artists, it’s surprising to realize how little guidance Kimball’s speech offers about the aesthetic or conceptual challenges that great art might aspire to address. Kimball described artworks and performances as exhibiting beauty, power, and greatness, but never explained what any of those terms constitute, how they intersect with purity or godliness from a Mormon perspective, or how exactly a knowledge of the “restored gospel” could propel artists to greater heights. He offered some suggestions for uniquely Mormon subjects—a cantata about Christ’s visit to the Nephites to rival Handel’s Messiah, for example—but he limited any discussion of a theology of aesthetics mostly to generalized platitudes.

One constant in his description of artistic excellence, however, is the assertion that great art achieves renown. His vision, as he described in “The Gospel Vision of the Arts,” was not of artworks, but artists. Rather than seeing the potential for works of great beauty or meaning, he saw Latter-day Saints competing with the world’s “brilliant stars” in all creative disciplines, “greatly increasing their already strong positions of excellence till the eyes of all the world will be upon us.” He quoted John Taylor, a church leader from the previous century, declaring that Latter-day Saints would “become the praise and glory of the whole earth, so that kings hearing of her fame will come and gaze upon her glory.” In his list of artists and performers, he focused more on the accolades they had achieved than on the specifics of what made their work praiseworthy. He commended Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, for example, not for its ennobling vision of the connection between humanity and deity, its incisive visual exposition of scripture, nor its expressive use of color, line, and form, but simply because it “is said to be the most important piece of mural painting of the modern world.”

Partly, no doubt, this is because Kimball’s professional expertise was in banking and insurance, not art criticism. But that is not to suggest that Kimball was overlooking the “gospel vision” as he considered the power of art. To the contrary, his emphasis on public acceptance and cultural impact resonates with a central aim of Latter-day Saint art since the early history of the church. As I explore in Mormon Visual Culture and the American West, Latter-day Saints had already been promoting their accomplishments in the fine arts for more than a century as evidence of their respectability and social-fitness within the American republic. In an era when polygamous Mormons were castigated as barbaric sensualists who threatened American civility, Latter-day Saints showcased their achievements in visual art, music, theater, and other cultural arenas as powerful counter-arguments. Although this discourse had mellowed by the mid-twentieth century, Latter-day Saints still faced hostility from religious critics who asserted that Mormonism was incompatible with Christianity. Additionally, Latter-day Saints in the mid-1960s were facing a new wave of public objection to their social practices, this time focused on their entrenched racial discrimination. The decade between the two published versions of Kimball’s speech, in fact, bracketed the most contentious period in this struggle—Kimball ended the church’s prohibition on priesthood ordination and temple worship for Black members the year following “The Gospel Vision of the Arts”’ publication in the Ensign.

This context helps elucidate the theological perspective underlying Kimball’s focus on fame as a measure of greatness. The existence of Mormon artists of renown would testify of the truth of the restoration while advancing the cause of the gospel by uplifting Latter-day Saints in the eyes of the world. Success in elevated cultural arenas would help Latter-day Saints counter critics who saw them as backward, regressive, or deviant, whether from conservative religious positions or progressive social standpoints. From Kimball’s perspective, the irony involved in squaring Michelangelo’s contentious, passionate, and supremely individual art with the LDS Church’s demand for anodyne, institutionally-vetted images was irrelevant. The “Mormon Michelangelo” needn’t make art that had any connection to Michelangelo at all so long as they succeeded in achieving universal recognition and enhancing the Mormon public image.

Artists and Perverts

While accomplishing renown was one essential characteristic for a Mormon Michelangelo in Kimball’s vision, he also asserted that they must be morally “clean.” That would give them an advantage over many historical artists, who, he noted, were said to be “perverts or moral degenerates.” If morally impure people could make great art, “what could be the result if discovery were made of equal talent in men who were clean and free from the vices and thus entitled to revelations?” Even in his litany of creators worthy of emulating, Kimball interjected critical observations when he had reason to doubt an artist’s moral probity. He hoped that a composer might emerge from Brigham Young University who would be the equal of Wagner, but “less eccentric and more spiritual.” Tempering his observation of Rembrandt’s brilliant originality, he noted that “his morals have also been subject to criticism.”

Kimball also offered a critical take on Michelangelo. Although he devoted more attention to him than any other visual artist, even quoting him twice to demonstrate his commitment to “hard work and patience and long-suffering,” he also saw Michelangelo as starkly outside his own religious world. He quoted Habakkuk to capture his sense of awe that someone so far from the gospel (as he understood it) could be capable of creating such magnificence: “behold ye among the heathen, and regard, and wonder marvelously: for I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told you.” It’s one thing to be called a “gentile” from a Mormon perspective, but “heathen” seems a bit overstated. Certainly, Michelangelo would have been shocked to see himself considered such if we consider the depth of his conviction to Christianity as revealed through his art and poetry.

