The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints employed three members of the Fairbanks family to create a “Mormon Exhibit” for the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. Avard Fairbanks designed the exhibit—his father, John B. Fairbanks, painted a series of murals beginning with the expulsion from Nauvoo and concluding in a thriving contemporary Salt Lake City, and his brother J. Leo Fairbanks created stained glass windows titled “Joseph Smith’s First Vision” and “In Holy Temples.” The central focus of the exhibition was a large-scale plaster bas relief by Avard titled “Eternal Progress.”
A pamphlet produced by the Northern States Mission described the theme:
The marvels of A Century of Progress are shown at the World’s Fair at Chicago. The revelations of science and the ingenuity and accomplishment of modern man have so changed the old familiar conditions that we stand amazed, wondering what further miracles will come to transform our civilization. Yet, startling as is the story, the Mormon exhibit reveals something more ambitious… It, too, is a story of a hundred years, and also the story of progress. Not only a hundred years of progress, but of “Eternal Progress.”
Avard Fairbanks’ design represents the idea of “eternal progress” with an allegorical figure representing the human spirit on its path from premortal to earthly to heavenly realms. On either side are figures representing “the steps which mortals take in their march upward,” with “social groups” on the left and “individual advancement” on the right. You can read more about the complex iconography in the pamphlet, which is available digitally thanks to the Church History Library, or you can read a summary that I wrote in the context of public representations of Mormonism in my chapter in Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader.
When I started writing, I assumed that the artwork—like the vast majority of plaster sculpture created for world’s fairs—hadn’t been preserved once the exposition concluded. Amazingly, it somehow got saved and it has recently been beautifully restored for the exhibition Work and Wonder: 200 Years of Latter-Day Saint Art at the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City (the entire exhibition is fantastic and you should absolutely go before it ends on March 1, 2025). I was delighted to get to see it in person—had no idea from the old black and white photos that I’d seen that it was polychrome! It’s an amazing document of Latter-day Saint history and art, but also a rare survival from an early twentieth-century world’s fair exhibit. I suspect it was saved because church leaders imagined it might be reused at future expositions. It was, indeed, repurposed just two years later for the San Diego California Pacific International Exposition, but for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, Stephen L. Richards directed the construction of a miniature tabernacle that could seat 50 visitors, complete with a working pipe organ.