Perhaps Michelangelo’s Catholicism made him enough of an “other” to put him in the category of “heathen” from Kimball’s perspective? Kimball added several additional points of criticism that hint at his recognition of another kind of difference. “Could we not find an embodied talent” like Michelangelo, he asked, “but with a soul that was free from immorality and sensuality and intolerance?” Those three accusations seem carefully considered. The last point might be the most obscure. How was Michelangelo “intolerant”? I suspect Kimball did not intend the term to express its common contemporary connotation of “bigoted” or “prejudicial,” but was alluding instead to the artist’s famous unwillingness to accept criticism or accede to the needs or desires of others. “Sensuality” seems clearer: surely Kimball couldn’t imagine an artist with a true “gospel vision” focusing so intently on the idealized nude as a subject.

“Immorality,” though. At first glance, one might assume that this meant the same thing as “sensuality”—that the nudity pervading Michelangelo’s work could stir embodied passions in a manner that might elicit sexual desire. I think there is a meaningful difference between the two terms in Kimball’s perspective, however. His criticism of Michelangelo as “immoral” suggests a fault not in the artist’s work, but in his life. The other artist that Kimball described as “immoral,” Rembrandt, is not nearly as associated with the nude as a subject. Instead, the “immorality” that bothered Kimball is evident in biographical accounts detailing Rembrandt’s complicated relationships, marital and otherwise, which even provoked an embarrassing legal proceeding during the artist’s lifetime.

The immorality for which Kimball criticized Michelangelo is less clearly defined in the artist’s biography, but reflects a commonly-assumed aspect of his character, even in Kimball’s era. People have speculated about Michelangelo’s sexuality since his own lifetime. The artist told his biographer that despite rumors and accusations, his interest in the male body was based solely on an appreciation of beauty, not sexuality. Yet the details of his biography, correspondence, visual art and poetry seemed—even to his contemporaries—to suggest something more. Following his death, his oeuvre was “whitewashed,” as James Saslow has described, especially when his nephew published an edition of his poetry, changing numerous gender pronouns to obscure the homoeroticism obvious in the originals. I am careful to remind my classes that even though it is tempting for us to make assumptions based on the modern categories we use to understand sexuality in the present, doing so can lead to misunderstanding since those categories did not exist in the past. Anyone who is interested in learning more about how Michelangelo experienced sexuality and how that experience shaped his art should look into the voluminous scholarship on that topic—Saslow’s work is a great place to start—but I will set those questions aside in exploring what Spencer W. Kimball may have thought.

It would surprise me if Kimball had delved into this topic in any detail, but I think it is very likely that he had come across references suggesting that Michelangelo was attracted to men. It might be surprising to learn that public awareness of this issue isn’t at all new, but started building as early as the mid-nineteenth century, largely through the work of John Addington Symonds. In 1878, he published a new translation of Michelangelo’s poetry that restored the original gender pronouns. His 1893 biography of Michelangelo was circumspect about Michelangelo’s sexuality, reflecting the Victorian-era public morality of his readers, but it still hinted quite explicitly, for the period, asserting that the artist was “obeying some deep instinct of his nature” as he represented female figures with bodies “scarcely distinguishable from the adolescent male.” Michelangelo’s images of women lack conviction, Symonds claimed, because “Michelangelo never loved, nor admired, nor yielded to the female sex.” Symond’s motive was not to slander Michelangelo, but to elevate the idea of love between men as an integral part of human experience with a long and sometimes even illustrious history in Western culture. His work was instrumental in inventing the concept of “homosexuality” near the turn of the century, contributing to the emerging corpus of scholarship that sought to define homosexuality as an identity while arguing for decriminalization and destigmatization. Continuing throughout the twentieth century, proponents of this perspective claimed Michelangelo as an example of an illustrious and accomplished homosexual.

How would Spencer W. Kimball have come across any of this? Possibly directly from Symonds, whose Life of Michelangelo is cited in the published version of his 1967 speech. Even more likely, he was familiar with the perspective from his engagement with literature about homosexuality. As Gregory Prince has described, one of Kimball’s assignments as an apostle beginning in 1947 was to “review cases of fornication, adultery, or homosexuality” that came before church leadership—in 1959 he was assigned, along with Mark E. Peterson, to “counsel homosexuals.” Kimball not only counseled in private, but published publicly, categorically denouncing the practice or acceptance of homosexuality in a book titled The Miracle of Forgiveness and in a series of pamphlets. In his research for counseling and writing, Kimball would very likely have come across references to Michelangelo’s alleged homosexuality. The artist was named in numerous volumes published in the era—claimed as a positive example by gay rights activists, “rescued” by apologists who asserted his heterosexuality, referenced by psychologists and psychoanalysts from a variety of perspectives about sexuality, and even occasionally denounced as an immoral influence by homophobes.

My guess is that Kimball would have been skeptical of claims about Michelangelo’s homosexuality. He continually denounced anyone who promoted acceptance or even tolerance—and it seems likely that he would have interpreted their claim to the artist as a ploy for normalizing what he considered sexual deviance. The intensity of Kimball’s revulsion toward same-sex love makes me doubt that he would have included Michelangelo as a positive example in “Education for Eternity” if he were convinced he was truly homosexual in the modern sense, even with the caveats about immorality and sensuality. Yet the language Kimball employed suggests he may have at least considered the possibility and taken such claims seriously. The wording in his note that “it has been said that many of the great artists were perverts or moral degenerates” is significant: in his other writings, Kimball used the term “pervert” primarily as a synonym for “homosexual.” In The Miracle of Forgiveness, for example, he employed the terms “pervert” and “perversion” almost exclusively as references to gay men. Beyond his awareness of Michelangelo’s contested sexuality, his warning about “pervert” artists might reflect the commonplace suspicion in the era that art was an especially attractive field for homosexuals, perhaps most famously expressed in the painter Thomas Hart Benton’s homophobic assessment of midcentury American art. Although creative genius was associated almost entirely with men (as Jana Reiss notes in her essay in “The Kimball Challenge at Fifty,” Kimball only named five women—no artists, one scientist, and four musicians, all performers rather than composers), the emotionally expressive aspect of artmaking did not accord with popular conceptions of masculinity in postwar America. Although it’s impossible to precisely excavate Kimball’s perspective, something about Michelangelo struck him as “queer.” Even though he did not directly question Michelangelo’s sexuality in his text, his assertion of the artist’s “immorality” and “sensuality” in the context of his wider warning about “pervert” artists ensure that we interpret his criticism of Michelangelo through the lens of sexuality. For Kimball, Michelangelo’s apparent queerness (no matter how vaguely defined) held him back from creating masterpieces on an even greater level that he might have had he been “cleansed.” There would be nothing queer about the Mormon Michelangelo in Kimball’s vision.  

In Kimball’s description, the Mormon Michelangelo will exhibit two essential characteristics, one very much like the original Michelangelo and the other very different. Like the original, they will achieve world-wide renown. Their art will fulfill John Taylor’s prophecy by propelling “Zion to become the praise and glory of the whole earth…” Simultaneously, however, they will be emphatically not-queer—cleansed from eccentricity, immorality, and sensuality. I find myself wondering, though, if Michelangelo’s queerness was not an obstacle, but an essential element in the lasting impact of his art? Even if it is impossible for us to fully understand Michelangelo’s inner experience or to know exactly how he navigated the sexual and religious worlds in which he lived, could it be that his oblique perspective gave him insight he could not have arrived at otherwise? Maybe his challenge in confronting the tension between the ideal world projected by his faith and the world as he actually experienced it gave him a voice that was much more profound and broader-reaching than the clear-cut moral directives of a self-assured institution.

Kimball’s desire for a Mormon artist who was at once entirely exceptional and completely normal seems fitting for the era in which he lived, when Latter-day Saints struggled to balance their desire for acceptance with their yearning for transcendence. Mormons had fought for decades to frame themselves as ordinary Americans—had they, in the process, as some Latter-day Saints feared, given up the distinctive practices and beliefs that had set them apart from the world? This was an especially urgent question as Latter-day Saints debated how their church would respond to the civil rights movement and other social questions that would impact their alignment with broader American culture. As a model for aspiring Mormon artists, Kimball’s vision of a Mormon Michelangelo offers a potentially frustrating paradox. But queering the conversation to explore that paradox illuminates how Latter-day Saints understood art through the complex social tensions animating the world of mid-twentieth century Mormonism.

“Black Pioneers: Legacy in the American West,” a traveling exhibition at the Booth Western Art Museum in Cedartown, Georgia, features artworks by the Women of Color Quilters Network showcasing the lives of African Americans who settled in the West. Quilters chose individuals, organizations, or communities to highlight in each of their pieces, spanning a wide geographical and chronological range. It’s a great show celebrating the lives of amazing people who worked against incredible odds to achieve remarkable things.

I was grateful to be introduced to quite a few figures who had been left out of the histories that I have read—but I was especially delighted to recognize three individuals who made an impact on the world that I study.

Peggie Hartwell chose Jane Manning James for the subject of her quilt, Portrait of Faith. She emphasized James’s untiring determination, framed by footmarks reminding us of the 800 miles that she and her family walked by foot on their journey to Utah, miles that took such a toll that “you could see the whole print of our feet with blood on the ground.” I think it’s also a fitting portrait of Jane Manning James’ determination in her later life, when she refused to passively accept her church’s racist treatment, a story of incredible perseverance that you should read about in Quincy Newell’s recent biography.

Earamichia Brown’s quilt, He is Able, tells Elijah Abel’s life story through photographs, documents, maps, and newspaper clippings. Brown’s use of cyanotype blue and parchment brown suggests the struggle to understand Abel’s life through the lens of history. Although ordained to the priesthood by Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith, Abel was written out of the church’s history in the early 20th century to justify the racist perspectives of members and leaders. I love how the image bursts into color in the center: at the heart of all the cold, historical records was a living, vibrant, full-spectrum human.

Michelle Flamer chose a subject who should be much better known in Utah than she is. Biddy’s Walk to Freedom depicts Bridget “Biddy” Mason, who was born into slavery in Georgia and “sold” to Robert Smith in Mississippi. Smith converted to Mormonism and brought the people he enslaved to Utah in 1848. Slavery was accepted in Utah at the time, but Smith moved on with other Mormon settlers to San Bernardino, California, where slavery was unlawful. Smith flouted the law by keeping Mason illegally enslaved. When he left the Mormon church in 1855 and planned to move to Texas, a slave state where she could be sold and again separated from her family, Biddy Mason worked in secret to find an ally who filed a court motion protesting her continued enslavement. As a result, she and all of the other enslaved people in Smith’s household were freed. Flamer’s portrait shows Mason holding her hands out with the chain at her wrist broken—the outline of her hands and the broken chain forming a heart as a reminder of Mason’s triumphant power within.

In researching the Latter-day Saint figures and events Lee Greene Richards painted in the murals for the Utah State Capitol in the 1930s, I was surprised to learn that just a couple years later, another state unveiled a mural project in its capitol that included an image from Mormon history: Missouri. It’s a very different context. Rather than celebrating Mormon contributions to settlement, like Utah’s, Thomas Hart Benton’s murals at the Missouri Capitol reference the violent displacement of Mormon settlers from Missouri in the late 1830s. Also unlike Richards’ murals, which were received with widespread acclaim, Benton’s sparked a major uproar.

Benton was commissioned to fill the House Lounge in the Missouri State Capitol with murals representing the history of the state. He titled his work “A Social History of the State of Missouri.” One of the leading “Regionalist” painters, Benton believed that the authentic character of a people was expressed in their traditions, folklore, and social interactions. To represent his subject honestly and with integrity, Benton believed that he couldn’t shy away from darker aspects of his home-state’s past. In addition to the typical scenes of pioneering farmers, railroad builders, political events, religious gatherings, and local heroes, he also represented the dispossession of Native Americans, the brutality of slavery, and the exploits of outlaws and criminals.

A small section on one of the walls represents the conflict between Latter-day Saints and other Missourians in the late 1830s, culminating in Governor Lilburn Boggs’ order that Mormons “must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace,” resulting in the forced displacement of approximately eight thousand Latter-day Saints. Rather than depicting a specific historical moment, Benton represented a generic scene of mob violence. A man and a woman look back in horror as they flee, watching a woman rushing out from a burning homestead, a black cloud billowing overhead. To their right, one mob member restrains a Mormon man, stripped naked, while two others cover him in tar and feathers. Benton doesn’t seem to have had a particular interest in Mormonism, however the centennial of Latter-day Saint settlement may have influenced his decision to include the scene in the mural. He may or may not have been familiar with the limited role that his great uncle and namesake had played in the Mormon conflict as one of Missouri’s US Senators (the older Benton avoided entangling himself by largely ignoring Latter-day Saint pleas for protection).

Benton’s mural pairs scenes of religious and racial persecution. A mirrored panel across a doorway shows early lead miners whipping enslaved workers, while on the left margin of the panel showing Mormon persecution, a well-dressed white couple greets a barefoot and shirtless African American. Benton’s intent has been debated, but it seems likely to represent a counterpoint to the intolerance and violence of the surrounding scenes, suggesting that not all historical Missourians were devoid of compassion. The scene may also suggest the irony, from Benton’s perspective, that early nineteenth-century Missourians would persecute fellow white settlers. These and other scenes showing heartless people using unjust power to oppress minority populations reflect Benton’s populist politics. Matthew Baigell argued in “The Missouri Murals: Another Look at Benton” (Art Journal, Summer, 1977) that the mural cycle makes “a serious indictment of the effects of unbridled individualism and predatory capitalism on the American people.”

Immediately after their unveiling, Benton’s murals elicited controversy. The problem stemmed less from the specifics of Benton’s political views, and more from his decision to represent unseemly and tragic events of the state’s past. A number of critics, including several influential legislators, felt that a more appropriate perspective for a public building would convey a positive message of triumph and progress. Others praised Benton for not shying away from the darker aspects of the state’s history. The argument became fairly heated in newspaper editorials and even on the floor of the Missouri House of Representatives. When a House member offered a resolution to provide brass rails to protect the murals from visitors, another representative proposed whitewashing over them instead. In the ensuing debate, yet another referred to Benton’s work as “manurials” (as reported in the Kirksville Daily Express, March 16, 1937). The Sikeston Herald offered a particularly colorful take, claiming that to say that the murals “had as much place in Missouri’s State capitol—one of the finest and most beautiful buildings in America—as does a pig in a parlor, would be to insult the pig.” (Mar 9, 1939).

Another aspect of Benton’s work also elicited criticism. Although he claimed to be an adamant opponent of racism, Benton’s representations of non-white people often reflect stereotypes of the era. Before he had completed the Missouri Capitol murals, another white artist wrote in 1935 that Benton’s “gross caricatures” of African Americans undercut his stated intent, working instead as anti-Black propaganda (Stuart Davis in Art Front, Feb., 1935). Some African American Missourians also expressed concern, even arranging a meeting with Governor Guy Park to protest the representation of brutality against enslaved people. Park, apparently seeing the image only as a representation of historical injustice, told the group that the image did not reflect poorly on their community (Mexico, MO Daily Intelligencer, Aug. 12, 1936). Benton’s representations of anti-Black violence are still shocking in the twenty-first century. While the Missouri Capitol murals have been the subject of limited debate, Benton’s depiction of a Ku Klux Klan rally in a mural at Indiana University has sparked significant discussion. Benton despised the organization and meant the mural to celebrate the Indiana press’s successful efforts to dismantle its power in the state in the 1920s, but since nothing in the mural clearly expresses that context, the image is understandably disturbing to many contemporary viewers.

Benton’s depiction of Latter-day Saints in the Missouri Capitol mural seems not to have drawn much attention. The scene was noted by a number of critics, but only as an example of the various negative aspects of the state’s history that they would have preferred he omit. Nor does Benton seem to have been interested in the subject beyond its broad historical contours—the image is fairly sparse and lacks any details that would tie it to specific historical figures or events. I haven’t found any indication of what Latter-day Saints in Missouri might have felt about the mural. Several Utah newspapers noted the mural project and the ensuing controversy, but none of them mentioned the scene representing Mormon persecution.

Despite its minor role in the overall mural project, Benton’s image of Latter-day Saint history stands out for representing a subject seldom addressed in public artworks sponsored by states outside the Mormon settlement region in the Intermountain West. There are a handful of artworks commemorating Latter-day Saints along the Mormon Trail, and communities in a number of states have erected monuments to the Mormon Battalion, but images depicting other aspects of Latter-day Saint history are rare. I would love to hear of any other examples you might have come across!

One hundred twenty-five years ago, twenty thousand people came to the center of Salt Lake City to witness the unveiling of the most impressive public monument that Utah had ever seen, a larger-than-life bronze statue of Brigham Young atop a massive granite plinth. Within a few years, additional bronze figures of an “Indian,” a “trapper,” and a “Pioneer” family completed the Brigham Young Monument, which stood in the center of the intersection of Main and South Temple streets until it was moved eighty-two feet north in 1993 to alleviate traffic obstruction.

I wish I could have been in Utah on Friday to see a new monument unveiled, although I am grateful to have been able to watch the livestream (archived here). Fifteen minutes east of the Brigham Young Monument, going up toward the mouth of Emigration Canyon, at the This is the Place Heritage Park, the Pioneers of 1847 Monument honors the first African American Latter-day Saints to arrive in the Salt Lake Valley, including three enslaved men, Green Flake, Oscar Smith and Hark Wales; and Jane Manning James, a free Black woman who had worked in Joseph Smith’s household.

I argued in a paper at the Mormon History Association last month that the Brigham Young Monument tells us much more about the people who erected it at the end of the nineteenth century than it does about Brigham Young or the settlers who arrived in 1847. For late nineteenth-century Mormons, the monument was a way to reframe Utah settlement as an integral part of building America—instead of as a renegade polygamous theocracy that stood in the way of American progress. The earlier monument’s supporters worked hard to bring together Mormon and non-Mormon constituencies to argue for “Pioneering” as Utah’s foundational character at a time when Utah was only just entering the nation as a fully-recognized state, but they marginalized Indigenous Utahns and Black Latter-day settlers in that narrative, just as they marginalized them in the social order of the state that they were building. The three men who arrived with the advance company on July 22, 1847, were identified on a bronze plaque on the reverse of the Brigham Young Memorial, but their names are included at the very end of a list of all the members of their company, firmly separated from their white peers by a bronze dividing line, bracketed with the label  “colored servants.”

Reduced by the racist perspective of 1897 Utah to a euphemized footnote, Flake, Smith, and Wales, along with James (who arrived two months later in 1847), are the heroes of the 2022 monument. The texts on the new monument celebrate their instrumental role in Utah history without hiding from the reality of slavery and institutionalized racism that they confronted throughout their lives. As Governor Spencer Cox noted at the dedication, the monument directly confronts a fact that many Utahns are oblivious to: despite the rhetoric of the state as a haven of liberty for oppressed people in the nineteenth-century, slavery was practiced there from the very beginning of settlement, legally enshrined in territorial law until abolished by the US Congress in 1862.

The monument’s designers avoided casting their subjects as hapless victims while also taking care not to aggrandize them. Unlike Brigham Young perched atop the plinths of the 1897 monument and, right next door to the new monument, the 1947 This is the Place Monument, Flake, Smith, Wales, and James are set on short granite pedestals where they look down from just above their viewers’ line of sight. Their poses are informal and the figures interact with each other in touchingly ordinary ways—Smith and Wales are depicted with their arms around each other, and James has a child in one arm and another tucked against her side. It’s a humanizing representation that makes the figures seem like real, approachable people, not remote historical icons.

Why a monument to Utah’s first Black settlers in 2022? The driving force behind the monument, filmmaker Mauli Bonner, told the Salt Lake Tribune that he was astonished to find that there wasn’t such a monument while working on the documentary, His Name is Green Flake. The only significant public memorial in Salt Lake Valley is a historical marker near the Millcreek Community Center. The new monument tells the story of Utah’s African American settlers on a much grander scale, in a much more prominent space. At the dedication, Bonner asserted that “we don’t tell the stories of enslavement to cause guilt or shame… we tell these stories because they are true.” And in telling them, he said, these stories “give us the opportunity to draw strength from them.” Cox moving described the pain and disappointment he felt on discovering that his own Mormon ancestors had owned slaves, and expressed his hope that the new monument would help all Utahns, but young people especially, to confront difficult truths about the past in order to create a more just future.

In 2022, the Pioneers of 1847 Monument works to begin correcting an injustice, telling a story that has been too often obscured. While the monument is of especial significance to African American Latter-day Saints and all Black Utahns, it is not just for them—not only because the legacy of early Black settlers helped create the world that all residents of the region now live in, but because reckoning with systemic racism in the past and present is a responsibility we all share. Mauli Bonner expressed his hope that the monument could facilitate a “healing experience” for its viewers, offering a means of addressing historical wrongs, but, ideally, with an attitude of reconciliation and recommitment.

I am excited to see how this new addition will transform Utah’s monumental landscape. The monument fills a critical void and is long overdue. As a historian of the visual culture of Western colonization, I feel that we should be careful about honoring enslaved settlers using the simplistic rhetoric of the heroic “pioneer,” without questioning the intertwined roles of slavery and Indigenous displacement in the project of colonialism. How can we celebrate the positive values that early Black settlers represent without perpetuating a shallow, sanitized picture of settlement? It is important to find ways to honor early settlers of color while still confronting the difficult truths about the impact of settlement on Indigenous People.

Even with that caveat, my study of monuments in American history makes me think that we need to do more than merely celebrate this new monument. Monuments are mirrors, not minds. They don’t store memories—they only reflect back what we see in them. When we’re at our best, we bring deep engagement and careful consideration to our interactions with monuments. We might encounter the Pioneers of 1847 Monument as a space to reflect on how race built the world we live in and how it informs our values in the present. At our worst, monuments are pitiful attempts at atonement, opportunities to let an unthinking, impotent mass of material deal with the memories that are too difficult for us to confront. I’m confident the monument’s supporters would agree that the existence of a monument to Black pioneers does not mean that the struggle that Flake, James, Smith, and Wales fought in is now over.

What does the Pioneers of 1847 Monument tell us about Utahns in 2022? I hope that it does not merely show that we know the importance of performative anti-racism and that we are more willing to invest in images imagining justice than in pursuing actual justice. I hope, instead, that it represents a real shift in values, a sincere and committed recognition that slavery was an abhorrent evil, that racism is destructive to humanity and society alike, and that the legacies of both must still be rooted out from wherever they continue to exist in our contemporary world.

One of the most popular representations of Mormonism at early twentieth-century worlds fairs was a miniature replica of the Salt Lake Tabernacle. Although vastly smaller than the original, the model was still substantial, four feet tall with an eight-by-five-foot base. Although it was sponsored by the Church, it was commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution as the centerpiece of a display on Mormon settlement in Utah, part of a larger exhibition on Western colonization for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle. Check out the University of Washington Library’s excellent digital resources on the Exposition, including an image of the Mormon display).

The church’s display in the exposition featured a number of artworks, artifacts, and a replica of the Salt Lake Temple on a similar scale, but the model Tabernacle was the undisputed crowd favorite. Visitors were drawn to the cutaway view, which not only represented the interior furnishings in exquisite detail—including a miniature Tabernacle organ—but also revealed the remarkable engineering in the building’s unique dome.

All this detail was possible because the artisan who built the model had also worked on the original. Abraham Reister Wright Jr. came to Utah as a young convert and worked in the Church Architect’s Office under Henry Grow on the building’s design. He was twenty-five when the Tabernacle was dedicated in 1867, and sixty-six when the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition opened.

The miniature Tabernacle was so popular that the church borrowed it back from the Smithsonian for the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933. For the Golden Gate Exposition, they upped the ante with a much-less miniature Tabernacle—this one could seat fifty visitors and featured a working pipe organ.

Now for the mystery—two mysteries, actually. First, while Wright constructed the miniature Tabernacle, the model of the Tabernacle organ was created by “Sotaro Masuda,” who the Inter-mountain Republican described as “an expert wood carver who arrived in Salt Lake recently from Kobe, Japan.” I have been able to find nothing at all about Masuda. There’s a Sataro Masuda listed as a resident of Brigham City in the 1910s, and a Santaro Masuda who died in Salt Lake in 1910 at age 28, but that’s about as much as I’ve uncovered. I would love to know more about the Japanese woodcarver from Kobe—definitely not the typical early-twentieth century Mormon artist.

An even more glaring mystery: what happened to the mini Tabernacle? The last I have found it mentioned in the press is in conjunction with the 1933 exposition in Chicago. News accounts claimed that the Church borrowed it from the Smithsonian—but it’s not listed in the current collections of any of the Smithsonian museums. Surely it’s still out there somewhere, I hope? I would love to hear from you if you’ve seen it or know what happened to it!

C.C.A. Christensen’s grave marker in the Ephraim Cemetery (in Sanpete County in Central Utah) offers a couple surprising insights about his life. The monument celebrates his poetry instead of his painting—although he’s now likely the best-recognized nineteenth-century Mormon artist, during his own lifetime he was appreciated more for his writing.

Another detail hiding in plain sight is less likely to come as a surprise to those familiar with nineteenth-century Utah’s family and social structures. The grave marker’s other sides commemorate several of Christensen’s family members, including, on the left, his wife, Maren “Mary” Frederikke, and on the right, his wife Eliza “Elise” Rosalia. C.C.A. married Elise shortly before immigrating to the United States in 1857. Ten years later, he married Mary as a plural wife. Elise and Mary each had seven children with C.C.A., and all but two lived to adulthood. The family eventually settled in a single property in Ephraim, although, at least by the 1880s, each wife had separate houses.

Christensen’s experience exemplifies some of the complexities of polygamy in Utah Territory. The history of polygamy often gets simplified to something like this: Mormon settlers practiced plural marriage openly beginning with their arrival in Utah, then the US government began prosecuting polygamists after the Civil War, forcing Wilford Woodruff to issue his “manifesto” ending Mormon polygamy in 1890.

The lived experience of plural marriage was much more complicated. Lack of federal legislation on the subject before the 1862 Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act meant that the practice was legal in Utah Territory for a decade after it was publicly announced in 1852. Many Latter-day Saints were later prosecuted for living in relationships that were legally sanctioned when they entered into them. Adding to the confusion, Mormon leaders adamantly defended their right to sanction plural marriage as an exercise of religion protected by the First Amendment. Even after federal legislation criminalized the practice, many church leaders assured members that they would not face prosecution because they believed the law could not be enforced. The US Supreme Court’s decision against the LDS Church in Reynolds v. United States, 1879, proved this perspective false. When C. C. A. Christensen married Mary in 1867, he may have believed, like many other Mormons at the time, that his right to marry was protected by the Bill of Rights.

Instead, Christensen learned by the late 1880s that the his plural marriage made him a target for federal prosecutors. Even after the Reynolds v. United States decision, multiple legislative steps were required to curtail Mormon influence in judicial administration and begin securing large numbers of convictions of Latter-day Saint polygamists. Christensen left on a mission to Scandinavia from 1887-1889, the most intense era of anti-polygamy enforcement. His call may have been issued in part to provide him legal shelter, as many other men left the country during that time as strategy to avoid prosecution.

After his return, however, he was charged with “unlawful cohabitation,” and tried in the First District Court in Provo. Two of his children testified in his behalf, assuring the court that even if their father were plurally- married, he had not been illegally cohabiting. His daughter, Diantha, noted that he had been out of the country for the prior two years, and that even before that, “there has been an understanding in the family that for several years my father has been obeying the law. He has not visited the second wife as he used to do formerly.” This was critical evidence because “unlawful cohabitation” as charged in the indictment could only be considered illegal if it could be shown to have occurred after October 1, 1886. Christensen’s son Frederick William corroborated this testimony, noting that Mary had moved into a separate house, but he admitted that “Mary’s children call the defendant father,” and that he had seen his father and Mary together at parties, although less frequently following the mission.

Even with their testimony, C. C. A. was convicted. The church-owned Deseret News opined that “there was not a scintilla of evidence to prove the defendant guilty, but an obedient jury brought in a verdict of guilty.” Despite the specific legal definition of “unlawful cohabitation,” a term created to encompass relationships even when participants denied ever having been married, many federal prosecutors interpreted all Mormon polygamous marriage as violating the law regardless of the specifics of the relationship. From this perspective, merely ending a sexual relationship with a plural spouse was insufficient to avoid prosecution.

After his initial conviction, C. C. A. Christensen was fortunate to obtain a rare legal victory. His attorneys discovered that “one of the trial jurors had sat upon the grand jury which found the indictment,” a clear violation of legal process, and he was granted a new trial. By the time of his second trial in April, 1891, Woodruff had already issued the “manifesto,” and federal prosecutors agreed to end enforcement of anti-polygamy laws. Interestingly, Christensen’s case was not dismissed, but when it went to trail, “The evidence for the prosecution was heard and the prosecuting attorney asked that the jury be instructed to return a verdict of not guilty, as he did not consider the evidence sufficient to convict.”

And, from a simplistic view, at least, that was the end of C. C. A. Christensen’s polygamy problems. But what about the two wives and two families that were still obviously very much a part of his life? Following Woodruff’s 1890 proclamation, Mormon polygamists were faced with the dilemma of maintaining their families while also following the law. Many Latter-day Saints felt that ending sexual relationships with all but one wife—or at least claiming to have done so—was sufficient. This is how Christensen’s family remembered the aftermath of the polygamy era. His granddaughter, Norma Jensen Taggart, remembered that later in life C. C. A. lived solely with his first wife, but after Elise’s death in 1910, he moved into the house with Mary. Presumably the couple considered themselves still married despite the intervening events that had necessitated at least the appearance of their physical separation.

Christensen’s biography reflects an additional complication in understanding polygamy in nineteenth-century Utah. While we have a significant amount of information about the theological lens through which Christensen interpreted his plural marriage and the legal process that he encountered, I have yet to find any sources revealing either Elise or Mary’s perspectives. Was Christensen responsible for initiating the second marriage, or was he urged by church leaders like many men of the era? What did Elise think? Did she approve, or have any voice in the process? How did Mary feel as an impoverished twenty-three year old recent immigrant with only one sister as family support in Utah? Did she understand the marriage as a relationship based on love, or was it more about support, or even coercion? How did the complicated relationship evolve over time for all three? Even though the patriarchal structure of Utah polygamy privileged men’s voices over women’s, numerous women in territorial Utah found positions of power to articulate their diverse perspectives on the subject—but women of modest social class from rural Utah like Elise and Mary Christensen seldom had these opportunities. My research hasn’t really focused on Christensen and his family’s biography, though, so I’m hoping that the sources are out there somewhere waiting to be discovered.

I chose George M. Ottinger’s Above Camp Douglas for the cover of Mormon Visual Culture and the American West because it exemplifies so many aspects of the Mormon experience in nineteenth-century Utah—a sizeable city emerging in the newly colonized valley; the juxtaposition of urban, agrarian, and wilderness landscapes; and the political conflict between Latter-day Saints and other constituents in the American republic.

That last point was likely much more obvious to viewers in Ottinger’s era than it is today. Camp Douglas was established in 1862, ostensibly to provide protection for mail routes during the Civil War, but many Latter-day Saints viewed the army post, which was positioned directly above Salt Lake City, as a threat to Utah’s territorial sovereignty. While the conflict never boiled over into a hot war, non-Mormon federally appointed territorial officials occasionally engaged the army post to enforce their actions.

In November of 1870, Ottinger got swept up in this conflict. According to federal officials, Ottinger had violated the law by training an unlawful militia. The artist claimed that he had merely been leading a brass band and that some of the young men accompanying the parade had marched with wooden guns and old, inoperable muskets. Accounts from Mormon vs. non-Mormon sources differed dramatically, but it seems that Ottinger and other local militia leaders felt justified in mustering their regiment of the former Nauvoo Legion for a non-military exercise. Federal officials were interpreting the law aggressively in their broader project of checking Mormon power, but numerous descriptions from witnesses suggest that the militia participants were in fact armed with serviceable weapons.

Whatever the merits of the case, Ottinger and seven others were arrested an imprisoned at Camp Douglas for ten days. “Imprisoned” might actually be a bit too harsh a description, because, as Ottinger noted on his release:

“…on being consigned by Marshal Patrick, to the military authorities at Camp, he assured them that the prisoners were men of honor, gentlemen, whose word was strictly reliable, and that if any of them desired to visit the city occasionally there would be no objection to their doing so.”

“The ‘Rebels’ Bailed Out,” Deseret News, Dec. 7, 1870

Their quarters at the camp were hardly a dungeon: their captors provided them an officer’s house with six rooms, “thirty-two blankets were given them for bedding, ample rations of food were sent them daily; and, had they felt disposed to have one, a cook would have been furnished to prepare it; but in order to have it when and how they pleased, they preferred to do their own cooking.” Ottinger and company claimed that “the entire time was passed in joviality and enjoyment.”

The “prisoners” found themselves in a fortuitous position within the complicated political struggle they were caught up in: army officials were involved in numerous aspects of Salt Lake City’s business and social worlds, and while they were obliged to execute the orders of federal officials, they worked hard to maintain good relations with the city’s Mormon community, even if many of them vociferously disagreed with the Latter-day Saints’ theology and political practices.

Ottinger took advantage of his unexpected ten-day retreat by painting a landscape from a vantage point above the fort—presumably Above Camp Douglas at the Springville Museum of Art. He also apparently leveraged the publicity his arrest attracted to promote his art. In January, 1871, the Deseret News advertised that visitors to Ottinger and Savage’s gallery could “learn all about that notorious Wooden Gun Rebellion, and see a view of Salt Lake City, by Ottinger, painted while he was confined in that military prison at Camp Douglas.”

Ottinger didn’t stay out of the news, but fortunately most of the attention was positive: he led the art department at the University of Utah, was adjutant general of the Utah Militia, and served as chief of the Salt Lake City Fire Department from 1875-1882, a position he commemorated in an exceptional self-portrait, also at the Springville Museum of Art.

Despite his experience in 1870, Ottinger wasn’t the Utah artist with the most extensive legal problems—more later on C. C. A. Christensen, who gets that honor.